Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point.
You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries.
Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
In my various data sources tracking job advertising, Munich has been and continues to be where almost all of the interesting jobs are based in Bavaria, and I'm not seeing falling real estate prices at all.
> Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany
I'd argue that in many ways it is worse than the Bay Area in the sense that the pay-differential, though in existence, is not nearly as pronounced. Stack Overflow keeps pestering me with emails about jobs that it has classified as "high pay jobs" for Munich. The salary beneath those job ads is usually something like €80k/year before taxes (which are extremely high in Germany). This must seem like a steal to a company like Apple. And this is in a city that has one of the best technical universities on the planet, an extremely vibrant engineering scene, and offers a better quality of life than the Bay Area at lower prices to any senior Apple executive who might want/need to move there from the Bay Area. -- My initial statement holds in that this is a "special opportunity" for Apple, that must be worth capturing for them.
Fells like a place with Bay Area prices but without the pay.
I've found that German-based companies are perfectly willing to pay 2x - 3x for an onsite freelancer than they would pay for an onsite employee, but they just don't do remote.
Since U.S.-based remote-only companies don't pay nearly as well as U.S.-based companies doing onsite - in my experience[!] -, this means that I could actually be earning more by doing onsite freelancing for German companies than doing remote for U.S. companies, but if you factor in the time & money for commuting and the increased cost of living from spending a lot of time in the cities where German companies offering interesting opportunities tend to be based, my disposable income/rate of savings, purchasing power, and quality of life are actually all better by doing remote.
The thing about recruiters you gotta keep in mind is, they're not your friends and they're not here to help you land your dream job. You're just a meal ticket to them and they just want to find some sucker to quickly fill the position as they're in competition with the other recruiters so whoever gets the position filled first gets paid, the others are left hanging. If you start making demands that the employers don't want to hear like remote work, they'll realize you're not a sucker and they won't get their money with you so they'll drop you as a candidate all together even if you would be a great fit for the position.
My question to you was how to you proceed to find good remote jobs? Linkedin? HN? Any advice is appreciated. My email is in my profile if you want to go private.
[0]: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/chief-invest...
Germany is indeed a country of engineers, but poorly paid ones.
In the large, European salaries for technical professionals are just way worse than American equivalents.