How are salaries for senior devs in Berlin at the moment?

I've been working as a Sr SWE in Berlin for 3 years, and I network with a lot of others. 60-90k is probably the most accurate range. Developers making 100k+ are in the top 5% of the market in the city. If you're making 100k in Berlin you'd be making 3-400k in the Bay Area.

Taxes are high. You're probably getting slightly less than 4k a month after taxes/insurance. Your apartment/utilities will be around 1200.

I just moved here from the USA and I think it's varies by the type of company you work for drastically. If you work for a bigger German company or an American company doing business here, you'll find salaries that are 90% or 95% of US salaries in like Denver or Atlanta. If you work for a German company that is early (or late) on, you'll find salaries that are more like 50%.

Feel free to reach out to me, I have pretty good (current) data on the subject but I'd rather share it privately.

I'm not in Berlin, but The Netherlands, which is probably similar. Most senior positions are around 50-80k, but there are a few over 100k.

However if you're willing to do contracting you can make a lot more - there are plenty of full-time, long-term gigs with rates of 80-110/hour.

You're looking at 80k+ easily, so that's atleast around 4200 or 4300 netto a month which you'll be comfortable with. And yes the market is really hot right now!

The comments here are disheartening looking at it from the UK. In the south of England I'm making 32k as devops lead at a small digital agency (handling the infrastructure for a collection of Wordpress sites and Umbraco sites, nothing crazy, a bit under 500k unique hits/week). It's difficult to know how hard I should be considering something else, or if thinking about it is just getting caught up in HN-comment-inflation.

You can make plenty of money doing enterprise devops freelancing with the big German companies. I'm currently on around £320k/year contracting for a couple of household-name companies. I think most of these companies are based in Frankfurt and Rhine-Ruhr though not Berlin, although they do seem happy to accept remote workers like me.

In January I got offer from both Amazon (L5) and Shopify (Senior Eng) for 130k package f in Berlin. If you're looking for a higher salaries I recommend going for a bigger names

Is Berlin a market where 5 YOE is plausibly "senior" in the same way it is for Silicon Valley?

You can check the salaries directly provided by companies on: https://germantechjobs.de/jobs/all/Berlin

(disclaimer: I am the co-founder of this job board)\

In your case, you would be looking at something between: 60'000 and 90'000 EUR.

Salaries for IT/software engineering in Germany work kind of the opposite of the US: generally speaking, you’ll make better money in mid-size cities at one of the big old industrials (e.g.: Siemens, Bosch) than in startup-hot Berlin. IG Metall Tariff is what you’re looking for.

I’ve snickered at a couple recruiting mails trying to get me to leave my “boring” giant family company’s IT department for a ~30% paycut and “usually under 45 hours” workweek (mine’s currently 35).

I am “in Tariff” - my base salary is determined by the main IG Metall contract for Bavaria. My employer can pay me up to 28% over that base amount based on my annual performance evaluation. If they want to reward me more, they can choose to bump me up a step. If they wish to pay me even more than that, I am then “außer Tariff,” which means they can pay me as much as they like over that higher minimum, and I’m no longer “limited” to a 35/40 hour workweek. Managers in my department are usually AT, but I also have several IC colleagues with 15+ years of SWE experience who are.

TL;DR - Germany values boring; go boring, get paid.

Despite being aware how markets vary, it will never not shock me that 25-27 year old barely non-jr devs on my team make double that. Can’t help but think things are in disequilibrium over the long run.

The market is very hot right now in Australia. Our government closed the borders so only Australians can apply. That combined with an unwillingness of staff to move roles means there's a big shortage. Salaries have shot up in the software industry. I have seen $1000 AUD per day contact rates for senior engineers. That equates to $220k AUD before tax (-30% net).

In my experience, a very accurate range is 70K-90K Euro (gross) for senior individual contributors. No matter if you have 5 or 20 years of experience.

More than that and you probably need to be principal engineer or something like that. Making more than 100K Euro gross in Germany (and probably in most of continental Europe, besides Switzerland) is consider top 5%.

The company I work for is hiring devs in Germany. DM me.

What's Senior Security Strategist position salary equivalent there?

US Equivalent is ~USD $180k

Levels.fyi always a good resource:

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Berlin-Ger...

This article on salaries in EU tech hubs is potentially relevant. Also takes into account cost of living.

https://www.offerzen.com/blog/developer-salaries-across-tech...