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Ask HN: Software Engineer Salaries in Berlin

51 points by zerr ↗ HN
Hi

Can somebody with enough karma create a poll with salary ranges for software engineers in Berlin?

Or you could post here, if you have something to share.

Thank you!

48 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] thread
playing_colours
From my experience, salaries can vary a lot. It depends on the following factors:

- is it an early startup, something more stable or established company in some industry. The latter tend to pay more.

- technological stack

- experience

For example, as a senior software developer in JVM stack you can make in startup on average EUR 50 000 - 60 000. Also consider taxes - they vary depending on if you are single, married with employed/unemployed spouse, children.

nichochar
This raises a lot of questions. I'm french and have gone to CA to work for a startup in SF for a while.

Salaries in Europe << salaries in the US, but you have to take into account social security, cost of life, country culture,etc...

So although the question is very important, and you should get your answer, don't make any decision based on only that.

That's just my opinion.

cake
Ohh I have a few questions for you :

What did you do in CA ?

What was your salary and how would it compare in France ?

__xtrimsky
I have a friend software enginneer in France, came out of the same school as me.

I make 7400$ / month, he makes 2600 euros.

But he has health care paid for, 5 weeks vacations, 35 hour work weeks.

rememberlenny
I was there in August and heard is was 30-40% less than the Bay Area/NYC salaries. The few web developers I talked to about salaries shared they were making 30-50k euros a year. That seemed pretty good.

It might not seem like a lot, but cost of living is also a lot less than NYC/SV.

drinchev
I live in Berlin ( working as a front-end developer ) and that is correct. My rent is 700 Euro for a small flat in Mitte ( city center ) and yes, Berlin is a cheap city in terms of food, party, rent, etc. Anyway most of the people are not here to make money as far as I can see. Lots of hipsters and other people just join the city for it's special "culture / party / art" kind of spirit.
mikecaron
And that really is an incredible motivation to live there. No city on earth like Berlin.
benjaminwootton
Berlin is a cheap place to live even by European standards.

Even though salaries might appear low, Berlin has a really good balance of culture + nice place to live + affordibility.

mikecaron
Absolutely true. My rent in the early '00s was equivalent to $200 / month for a 3 room apartment. Granted, I had a coal furnace in my bedroom, a tiny gas furnace in my living room and no heat in the kitchen or bathroom (except for a pull-string infra-red heater over the door for when you step out of the bathtub). Everything was cheap from beer to food to clubs to travel. I made half of what I made in the States but I didn't feel it at all.
ido
Just to give people some perspective, this is very cheap to basically unattainable in Berlin today.

Assuming you want to live somewhere with good transit connections and fairly central (say, on the inner side of the Ringbahn[1] or close to it) a 3-room apartment (2 bedrooms+living room, let's say around 60-70 m^2) will likely cost you 500-600 eur not including heat (700+ including heat and utilities) if you don't inherit an old contract (in Germany landlords are limited in how much they can increase rent on a year by year basis for an ongoing contract, so if you get a new apartment you'll probably pay more than the previous tenant as the land lord will use this opportunity to increase your rent).

Overall tho it is still cheap for a western city. I think my expenses dropped almost to half what they were in Tel Aviv.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Ringbahn

[dead] mikecaron
I stand corrected, my apartment was then a 2-room (1 bedroom + living room + kitchen + bath; I had thought living room counted toward the room count... it's been some years).

Yes, it was a special find, I admit. I was living in an old Soviet style block apartment building next to Weissensee[1]. I was able to come by it through a friend who moved out of town and let me take over the lease. She got it via a friend who knew the man who died living there. She was only there a short time and didn't clear out any of the old East German artifacts that were still left from the previous man. I kept a great deal of them (liquor, table settings, a california closet, a strange folding bed thingie, still-wrapped-up Christmas decorations, etc). I still use my DDR sugar bowl, creamer and shot glasses. I noticed a similarity to my things when I watched the movie, "Goodbye, Lenin!".

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/eKO6O

markkanof
I can definitely see how that would work when a lot of the necessities of life are priced lower, in line with your lower salary. How did you feel about making purchases that are priced at a more global level? For example if you wanted to buy an Apple computer to do your development work on. I've always been curious about this as people don't tend to talk about it when discussing the cost of living in different geographic areas.
ido
That stuff becomes comparatively more expensive, but still most of your expenses are for the basics (housing+ transit+ food probably add up to ~80-90% of most people's expenses) so it's not that big of a deal.
mikecaron
I had usually bought electronics from the USA when I knew of a friend coming to visit. They'd purchase it, bring it over and I'd pay them back. I avoided paying the VAT that way.
junto
This is changing fast though. Places like Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain-kKreuzberg, and more recently Neukölln are completely gentrified. The prices are rising fast and the "cool" people are moving on the the new squats and cheap run down properties. Property developers are leveraging the relative cheapness of the property market (compared to other capital cities) and trying to turn a fast buck (and doing os).

I'm not so sure that Berlin is really that cheap anymore.

rdl
What I'm more interested in are costs of employing people in Berlin, vs. costs in the Bay Area and other markets.

e.g. if salary expectations for a mid-level dev are EUR 50000 vs. USD 120k, but Germany costs another EUR 50000 in taxes/permits overhead vs. another USD 30000 to the employer in the US, it's a wash.

netrus
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.
a8da6b0c91d
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.
johnward
Yeah, having to pay people for time off due to having a baby sounds terrible. /s
danmaz74
Even more terrible when you don't even have to pay them - they're paid by the State.
levosmetalo
Those communist bastards, how dare they? /s
levosmetalo
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.

Ancorehraq
So, a long term /three/ way relationship, then? The employee, the employer, and the state.
levosmetalo
Well, Germans people have always been more liberal and open minded regarding relationships, so threesomes are not that rare :)
junto
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).

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

junto
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.
netrus
It really depends. Minimum: 30k EUR Recent graduate: 35-45k EUR Senior: 45-60k EUR Like everywhere, salaries are higher in larger companies and for older people.

As Berlin is quite poor, expect maybe 10-15% below German average, but take into account that cost of living is low (especially rent and food).

Cyph0n
Interesting. A bit off-topic: how much would it cost per month for basic amenities for a college student in Berlin?
grn
I know a PHP programmer who makes about 6.5k EUR / month as a contractor but that's my only data point.

I'm considering moving to Berlin and working there as a contractor so I'd love to see some more data. Keep in mind that the overhead of an employee is huge (I bet it's over 100%) so a contract may be much better financially.

seivan
While you're at it, also ask for the taxes for a single person. It's around 35-42%. Of course some will claim that a large of that is not actually tax, but your pension. Because you know... countries always pay their pensions when you're old .

Also ask what the tax is for when claiming pension, usually it's higher than a salaried tax, because you know what the government feels about old people. At least in Sweden.

levosmetalo
You can check taxes for yourself. Here's a quick link in English that correctly calculates taxes based on tax class, and has a short explanation about different factors.

EDIT: Sorry, the missing link is http://www.parmentier.de/steuer/steuer.htm?wagetax.htm

Also, if you would like to see what is an employers overhead over a given gross salary, this link (German only) can also help: http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-a...

ido
you forgot the link!
expertentipp
Taxes and other contributions subtracted from your salary are high in Germany, almost as high as in Nordic countries. There are many gross-net calculators available, search for "Netto Gehaltsrechner".
Daviey
I really fail to see what value this polls add. The sample size is usually too small, and then - only indicates values.. doesn't provide enough detail on level of skill or responsibility.
hdragomir
You should be fine with anything around 2.5k a month.
siscia
In italy young developer are VERY VERY VERY lucky if the get something like 1200 €/months (and I think that I haven't stretch enough the VERY LUCKY part)
poulsbohemian
I've been hearing this for 15+ years now, IE: that tech salaries in Italy are incredibly low. How is it possible, just given the raw supply/demand problem for tech workers? In every other part of the world, tech workers are somewhere in the say, top 10% of earners, but not Italy. What is it that's so unique about market conditions there?
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SpaceJudas
I hate to self-promote, but I work at a company called payscale that makes its livelihood off of building super specific salary range reports out of crowd sourced data.

Below I'm posting a link for the generalized "Software Engineer" (non-senior) in the city of Berlin. Obviously where you place in the range is dependent on a bunch of other factors like your specific skills (some languages actually pay better than others), company size, and your years of experience. http://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Location=Berlin-Berlin/S...

If you want to drill down further than that, filling out our survey will give you a personal salary range based on your skills, experience level, and all the other compensible factors that we've come up with. Good luck on your job search!

adamb0mb1
You posted a link to Berlin, which has several entries for different types of engineers. But close enough :-)