None of my PhD colleagues (from my and other top3 tech universities) is still in Germany, they are all in the US, except one which is now a Prof in the UK.
Most of my BSc and MSc colleagues are still in Germany, some spreaded out through europe, and few to the US.
Its pretty hard to some of us actually have work-related conversations with old friends still in Germany. They always ask about the salaries in the US, and guess something "absurd" like "you are probably making more than 200k$, 250k$?", to which the only thing you can actually say is "yes" kind of in shame, because making >500k$/year is "absurd"/"beyond imagination" by German standards.
We have all worked in Germany in industry before moving to the US (both internships, but also between MSc. and PhD, or briefly after the PhD), and there is just no comparison about the quality-level of the work and intellectual-growth in the US and Germany.
In my German employer, our 15 ppl team was 2 PhDs, and many MSc, all from different skill levels, doing a good job, etc.
In my US employer, our 50 ppl team has > 40 PhDs, couple of Stanford / MIT / Berkley / .. ex-Professors, pretty much all of them infinitely smarter than me, all giving me feedback, punching holes through my work, discovering my flaws, and teaching them to me, etc.
The difference in the amount of stuff you learn per day of work, the quality standards, etc. between both employers is abysmal.
Personally I regret not leaving Germany earlier, it's much harder once you have kids.
They can run your company steady-state, but they are not going to build anything internationally competitive.
Why do you think you need people who don't care about having a life outside the workplace to build something competitive?
Can you really tell me with a straight face that Germany has 25% of the success examples that the US tech industry has?
IT isn't a fair comparison, no country in the world can compete with FAANG right now, that's hardly Germany's fault. And still, there's SAP and Deutsche Telekom. Telekom has 50% of Google's revenue. Sure, the market cap is another story, but still.
Most of the companies you listed were founded before 1950. That's not at odds with my thesis -- these engineers can continue to drive an already-successful business but will not be able to start something genuinely new.
For the record, yes they're the sort of engineers I'd want to hire. If we're making broad assumptions about a country's workforce, I'd want a happy, well-rested workforce that's not held hostage by their company's health insurance plan.
You say that as if valuing your free time is a sort of moral weakness in an employee.
If a German startup has a nice idea and start working towards it with 4 ppl 30h/week each, at say 50k$/year/employee, a US startup:
- has access to most VC funds
- the German startup might have proven that there is money there, which helps getting VC funds
- has access to (0) a lot of (1) top and (2) absurdly hard-working talent that will put as much time as necessary for the startup to out-compete everybody else,
- has access to an ecosystems of startups around that might help them,
- has access to better way to compensate these employers, like almost tax-free equity, etc.
- has access to better ways to cash out, IPO, SPACs, etc.
Once these startups outcompete and survive the competition, then and only then they can and do switch to 35h/week, etc.
Some of my friends from MSc. in Germany work there at startup incubators. They have 50k$/year salaries for 40-50h/week, and B2B startups get funded for 2 years, die, and they just move to the next one.
Most of them are trying to switch to bigger German companies like car manufacturers to get a 35h/week job that's higher paid, and are pretty burned out of the life of attempting to build stuff that ends up in nothing because they get outcompeted by the US, China, etc. every single time.
This type of international competition didn't exist 100 years ago at this level, and many DAX companies are that old. AFAICT the youngest company in the DAX is delivery hero which is 10 years old. The most valued company is SAP which is 40 years old.
Compare that with the 30 most valued companies in the S&P500....
That's a good question.
In the US, if you are founding a startup with 4 people, while all 4 are "employees", you are way closer to "self-employed" than to "9-4 employee at Siemens", and the startup more than handsomly compensates the employees with equity, to actually make it so: "you are working as an employee for a company that you own a big chunk of".
In Germany, it does not make financial sense to give a sizable chunk of the company to your employees. Many companies offer equity, or equity purchase plans, but as a "minor" perk, and not as the main part of the compensation.
OTOH, how long do you think self-employed people work in Germany? I know some that work 15 hours per day 7 days per week, and the system is perfectly fine with that.
So good question indeed.
My opinion is that Germany values with respect to "work" are incoherent and unsustainable.
Incoherent because Germany is fine with self-employed people working themselves to death for a miserable salary (most post man and DHL sub-sub-sub-sub contractors in Germany), the system itself keeps them miserable, while simultaneously preventing salaried employees to make the decision of how much do they want to work, and giving any freedom to their employers to appropriately compensate employees that perform better. The goal seems to be to squash the outperforming outliers, to try to broaden the average.
That's unsustainable, because cash cows (BMW, VW, Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ....) come and go, but Germany can't generate them anymore. To the point that the German government essentially has to "co-conspire" with its cash cows (e.g. Diesel Scandal, etc.) to avoid any risks of them dying. The German people complain about the cash cows doing lots of lobbying, having lots of power, etc. but the reason this is the case is because, like the Germans call it, they are "of crucial relevance for the system".
I know people who emigrated to the USA decades ago, and now send their children to German colleges because those are practically tuition free for EU citizens (you need to pay rent tho). If you want to move back more early on, you can use your savings from your time in the USA to get the bulk cost of buying a house in one of the regions with good tech jobs like Munich out of the way. Then you can live a great life in Germany even with the limited German tech salaries.
Note that I'm not saying that you shouldn't go to the the USA in the first place. In fact, I'm still strongly considering it myself. But the less healthy, young, single, and childless you are, the more advantages does Germany have for you.
Working with people that are much smarter than you generally makes you better at your work.
So from that point of view, going to the places where the concentration of super smart people is the "highest" makes sense.
You'd have to be in a niche where there's only a few teams world wide that are any good, and the US one is the one that's hiring.
Its like comparing a top German tech university with MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley.
Sure the German tech universities are really good, but from the set of people I know with offers from MIT or Stanford, none of them rejected them, because they were a huge boon for their careers.
The impact is pretty much the same with tech in SV.
> so there's no reason to take the job insecurity and parental leave hit for that alone.
Parental leave is usually _orders of magnitude better_ in SV than Germany.
All SV employers I know offer you 4-6 months of fully-paid parental leave, and allow you to take more months, but unpaid. If your salary is 600k$, your paid parental leave is ~300k$.
In Germany you get max 1800 EUR netto / month of Elterngeld. If you take it for 14 months, that's 25000 EUR. Somebody making 5000 EUR netto/month (e.g. 120k$ brutto), and deciding to stay at home, looses 3200 EUR netto per month. Most of the people I know making slightly over 100k$ in Germany with kids went back to work as soon as possible (women in less than 3 months... which is nuts), because they have bills to foot (mortage, etc.).