On the other hand, overhead in nothing close to 100% - more like 20%. (On top of the gross salary - The dev will only get about 55% of his salary after tax, insurance etc.). No mid-level dev expects 50k EUR after taxes.

This is a valid point. As an employer in Germany you have a large number of overheads on top of the employee's salary, including social contributions, health insurance, pension, etc. These are expensive in Germany.

Probably the bigger concern is it will cost a fortune to fire or lay people off in Germany. Or if an employee gets pregnant they can disappear for something like five months at full salary, and you can't replace them. Hiring people in most of Europe is a daunting proposition.

New-parent-time or "Elternzeit" can be up to 12 months. I believe that the state pays the "Elterngeld", not the employer.

The fact remains that you lose an employee for up to 12 months, and you have to take them back into their previous position afterwards.

Compounding the problem for the employer, is the fact that fathers are also entitled to the same amount of time. Both parents can share 14 months Elternzeit, so both parents cannot take 12 months off each, but they can take 7 months each either together or consecutively.

So the father could technically take 12 months off. Therefore, avoiding hiring women is not a valid strategy (and it shouldn't be either).

Another point is that you can't make people work 60 hours a week easily like in the USA. That could even make you a serious trouble with the law.

If you want to avoid these situations, then just hire contractors, but that will cost you more. If not, just stay in the USA. Europe doesn't need employers that treat employees as slaves. Employment in Germany is more like a long term two way relation, and regulations are made with that assumption in place.

So, a long term /three/ way relationship, then? The employee, the employer, and the state.

Well, Germans people have always been more liberal and open minded regarding relationships, so threesomes are not that rare :)

Yeah, having to pay people for time off due to having a baby sounds terrible. /s

Even more terrible when you don't even have to pay them - they're paid by the State.

Those communist bastards, how dare they? /s

AFAIK, an employer gets fully reimbursed by the health insurance for the paid maternity leave.

Yeah, what I want is a single sheet overview of hiring/retaining/firing across multiple locations.

In Germany it seems easy enough to get to 5-10 people with essentially founders and contractors, or expats, or corp to corp. I wonder if something like a PEO could exist which has the long-term employment relationship with the employees, who can move between startups -- it wouldn't be a "staffing agency" or body shop which just provides a bunch of morons for a low price as needed, but a way for employees to be essentially consultants and either promote themselves to companies, or be recruited by companies, without friction.