This. Salaries of 70-90k EUR for Senior devs in Berlin are absolutely achievable and combined with the quite low cost of living in Berlin you probably have more fun money than anywhere in Europe as a developer.
German cities themselves are definitely much nicer than American cities. In fact, "much nicer" is an understatement, American cities usually feel like they were designed by people who hate cities and want everyone in them to suffer.
That said, US lifestyle/culture has its own set of advantages compared to Germany. German culture is surprisingly backwards for consumer software/internet stuff, for example.
Salaries for devs in the US are insane compared to the rest of the world, I don't think they can be taken as a reference, especially as most people do not have an easy way to just choose to move there.
Hard truth: It also heavily depends on how good you are. The salaries talked about are usually the top 10% maybe 20%. Like people throwing around Facebook and Amazon salaries. They only employ a small percentage of devs.
That leaves at least 80% that earn considerably less and 50% that earn below the mean.
Quick math lesson: 50% earn below the median. For salaries (in general, I've no idea what it's like for developers in particular) the right-hand tail (high performers with extremely high salaries) and the lack of left-hand tail (no salaries are negative) shifts the mean (arithmetic mean a.k.a. average) upwards so it's actually (usually) going to be more than 50% of population earning below the mean.
Well, it's more of a linguistic/english lesson. I meant the median and just forgot that average and mean are synonyms. But thanks for pointing that out.
I actually edited out exactly the same argument that you wrote, because I (and you) have nothing to actually back it up.
Counterexample: if 60% of people earn very close above the average and 35% earn 30% below average and 5% earn (on average) double the total average, then the majority earns above average even tho the right hand-tail gets high. This is just one possible scenario that is not even completely unrealistic.
Also remember that most crazy incomes are not salaries.
If you are looking at SMBs that treat you as a "IT guy", sure.
If you are looking at more "modern" tech companies in Berlin or well-funded startups it's definitely possible. The last 3 job offers I had were in the 90-100k range, for a "senior" position (~6 years of experience) in Berlin.
Just from the top of my head, you could probably earn well at: Zalando, HERE, Mozilla, EyeEm, Blacklane, MongoDB, Zeitgold, Talon.one, Infarm (just raised a juicy funding round) + a boatload of blockchain startups
On top of that, a lot of the bigger SV startups have satellite offices in Berlin.
Yep, personally know them. But they're in Köln last I remember.
Many of the companies you mentioned (not gonna named not to get sued) have reportedly terrible working culture and/or awful recruitment process (applied to most of them). So maybe the money is compensating.
Might be true for some of them, but for the ones on the list where I know people that work there, it sounded pretty good. In the end good working culture is one of many axis to optimize on.
Its just from my personal experience, but i know a lot of people in the 70k+ range at different companies, all senior though. We also interview a lot and a considerable amount of candidates that get offered high sixties go somewhere else where they got a better offer.
