Why are tech salaries so low over there? I’m the US you will break $100-120k USD as a recent graduate even in parts of the South and the Midwest with lower cost of living.
1. Europe isn't a single tech market, it's dozens. You might get paid California wages in Switzerland, Midwest salaries in London, and less elsewhere.
2. It's also dozens of markets when selling products. As much as the EU tries, functionally there are still barriers to trade across the EU, let alone places like the UK. Stuff like language, culture, religious practices all impede easy scalability, not to mention differing laws.
3. The US is a continental-scale superstate mercifully isolated from most of the world's wars. Europe is not. It's that much harder to grow the amount of capital North America sees when the continent is split of more than often at war with itself.
Around half of what your employer pays goes to the state, health insurance, retirement insurance, social insurance, ... In the US I assume you need to save much more money in case you lose your job or can not work anymore due to health.
Also education is paid for by the state. In the USA I heard people pay off study debts for many years and are thus also forced to look for high paying jobs
Lack of companies who earn a lot or have a lot of cash / good business model. Currently open FAANG engineering positions are close to 0 (Still more than 600 positions in the US) and there are single digit "FAANG-like" companies here (hundreds in the US).
I don't think that Germany will ever catch up tbh. There is no incentive. Once you earn a little more, the progressive tax rate is too high and eats everthing away. Less people pursue engineering in the first place, because net wages are so compressed. Also just look at real estate.
Munich:
- Median house price: USD 1’534’933 for ~1500 sqft
- Median salary: USD 59k pre-tax.
The pension system will break in the next decades. Actually
it already is.. it is already heavily financed by other taxes.
This country has other perks like more vacation days, but making bank is definitely not one of them tho.
Many academics emigrate to Switzerland, USA, Netherland or Canada - me included.
By-and-;arge Germans don't own their own homes. The median age in Germany is about 45, but less than half (~49%) own their own homes. That compares to about 65% in both the UK and US, both younger than Germany.
No, it' not that low for mid level engineers. Here's some anecdotal data:
An SDE II offer from Amazon (Berlin) was 90k base + 15K sign-on bonus + some RSUs. An SDE I (new-grad ish) at Amazon makes 72K euros + RSUs (at Aachen).
Zalando offered 75k for an Applied Science role (Berlin) for someone with a masters degree and 3 years of web-dev experience before the masters.
Delivery Hero (Berlin) recently hired a friend of mine. His base pay was 84k euros. He had ~ 5 years of experience as a back-end dev.
Some one I know who defended their PhD in 2022 was offered 90k (base pay, no variable component) at Porsche.
I know about a recent offer from a translation comp
any based in Cologne that was close to 80k euros (base) for an SDE.
New grads still get offers in the 45-55k range, especially in smaller cities. A friend of mine just received a 57k offer from Deutsche Boerse (Frankfurt) for a non-SDE technical role. Honestly, it's not bad. 57k is approximately 2500 euros a month after taxes. Assuming that you pay 1000 euros for rent, you are still left with 1500 euros. Groceries shouldn't be more than 500-600 euros a month.
