The German car companies already have hired great engineers, but thankfully they couldn't care less about the "rockstar" label. You draw a direct line from software engineering to automobile engineering, without honoring the fact that those two branches are fundamentally different in Germany.

That automobile engineering is different from software engineering in Germany is kind of agreeing with what I say. That people still think that is one of the major reasons why German car companies will fall behind. And you also agree that a car companies would worry about hiring great car engineers (i.e. the people who build great old-style cars) instead of great software engineers (the people who automate the machines to build the new-style cars).

You need to have 50-50 car engineers and software engineers and they need to work together to make that move happen. Do you think a guy with a black Star Wars t-shirt and an Arch Linux running Thinkpad could get any meaningful say in product development at any big German company, car companies and banks especially? If you would answer that with "no" we basically have the same view on how the German industry looks like. What we may not agree on is if that can succeed any longer in the automobile market.

You have very, very obviously never been inside a german car factory.

Wait, wasn't Tesla just telling that they are buying a small GERMAN company to get factory automation knowledge? I read that somewhere...

What is the point you trying to make? Yes they are buying the smart engineers and somehow a lot of German car companies didn't buy them first. Pretty much the problem as described above.

The point is: the German factory automation business already exists and is huge. Germany already sells this world-wide. Tesla just bought a tiny share into it.

Industry 4.0 - Germany's 4th industrial revolution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y990kaGbJD0

Industry 4.0 in the Volkswagen Group https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTl8w6yAjds

"Industrie 4.0" - Bosch plant in Blaichach, Germany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKhSTjraHlU

CAR FACTORY: Mercedes-Benz Industrie 4.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdXRTKy_TrM

German car companies and their suppliers (Continental, Bosch, ...) have already lots of smart engineers in this domain. Their current factories are among the highest automated in the world. Volkswagen invested $15.3 billion in R&D last year, Daimler $7.6 billion, BMW $5.5 billion. Number one, three and seven in the automotive world.

Tesla was spending $0.7 billion for R&D in 2015.

The whole "rock star" notion was/is silly enough in IT, where qualifications differ wildly, and automotive engineering has a much more level playing field.

It's changing, cars are quickly turning into digital appliances and moreover there is a huge push to "connected services", meaning huge amount of real-time data and ML. I have seen slightly above average engineers landing senior architect roles there just by being close to Big Data/ML, in Germany of course.

Hint: do Big Data & ML and let BMW, Audi and M-B fight each other to get you. 140k/year base. Externally BMW will tell you that not even managers have 80k but that's just public BS. They are pretty much in a war for talent.

This is an assumption from what would be logical or real life hiring experience? I would agree with the logical foundation, but none of the big data & ml people I know work at a car company.

As I said I only remember Zalando being active on the hiring front, and they don't do cars (yet).

Magic word is "connected services" if you want to earn big bucks in automotive working on ML/Big Data. It's a real life experience, basically in the past year all big German car manufacturers are hiring like crazy in these fields.

Maybe in the US. In germany that's a senior manager salary. Independent of how good you are as a SW developer (or data scientist, ...) you will always get a normal engineer ("Sachbearbeiter") salary, which is pretty much regulated through IG Metall. And that maxes out at about 100k€ (which you will have more chances to get when you are decades of years in the company than when you are new but have a great knowledge). Source: Have worked long enough for one of those companies. And always wished salaries would have been more skill/talent based.

C'mon, I would appreciate comments or discussions, ideally about real life (personal) experiences instead of downvotes. What I tried to give here was also only my personal experience (and what I know from lots of friends also working in the industry).

I think the trick was to be hired outside unionized jobs - those had some cut off (I don't remember exactly, like 130k-140k/year), basically like the whole higher management is.