

Europe Joins The Talent Wars - ed209
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/22/think-hiring-is-tough-in-the-valley-now-europe-joins-the-talent-wars/

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ed209
Is it just the capitals / large cities that struggle? There must be pockets of
talent all over the UK and Europe.

I particularly don't want to move to a capital / large city. But I would move
for a company based near the coast for example.

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Xylakant
Hamburg is close to the coast, not too big and from what I've heard a couple
of startups make a nice living there. The german variant of Über is based in
HH IIRC.

I don't actually think that Berlin is struggling. It's hard to hire as a small
company because there's bigger fish in the pond that can offer better pay/more
interesting projects but if you're at least semi-well connected you should be
doing ok. It's just that Berlin has been extremely cheap for quite a while and
is now catching up to what I actually regard as a rather average level. The
cited example of a PHP Dev with 2 years experience and a 180K wage is
certainly an outlier. Experienced devs should probable average at around
60K/year, costing the employer at around 100K.

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ed209
Love Hamburg, a great place for sure (I freelance there). Although best
kitesurfing spot is about 150km up the road at st peter-ording. But actually I
meant Uk coast to stay near family :)

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Xylakant
Quoting the CEO of 6Wunderkinder as "Berlin needs less hype" is a paradox in
itself.

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roel_v
100k for a 2-year experience php dev? Can anyone corroborate that claim?

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Xylakant
Possible, he might be a very bright and promising kid. Average: certainly not.
I regard this as statistical outlier. I'd offer 50-60k max for a 2 years php
dev. We do have a large influx of people from Spain and Greece lately -
they're legally allowed to work here without any visa and the unemployment
rate drives them here.

However, if those numbers are cited it's difficult to know which side you're
hearing. An employer in germany has to pay health care and social security
etc., which adds another ~40% on top of the wage - so they might have cited
that number to compensate for differences in the american model (private
healthcare paid by the employee).

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tayl0r
Senior level software engineer here- I just relocated to Berlin from SF and
I'm not seeing it. I've also talked to a lot of other programmers / employers
of programmers here and no one has ever spoken of salaries that high.

If these salaries were real, I would not be trying to do side-projects full
time from home!

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FlyingSnake
Care to share what range are the salaries are in?

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Xylakant
From what I hear I'd place the average for a solid experienced dev at around
40k-60k Euro per year with a pretty wide spread [1]. It's hard to tell though,
I might be living in a bubble :)

[1] 3+ years, at least one larger scale project. Knowledge of more than 1
programming language

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Herald_MJ
It may be new to TechCrunch, but there's been a talent deficit in London for
years now.

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cjrp
And yet I regularly get recruiter emails looking for "rockstar" developers
who'll work startup hours... for £25k (~$38k). Thanks, but no thanks.

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tudorizer
You hit the nail in the head here. From what I saw while living in London,
Singapore and now in Germany is that the problem is not with the talent, but
with the right compesation. There are so many hackers out there, but
"rockstars" or "ninjas" for 25K GBP is an insult.

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webjunkie
Wow. 180k. Where can I apply?

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prpatel
Don't get too worked up. High cost of living plus high taxes mean your take
home pay is considerably lower than what you get in the USA.

