I'm a German soon to be CS graduate and right now my favourites are SV and London. I'll try to get into a company that can sponsor L1 visa for SV first and then I'll try London.
The German job market is precisely as described by GP: you are competing all the time with remote people in countries with much smaller cost of living and the wages are super low compared to aforementioned places. Germany has great schools, and medical system and I think when/if I want to raise a family I'll come back. But until then I want to make money and you do this while it's easy to move around.
You can say this is a cultural problem but I think the problem is different: there is just no big software industry in Germany. It's mostly SAP salespeople, development of various custom ISV software and a small startup scene in Berlin. Most German companies don't need good software for the stuff they are doing.
This. Italy here, working with Slack, GitHub, etc. But my customers don't always care about the technical details. Companies with an IT staff usually do, the others don't because they don't know anything about those problems, except some scare about cookies and GDPR.
I could write software on paper and deploy by magic, it would be ok for them. And why not, they make money selling other stuff. Then a customer I haven't been working for a very long time calls me asking if I got a copy of their production VM, even many years ago would be ok (obviously I didn't) because they got hit by ransomware years after having stopped to do backups, maybe because it was too inconvenient.
Of course Germany is a better market than say portugal. But that doesn't mean that I'll try to check the globally competitive offers first, to which Germany doesn't seem to belong.
Fellow countrymen might jump in to set me straight, as I have been away for too long, so I lack proper information.
Lisbon is a great city, but expect to live in the suburbs due to the high cost of renting and enjoy about one hour commute time and salaries are still below what we used to enjoy during the first .com wave (1995 - 2002).
Yes, tech is comparable, but not everyone can live in Lisbon.
There are smaller tech hubs across Porto, Aveiro, Braga and Coimbra due to their universities, but pay is even less than in Lisbon, although you get to enjoy better quality life and might afford to live on the city center.
But expect to do lots of overtime without any kind of reward beyond a "thank you", while in Germany those kind of situations are regulated, and in when it happens you have the support to complain about them. If you want to actually take that route that is another matter.
Naturally there are a few unicorns that are great places to work and do reward the extra mile, but they are the exception, not the rule.
> The German job market is precisely as described by GP: you are competing all the time with remote people in countries with much smaller cost of living and the wages are super low compared to aforementioned places.
This is not something I ever encountered. Are you sure you are familiar with real job markets? If you're looking for an interesting job (in Munich), feel free to contact me.
Twitch has some engineering in Berlin, Amazon pays quite well, Siemens pays quite well, as do the various car companies (basically any company with a strong IG Metall presence pays 70k+ for developers), Snowflake has some engineering in Berlin too (I work for them, you can figure out my email address fairly easily and drop me a mail if you like). Startups in Berlin generally pay 60-100k depending on seniority. Median income in Berlin is something like 18k after taxes, so maybe 30k before taxes.
As someone who was in that position ca. 20 years ago and then moved to SV for almost a decade: I don't think I would have dare to make such a sweeping claim as you:
> The German job market is precisely as described by GP
As a completely new entry into the job market, despite plenty of real work experience (during the last two years of my study the study was "secondary", I managed to make all major university projects about things I needed to do at work anyway), how could I possibly have know enough? I know I never had that feeling.
I actually did move to SV immediately so I can understand what draws you, no argument there. Still, I returned after almost a decade.
I think you are waayyyyyy overvaluing your own experience level. Where does such confidence come from? You cannot know even 1% of the German IT job market given how many medium sized of importance there are. Even in the US there is a large number of software businesses nobody has ever heard of because they are in a niche. For example, I once consulted for a company in Fort Worth (TX) where software for giants like Walmart was written. I think even here in this forum very few people would have heard of that company.
Occasionally someone, often magazines, ask about-to-be-finished students where they want to work. Inevitably the top ten are a handful of major names. That says a lot about students knowledge about potential employers, which seems to consist of only a few names of the already well-known few big companies. It says nothing at all about the reality of the far more diverse job market and the myriad of interesting options at thousands of other interesting companies.
If you just drive through Germany blindly, without a map, you'll find company after company that would never be listed here because they are not a mass-market brand.
So by all means, do go to SV, it's certainly a great experience. Just don't overvalue your own experience, and question why you are so confident in your claims and generalizing your own very limited experience.
secondign this. I'm 45 yo, and by the time I entered the job market, I was a real good developer (sold my first commercial program at 16, made 3D engines at 18, etc.). And you know what ? I didn't knew anything. That's because software is a just a part of the equation : knowing the business, the people, the rules, the companies, your own needs in life, working with others, with management, etc. All of that you don't learn at school and you learn as you go. So if you can land a job in SV, just do it, but don't think that's the end of it :-)
Now, for my part, I came to the conclusion software is just a tool and, as that tool, I want to be used for things that matter to me. Since I think that the only thing that matters
now are fighting poverty, climate change, I really wonder what I'm gonna do...
And I can assure you, when I was at your age, all my life was oriented to make one and only one thing : 3D engines for video games, which I did.
Thank you both for your input. I don't want to leave Germany on a permanent basis. I'm looking forward to the German job market in 5-7 years, maybe more, maybe less, depending on how much I like it.
As for well-known vs not well known: usually bigger companies have more employee protections, more career possibilities, pay better, etc. In small companies you have more power and control, and to some this makes them more interesting. I think larger companies are better but maybe I'll be annoyed by the bureocracy and switch to a smaller company, idk :).
I worked at what was a startup whose name you likely know, during the dot com boom, you could go from not-long-out-of-university to "very important head honcho of XYZ department" going (or flying) to very important meetings with really important executives of major companies in no time. Try that at some major company. It's actually rather unhealthy - for everybody, although the drug feels good to you at that time.
From what I've seen, salary vs cost of living is rather crap in London because London is very, very expensive. SV makes sense if that is what you want to do.
come to Berlin, nothing of what you say applies there imo. Salaries might be substantially lower than in SV, but it's also far far cheaper. Eg. as a Senior 70-90k EUR is realistic in Berlin (without management), allowing you a very good quality of live in a city that is nowhere near SV/London in terms of rent and many other expenses.
IDK I'm not a very consumption oriented person. In the phase of life following my graduation I plan to save my money so "how much can you save" is the metric I compare places by. Yes, SV has a higher cost of living and I'm not an extremist like this very frugal guy who lived in a van for his mountain view internship (cool trick though!). But from my assessment even if you rent a room/condo, SV/London are still more attractive than Germany.
If your lifestyle is to spend most of your paycheck (which is a fine lifestyle btw, I don't want to be judgemental), then I think Berlin is much greater than SV. The fewer money you get is at the same time more powerful in Berlin. If you have children, even more so.
But you know you maybe want to buy a flat or house, but for that you need money. It's hard and takes years to use your SV/London wage to buy SV/London flats. It's hard to use your Berlin wage to buy Berlin flats. It is comparatively easy though to use your SV/London wage to buy a Berlin flat.
Germany is not unattractive for me on a permanent basis, but I think in the current situation I'm in, other places are more attractive.
Also I might be wrong, I'll conduct a final assessment once I graduated and have concrete job and wage offers and can do cost of living calculations and how much I'll be able to save after deducing all costs I expend.
The German job market is precisely as described by GP: you are competing all the time with remote people in countries with much smaller cost of living and the wages are super low compared to aforementioned places. Germany has great schools, and medical system and I think when/if I want to raise a family I'll come back. But until then I want to make money and you do this while it's easy to move around.
You can say this is a cultural problem but I think the problem is different: there is just no big software industry in Germany. It's mostly SAP salespeople, development of various custom ISV software and a small startup scene in Berlin. Most German companies don't need good software for the stuff they are doing.