My company has noticed that good developers in Germany are cheaper than in India. Good is key here, you can get bad developers in India for very cheap (this might be good enough). The highest paid software positions in Germany are non-union jobs and the majority are not willing to leave the union for more money, which means they are refusing to do the work of a senior engineer, and this in turn means we can't use the cheap labor for lack of leaders.

I remember reading Indians on r/DevOps who were surprised they were earning more than Germans in DevOps/Ops positions.

Adjusted for costs of living or TCO? IT pays peanuts in Europe.

It doesn’t make sense to me why pay is so low in Europe. Is there actually that much less demand relative to supply?

It's not taxes, the taxes are high but the gross salaries in EU and even in the UK are very low, compared to the USA. You don't have stuff like developer making 200K a year but taking home 50K a year, it's more like making 60K a year and taking home 40K.

IMHO it's the culture and the VC environment. There's simply not that much money around to throw at moonshot projects, therefore you don't have many unicorns that lose a few billion euros a year paying extravagant salaries for talent. Obviously EU is a very rich place but people with money invest their money in stuff that are profitable right away, likely to be profitable in short term because a giant company is behind it or invest in the US companies if they are more adventurous.

Taxes.

You are not getting that much in net salary above certain amount.

Europe is a hellhole if you are a young ambitious individual.

> highest paid software positions in Germany are non-union jobs

How does one identify a well paying non-union employer? Noname companies in almost all cases pay much less than union employers.

This is Germany, not the US, rules are different.

All I know is a lot of great engineers at my company are internationally refusing more pay to non union jobs. I.have no idea if it applies to other companies, or what the benifits are

> Easiest is also highly subjective

Anecdotally, I've observed (over a 30-year career) that less than half of the people who have the qualifications can actually produce halfway decent code (as in code that doesn't crash the first time it's used or introduce new problems).

I’m from a small Australian city. I earn in the top 5% of the country with 8 years experience and no degree. And I see all my friends who picked software in the same situation.

It’s probably the most privileged position possible.

Maybe it's true in Australia.. however here in Germany e.g. your chance of being a top earner if you have no degree is near nil. Usually you are expected to have university degrees for tech jobs. There are also some without but it's the minority and their promotion prospects are a lot worse.

I was thinking about moving to Germany from Poland. I was surprised that devs there has such low wages in comparison to cost of living. I abandoned the idea after it turned out my QoL will decrease quite a lot even I'd get more money than I've now

I'm curious what numbers you've heard, my quality of life here is significantly higher than it was in Warsaw, but I was making relatively much less back then.

I'm the "worse" type of developer - I'm working with test automation so salary is a bit lower than for "normal" devs. But what I've heard 60k EUR is what I can get (I was reading about Berlin - I've also read that e.g. Dresned has the same wages as I have now). But this money will be for my whole family (wife is staying home with childrens right now and for some more time before they'll go to the kindergarten) so I also will need bigger appartment (=more expensive). And after my rough calculations it turned out that our QoL will probably drop. Not that it will be _bad_ but visibly worse than it's now.

This is true maybe for big, traditional German corporations like Siemens or VW; but have absolutely not the case for any of the start-ups or any of the big tech companies from US.

And especially not true after 2020, when so many more companies are willing to hire people remotely, often for close-to-US-levels of pay.

I have to agree with GP. I know many developers in France/Germany at the Master level, and although their job is far from being the worst, their total compensation is rather in the top 30%. Not bad, but far from a 6-figures.

Same here. I'm from Poland, I've 6 YOE, no degree, and also top 5% of earners. No other job will let me achieve this in such short time. You can earn similar money as a doctor, lawyer or let's say plumber BUT ypu have to do at least one of: a) work 80 a week instead of 40 (and let's be honest, none of us work 8h a day). b) do hard physical work instead of sitting in a chair c) be responsible for people lifes (and face jail in case of failure) etc

In short: I'm privileged AF

Getting a paper is almost mandatory here due to the ease of getting one.

I suspect this was simply so obvious that OP didn't feel it was worth mentioning. If your goal is making a lot of money in software development, you'd be a fool to stay in Europe. You have to move to the US. That's where the money is.