The shortage of developers in Germany is exactly the reason why people from Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa are hired in the first place. There's plenty of reports and publications discussing this shortage from last 10-15 years - it's not new and it has never been solved.

Just an example: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/wirtschaftswund...

I don't know what kind of CTO you are (I'm CTO too), but if you were hiring recently in Germany, you should be able to notice the average time to fill a senior software engineer position is several months. This is the reality in which we live.

Completely wrong: there is no shortage of developers, there is a shortage of competent people. Huge difference. Not a CxO myself, but high enough to feel the pain of hiring good people, especially when HR does not allow to pay them properly - for them all developers are the same, so they all get about the same salary.

Ok, that also fits my understanding of the market - I don’t receive all the applications, because our HR team is good at filtering. Unfortunately, German businesses are very strong in salary negotiations, so it’s a whole big thing to sell the idea of fair market compensation inside the company.

is that not the case everywhere?

Our company is trying to hire 50 more developers until end of the year and its hard, we get them from all over the world, especially India and Africa has a lot of good talent nowadays but also east europeans. But it's still hard to find good people.

Hey I'm a full stack dev looking forward to move to europe; I consider myself "nicht schlecht" as a developer; already lived 1 year in Germany (worked as an intern in VW) and would have to study the language again but could be up and running before the end of the year. Hopefully your company is looking for some C# devs among those 50, email in my profile