34k € is a bad salary in Germany? Because I think it is an average 1st salary in France (or the companies I've been talking to are also planning to get me paid abysmally)
For a developer I'd say yes. For comparison the yearly salary for an entry level academic (masters->university) is about 44k € gross/year (which more or less automatically goes up to about 49k after one year). I'd expect a decent entry level developer to make at least that.
There is a difference between "acheivable" and "culture". I should also probably add I'm thinking of London-Non-Finance which is admittedly smaller than London.
34k ain't bad, but average salaries for Experienced Java devs with 5+ years of experience are in the range of 50-55k.
Also by paying less than blue card limit, the devs are basically tied to VisualMeta. Most of the devs don't know German system well and thus are being taken advantage of.
Depends on where you live. If you're near a larger city or not. There's a huge discrepancy in salaries Due to geography (and also massively depends on your skill set, obviously).
To give you a frame of reference, I was pretty well paid in Perpignan after a few years in a company (a bit north of 40k€). The junior devs I hired got south of 24k€.