I live in Germany, and I do compare salaries to American numbers. This is the very reason why I will never work for German companies ever again, because I'm not willing to be dependent on wage labour until the end of my days. I am working remotely for a US startup, who a) value my skillset instead of using antiquated tech, and b) who pay twice what I made before in Germany, and c) recently made me a cofounder.

German startups aside, our big multinationals happily create teams working in the the US and Germany, while paying their German employees a fraction of their American colleagues. I know of cases in pharma, automotive, and erp.

I'm loathe seeing this contentment with the wage situation in Germany. If wages for in demand fields like Software engineering are essentially flat for 30 years and €70k are considered an amazing salary, how exactly are wages supposed to rise in service sector fields, for example for caregivers? Salaries as part of gdp have deceased over that time range, but the prevalent ideology among my crowd is that one shall not work for money, because that's apparently a dirty thing to do.

Software engineers not pushing for significantly higher wages and gaslighting people who do makes them accomplices to the wage surpression that is rampant in Germany and the EU at large.