Yea this is so gonna work with them paying 50-60k/pa for engineers. Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe
> Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe
German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters, bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.
From my experience this is true for big German corporations, but is it really different for big corporations from other countries?
While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.
From my experience, this is true for big corporations anywhere. It seems that when a company reaches a certain size it becomes incapable of digging itself out of that hole.
Probably the old-school mentality of pay hierarchies: Managers must earn more than subordinates. Thus if the salary expectation of a high skilled engineer is higher than some of the management class, it's often viewed as obscene. Usually as an engineer you achieve certain salary levels only with additional management duties.
Not only that but them being stubborn and with a superiority complex. DACH companies rule EE with their capital and often manage to prototype and execute very much innovative features focused on convenience in the EE region (with local engineers etc). But this will never transform into something bigger because management wont allow non DACH people to assume executive roles + conservative market in their countries.
It's an interesting phenomena but to be honest you need a leader with a vision to change the course of history. Circa 2006-2012 everyone orbiting the DACH sphere of influence believed they need to speak german even in tech jobs and then due to USA's influence and huge market we realized we actually dont give a crap about DACH that much. Thus it spawned companies in EE,Baltics and everywhere else with a focus on mostly american market.
And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted English as the defacto working language in tech.
Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and unified market we will never be able to challenge competitors from Asia let alone the USA.
Also by default DACH companies are very limiting to foreigners to go higher. Sure they hire a lot of engineers but you will never see overachiever Indian CEO or Asian CEO or even board members.
As a french speaking Swiss I'm pretty biased, but I'd say it comes down to salary thriftiness to the detriment of innovation, practicality to the detriment of flexibility, and perfection to the detriment of velocity.
If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.
But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
> But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?
French speakers are a serious mystery to me. They are much better stewards when it comes to tech and cooperation but they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french" that it hinders any progress.
At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.
Extreme frugality and risk aversion, cash (and revenue) is the only KPI to success, digitalization = just make it a PDF and don't change the process thus any process is still equally slow.
at least for jobs which often are referred to as engineers (through legally speaking are not as enginer is a protected title having little to do with software development)
maybe for jobs of people which mainly idk. replace hardware in servers all day but don't really administrate the servers at all
DACH would be: (D)eutschland (A)ustria (C)onfederatio (H)elvetica...
This acronym manages to use three different languages, german for Deutschland, english for Austria (which is Österreich) and the latin name for Switzerland...
Don't ask me, it is very dubious to use this DACH hodgepodge term here, as definitely mentalities are different: the state of IT is in no way identical between these three countries.
Also, Dach stands for "roof" in German, I guess that's why they like it. maybe
The German social contract for a long time was that the working class gets low wages, which keeps German exports competitive and combined with the large internal market, prices low. In return for making the owning class wealthy, workers also get a relatively good social support system and job security.
I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.
Low salaries to me indicates they believe it is a Germanic ideal to pay subpar wages for highly skilled engineers? I don't think it's a mentality thing, personally, I think it just speaks to the weakness of the European economy for the last 20ish years
Lots of people in this thread talking about low salaries in tech in the EU, but maybe it’s the case the US is the outlier? And not even the US as a whole, more like SV?
Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?
I don't think Silicon Valley has really been the standard bearer for software engineering jobs in at least 5 years, I'd reckon as far as 10 years. The pandemic also has hollowed them out as well. You can find high paying software engineering jobs in plenty of low cost of living states these days. That city has very sharp problems that it is failing to solve and when given a choice, many people choose not to live/move there
Between 1998 and 2020 its IT industry grew to a sizeable share of economy. By 2010, the average salary in IT was 10x the average salary. Moreover, the industry worked mostly within the global economy. with many Belarusian firms subcontracting to FAANG, German powerhouses or growing into big successes in the mobile industry.
Unlike in Armenia or Georgia, the Belarusian IT industry was never a major tax contributor, but its internal spending power was enormous and it transformed the country into a much more livable place.
Since August 9, 2020 this all collapsed. Out of slighly less than 9mln population, 300,000 left the country out of fear of prosecution. Many of them -- from that same IT industry that once defined the bright future of the country.
honestly if you include other costs e.g. for acceptable health insurance, having children, eating reasonable healthy, general quality of live things etc. the sallies often aren't bad at all
Sure if you are one of the best of the best and are willing to take high risk for high reward and in general give up QoL/Work live Balance then especially in SV you have better chances to make a lot of money.
But for most skilled engineers they can get their money worth in the EU, through depending on their priorities and goals in live.
Like to put it in context to have a similar quality of live in US I think I would need to earn around 50% more before tax and that is even through US has much less tax. Through that 50% more also would allow me more flexibility for reducing my QoL at the current time, invest it and long time have more money (or much less if you mess up). So again a question of priorities.
Quality of life is pretty high in the US for salaried workers (health insurance is good at these jobs usually). Work/life balance depends on the company. If you work in a low CoL city, life is very nice (compared to larger, more expensive cities like SF and NYC)
Depends. If you want to live a good life you stay in the EU. If you have the will and ability to do great things professionally (not many do) then in most industries you need to move to the US to do it. There’s just not enough high-risk capital here for exciting projects to be done. I suspect comes from market size. Financiers won’t take high risk without high reward, and the reward is not here.
Please think about context. GP thinks, there was a weak European economy, esspecially about Germany in the last 20 years. This was not the case and even during the current struggle in Germany (not German swiss), more people from the US move here
I meant that the European economy is not growing; Germany has had 0 or negative GDP growth for about a year now. People move from the US to Europe for a lot of reasons, not necessarily because of economic opportunities. I think the most common kind of expat I see is someone who works remotely for a US-based company and enjoys the relatively lower cost of living in Europe. This is not an indication of strong European growth, it's an indication of the buying power of the dollar compared to the Euro
