Yeah, but you don’t have to have to pay SF mortgage prices, have a working public healthcare, no hordes of homeless on your doorstep etc. etc.
One might argue that we get more for our sille euro wages. Also if we decide to leave the company, we are not completely f_ckd, since our families don ’t suddenly drop out of healthcare and other services.
What you ignore is the thing that with meta’s salary you can retire in 10 years back to Europe. With silly wages in Germany you can retire on your 75th birthday. Feel the difference? Germany’s economy is stagnating, there will be no higher salaries anymore. Just higher taxes. If I were younger I would pick SF and hordes of homeless over declining Germany. If you follow political discussions it will not get better: planed VAT increase, retiremeNt and health insurance getting continuously more expensive. Even if I can get 3% yearly salary increase it will be eaten up by rising taxes and inflation making my poorer every year.
I think this reduces to a simple question of preference, but you understand that in order to get those salaries you work around the clock in a work environment so toxic, that there’s several books written about it. There’s a reason why they dev’s can order food and have free laundry service there, and it’s not zuck just loving his employees more. So yeah if you don’t get ill or burnout you get to retire earlier, and then move back to Europe. I’d rather stay in Europe, have spare time, live my life in nicer society and perhaps even make products that help society, or somebody, some way.
As of Germany, I don’t follow currenct politics over there (not a German here, Finnish), but you guys have time and time again show that you can produce pretty much anything for the global markets as well or better than anyone else. Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.
Not a German. Coming from authoritarian state and following democratic processes in Germany very closely. Love to talk with older neighbors occasionally. From my personal observation I can differentiate 4 time lines. First one is West Germany after WW2 living under the skirt of Americans. This laid foundation for rapid growth in second phase and prosperity. Arrogance came in with “Made in Germany”. Third phase started with unification and millions of new citizens from former eastern states. While being Germans they had really skewed worldview (I lived there many years). And the decline started in episode 4 with Merkel and zero interest era. While pragmatic leaders would push for using interest free debt to improve infrastructure nothing happened. Instead of that she opened borders and closed nuclear power plants. This decision lead for huge tensions in the society overloading social system. Dumb right orientation parties were elected. Electricity’s definitely not cheap.
We pay more than 30000€ a year for mandatory public health insurance and more for modern treatments not covered by insurance. That’s not different than in US, except the funny salaries in Germany.
Society is not homogeneous. There are more and more elderly who will vote who promises them heaven. The young ones are ignored. There are many conflicts: young vs. old. The riches against rest 95%. The ones born on German soil and the ones arrived later mixing illiterate refugees and PhD expats together.
Interesting times. It’s nice to believe, that Germany can put the shit together. But there are too many forces at play. Let’s see. I am too old to move elsewhere.
> Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.
The problem is that post-war Germany was founded on a promise of eternal prosperity, fuelled by our export industry, ever-increasing population counts, and cheap energy from coal (and later Russian gas). This engine was running so smoothly, we completely slept through digitisation, missed how China kept catching up with our engineers, and felt so reassured by the US entitlement to the world cop role that we shrunk the military further and further.
And now, all of that collapsed pretty much at the same time: Exports are staggering for a variety of reasons, people so few children our pension system costs explode, and energy prices have risen to the highest levels in Europe. All levels of the federal government are struggling with organisational problems, many have painted themselves into a corner, with incompatible silo solutions, and many still work on paper exclusively. In the meantime, the Chinese are able to produce many of the things we used to lead in at the same or better quality, and at lower prices - partly because a lot of strategic state subsidies are going on, partly due to stolen IP, but also due to a plain lack of innovation on our part. And we all know what happened with regard to the military recently.
Germans were never good with change, and right now, so many things change that most people are completely overwhelmed, oversaturated, anxious about the future, fatalistic, and angry. They get to each other's throats instead of looking ahead. Everyone is desperate for things slowing down at least a little bit, but they won't, and people know that.
There's lots of potential here, but I'm afraid on the great sinus curve of history, we're on a downward course right now. Unless something fundamentally changes, we'll see an extremist right-wing party take over power; many of its members openly celebrate Nazism.
I'm really trying to stay optimistic, but it's really getting harder every day.
London (where Meta offices are) isn't cheap, many UK companies offer private healthcare as public isn't fast enough, lots of homeless, entire 'tent cities'.
Compared to say seattleLA/Newyork, the number obviously homeless is vanishingly small. Yes, tubes will have a beggar, but there won't be more than one of them. They also are rarely aggressive.
Even in Soho, where one of the main london hostels are for homeless people its not that bad.
Facebook doesn't pay an average US salary, either (which is presumably why anyone stays). Based on levels.fyi, you'd be looking at 300-400k eur for an E5 in Berlin all-in.
Not sure I'd recommend it; there are less cartoonishly evil companies who still pay silly money in Europe available.
I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever. Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
> I don't think they pay you that much in Berlin. Why would they? All other companies pay less - no competition what so ever.
There are a small number of FAANG-ish companies who pay very high salaries in Berlin, London, Dublin, etc etc.
(And of course Zurich, but Zurich is Zurich.)
> Paying >100k is already super good, so they do probably around that.
I assure you that they pay more than that for halfway senior roles. Note that a lot of it would be in equity; the base salary would likely be in the 100-150k range, but one might get that again in equity.
It might be a buyout, or someone/some people moving to berlin from america.
if you are moving countries you keep your RSU allocation, but your wage is adjusted down/up based on local levels. (ie for london its .85 or something)
How? Any world wide company will have local offices for local operations. They are big enough that they have whole data centers there. Of course they'll hire some locals.
One might argue that we get more for our sille euro wages. Also if we decide to leave the company, we are not completely f_ckd, since our families don ’t suddenly drop out of healthcare and other services.