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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Why are software engineer salaries so low in Germany?

FAANG stock price increases and the California startup bubble have increased money availability to the US software industry and massively inflated what coders cam earn there over the last 15 years. Eventually this has translated in raises across the US as other companies lost their best coders to FAANG (and MS and unicorns that pay six digits).

Europe remains fairly isolated from this effect because (a) not enough EU coders want to move to the US even at triple the salary to cause a shortage of coders there and (b) FAANG and US firms can get away with paying less in Europe because remote work is not yet quite equivalent to being on-prem in the US...

also not all EU coders can come to the US even to network while on a tourists visa because many can't get those either. these are correlated with extremely destitute areas of europe where earnings are much lower, but they can go to Germany.

Most of the people who can go to Germany can easily go to Switzerland as well where salaries are much, much higher.

Germany doesn't have adtech companies like Facebook and Google that vacuum up cash from the entire globe and deposit it all into San Francisco, or finance companies that vacuum up sketchy money from global oligarchs and deposit it all into London.

Why don't German developers move to SF or London? Some do, but then they're not software developers in Germany...

Why don't SF and London companies hire Germans to work remotely? Some are willing to - but they're also willing to hire Polish and Bulgarian developers, so the market rate isn't that great.

I've worked in US and northern EU and in the latter there is basically no funding (relatively) and no talent feeders like FAANG. Senior engineers are also enamored with unnecessary complexity and founders still want to treat technical folks (even very senior) like cogs in a machine.

I believe the better question is why US salaries are so high

Scalability of work?

The work of a few engineers can support a workflow of a million users.

That spending $1 on engineering can bring in $10 of revenue.

Is that work somehow less scalable when done in Germany?

FAANG targets global audience, German companies target primarily Germany/Switzerland/Austria

The U.S. has the consumer products that have reached global scale.

And they probably want to deal only with engineers from the U.S. for legal reasons.

And up until recently, they’ve only hired in the Valley.

Finding qualified distributed system engineers with that funnel would definitely reduce the pool to several thousands.

> I believe the better question is why US salaries are so high

Why wouldn't they be? US companies that drive up the salaries are extremely profitable and they compete for limited pool of engineers.

They don't have strong unions like in America.

Tech workers are extremely ununionised, especially in the US. While this may be the case in other industries (though I doubt it - Germany famously has much better labour laws than the US and other European countries), I don’t think it has any effect on developer salaries.

> ununionised

ionised then?

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