We asked 15,000 European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf]

https://static.germantechjobs.de/market-reports/European-Transparent-IT-Job-Market-Report-2025.pdf

38•birdculture•1h ago

Comments

NoiseBert69•1h ago

I don't trust these numbers for Germany.

Why? Have a look at all the Tarifunternehmen salaries. 80k-90k€ is pretty much a standard salary you can reach after 5 years (with maybe changing your position once within the same company).

Feels like their dataset has significant sampling gap in some very big industries here.

tsss•22m ago

Very few companies pay the union salary.

NoiseBert69•16m ago

A lot of the big companies in Germany do.

Volkswagen AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Deutsche Bahn AG, Siemens AG, Bosch GmbH, BMW AG, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, BASF SE, Bayer AG, SAP SE, RWE AG, E.ON SE, Lufthansa AG, Continental AG, Thyssenkrupp AG, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, Allianz SE, etc.

j7ake•14m ago

It doesn’t matter honestly, 65k versus 80k after 42% tax on the extra 15k is about 800 euros a month. Not qualitatively different.

NoiseBert69•11m ago

Reality is ~36-38% if you learn to spend money strategically so you can fill a proper tax return.

I never paid 42% my entire engineer life.

klooney•9m ago

What are you doing, for the non-Germans? I'm wondering how onerous your tax optimization strategy is.

NoiseBert69•5m ago

There are many tools available in Germany that support you doing your tax filings. They have endless questionnaires in (tax law free) easy language that guide you through all the niches.

They not only respect all rules regarding the laws but also the latest jurisprudence.

One huge chunk are so called Werbungskosten.

rockyj•42m ago

Yeah, the numbers in Germany are not so rosy. If these numbers are true, we are looking at -

- An "average" salary of around 65K / year

- This after (an average of) 5-6 rounds of interviews

- 6 months of "probation", with only 2 weeks of notice

- And all after 4-6 years of degree/s and 4-5 years of experience (so around 10 years of investment)

Then after taxation 65K annually means around 3500/month in pocket. Then with the current prices - around 1200 goes in rent alone. Not a lot of room to spend after that. Then, prices keep going up and even a simple (new) car is around 20,000. Not to mention the stress / savings you have to keep since people can be let go anytime. To top it, there is a ceiling in Germany - unless you are extra-ordinary forget making above 100K ever even after 25 years of experience.

IT / software dev is a "barely survivable" kind of job in Germany right (sadly) now. I do not recommend it to kids in school/uni anymore (again unfortunately).

nasmorn•37m ago

But are they? A Berlin startup was paying this average salary to the Indian/Pakistani devs they sponsored and fully expected to jump ship in the next 12 months. Why would they not pay 70k-75k and have your pick in the upper half of the domestic market.

nine_k•18m ago

Maybe recent immigrants were the key demographic polled? That would easily describe the skew.

kuerbel•33m ago

Those numbers can't be right.

N19PEDL2•15m ago

At least in the Frankfurt area, they are.

funkyfiddler369•27m ago

Germans won't tell you how much they earn, ever. It keeps salaries down in all industries.

These fucking Tarifvertraege have kept salaries from growing, too. The people would have pushed a long time ago but the truth is masked well enough.

Those who don't believe the shit, earn more. It is sad and the change and progress happens elsewhere. Enjoy one or two decades of German companies looking like they still matter. Nobody will account for the reasons later on. It's a shame.

And an average of 65k to the average person is gooood.

NoiseBert69•21m ago

These numbers are far off reality.

80k€+ isn't a high salary for job in a Tarifunternehmen if you stay with it for 5+ years.

Many of my colleagues cracked 100k€ this year without being AT and having crazy high position ratings.

tsss•23m ago

That sounds about right to me, maybe a tad too low. In my experience it's more like 2-3 rounds of interviews and 70-75k€/year with 5 YoE and a college degree, which amounts to 3700€/month net income and you can't expect much improvement on that even with 25 YoE unless you become some sort of corporate middle manager.

Germany is the biggest cuck country in the world.

nine_k•23m ago

What are some jobs that pay significantly more? Is it easier to be a factory worker? (I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.) Does work in finance, or in medicine, or some other highly educated job pay materially more?

pbmonster•4m ago

Yes, medicine pays better, median is around 100k but with significant back loading towards the second half of the career.

Finance can be (much) better, but feels like far fewer jobs, especially outside Frankfurt. I'm not sure finding a high paying finance jobs is easier than finding a software job at the German office of an American firm (which pay similarly well).

> I suppose factory workers cannot be let go as easily.

It's important to look at comparable companies. If you're a SE at a company with many factory workers, firing the SE is usually equally as difficult as firing the factory worker. They usually have the same protections and are in the same union. Software shops just tend to be smaller and those have lower job security.

simfoo•7m ago

Whenever I read those reports I can't help but wonder who they are actually asking. I'm definitely in a bubble working in Munich and either for US subsidiaries or at least close to them (automotive, ai, robotics, aerospace and others) - but it's a pretty big bubble because it's easily thousands of engineers within one or two hops. And we all make north of 100k€! No-one with more than 5-10 years of experience would accept an offer below 90k and I know a lot of folks that earn 150k+. The statistics always feel very low-balled

rednalexa•3m ago

This experience is common in my circles even in the US as well as those I know in Europe. May be a bi-modal distribution where some industries are vastly underpaying while some industries are the opposite and paying well above the average. This seems to have happened in a lot of career spaces

KellyCriterion•3m ago

Want a bet?

Loose your job right now and you wont see this 100k+ for a veryyyyy looooong time. People are taking cuts of 50% just to get any employment.

blell•3m ago

Don’t worry, the situation will drastically improve with the new plan of importing thousands of Indians into the EU.

nasmorn•40m ago

It basically paints 80k/y as the top 10% of senior salary in Germany and I don’t know anyone good working for less. While I only have anecdata this seems way out of touch with what I understand companies expect to pay for their talent

_tk_•38m ago

Agree with the sentiment that the numbers for Germany - and I would say Switzerland as well - are not on the level.

WarmWash•31m ago

And this is largely why Europe totally whiffed on the tech explosion of the last 25 years.

Keep your golden geese well fed or they will find someone else (or another country) that will.

hocuspocus•26m ago

These job portals (SwissDevJobs.ch, GermanTechjobs.de, etc.) are incredibly self-selecting.

I don't know any half-serious company posting ads there. And I'm not even talking about top tier or second tier tech companies, just tech adjacent employers paying market average.

Same with recruiting agencies matching people with startups. There was talent.io (not sure if it went under or re-branded) sharing ridiculous salary reports.

I'm all for transparency, but if your customer portfolio is literally paying bottom quartile salaries, I don't think this helps anyone.

KptMarchewa•24m ago

Funny how Poland is above Germany, yet I still feel the numbers are low - probably that's just my bubble though.

helge9210•18m ago

These reports are not for engineers, but for businesses. HR will point to the statistic and state "we are paying top of the market". In reality, trying to hire a senior engineer below EUR100k is like looking for a black cat in a dark room (you can be certain, the cat is not there anymore).

trilogic•13m ago

Still no real data on the layoff % in the tech sector, respective to Devs or just in general.

Personally I noticed an exodus of Americans towards Europe. IT may as well be considered an intellectual immigration flux.

The critical point is that no one has the puta idea of how to use AI to create jobs, so to smooth and balance the shift/layoffs. Time to be creative on it or else we will see employees destroying the machines again like they did in the beginning of the industrial revolution followed by an economical depression.

xnorswap•9m ago

.NET devs being among the worst paid? Seniors earning barely more than regular devs? Yeah, that feels about right to this UK-based senior .NET developer.

PurpleRamen•4m ago

This site looks so suspicious. The numbers are very wrong. I looked up two jobs they are listing, which had some very extraordinary wage shown. Both turned out to be wrong, by miles even. By which I mean, they show 80k/year, for a 1k/month paid training. Is this some vibe coded garbage?