421–430 of 450 posts
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According to [1] if you make 400k a year your employer has to pay 413k in total [1] https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-...
"net" is the keyword here.
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It’s probably true that the net salary is lower than some other comparable countries, although Denmark for example has also a quite low net salary. I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made…
I would be _ecstatic_ to give up half of my salary for such a system which assures that irrespective of my employment/financial status, age or health, I'll get the care I need, until I die.
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Yet how many people, even well-educated ones, have this balanced view on salaries? Most people see the bottom line on their pay statements. They "conveniently" forget that they still have to pay for health insurance, pension funds, etc. A big figure on the pay slip is a status symbol. If Germany wants to attract foreign high-profile human capital like the US does, they should create a similar system: Pay them their f…
You opine on a system you clearly don't understand. Each of these deductions are clearly shown on your pay slips. They can be calculated in advance from your gross income. In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low. In any case, it's impossible to have a balanced view on compensation, because of the huge differences between the countries you compare. I lived…
I typed 100k/year into brutto-netto-rechner and it shows that Netto is less than 65k. Basically over 35% of your salary gets confiscated by the state, of course this doesn't include further taxes like 19% VAT you pay every time you buy anything at all.
How is that "relatively low"?
If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014. Also, there has been a growing…
Actually there is a lot of current semi activity in Dresden. It's the biggest cluster in Europe. Notable fabs in Dresden: Globalfoundries, Infineon, Bosch (recently opened), X-Fab, First Sensor, Plastic Logic (now defunct). May be noteworthy that some of these fabs are among the semi fabs with the highest degree of automotation world wide. Add to this many bigger and smaller suppliers, universities, reasearch institu…
Also, CERN heavily promotes open source software development, among other things by getting students super excited (high school trip to a super collider) and by raising research funding for PhDs to work on said software.
If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014. Also, there has been a growing…
Any historic reason for the cluster to be in Dresden? I would have expected the most sophisticated areas to be in Western Germany area. Maybe govt encouraged development there?
If you're fabricating things at 30nm, a strong gust of wind against the side wall of your factory might be enough to waste some wafers. If I remember correctly, they have a rubber shell to protect against it...
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Personal development. Working with people that are much smarter than you generally makes you better at your work. So from that point of view, going to the places where the concentration of super smart people is the "highest" makes sense.
There are plenty of smart people and high tech companies in Europe though, so there's no reason to take the job insecurity and parental leave hit for that alone. You'd have to be in a niche where there's only a few teams world wide that are any good, and the US one is the one that's hiring.
Its like comparing a top German tech university with MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley.
Sure the German tech universities are really good, but from the set of people I know with offers from MIT or Stanford, none of them rejected them, because they were a huge boon for their careers.
The impact is pretty much the same with tech in SV.
> so there's no reason to take the job insecurity and parental leave hit for that alone.
Parental leave is usually _orders of magnitude better_ in SV than Germany.
All SV employers I know offer you 4-6 months of fully-paid parental leave, and allow you to take more months, but unpaid. If your salary is 600k$, your paid parental leave is ~300k$.
In Germany you get max 1800 EUR netto / month of Elterngeld. If you take it for 14 months, that's 25000 EUR. Somebody making 5000 EUR netto/month (e.g. 120k$ brutto), and deciding to stay at home, looses 3200 EUR netto per month. Most of the people I know making slightly over 100k$ in Germany with kids went back to work as soon as possible (women in less than 3 months... which is nuts), because they have bills to foot (mortage, etc.).
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I'm fine with that. I value employees having balanced lives more than GDP bragging rights. For the record, yes they're the sort of engineers I'd want to hire. If we're making broad assumptions about a country's workforce, I'd want a happy, well-rested workforce that's not held hostage by their company's health insurance plan. You say that as if valuing your free time is a sort of moral weakness in an employee.
This might also help explain why so few startups survive in Germany. If a German startup has a nice idea and start working towards it with 4 ppl 30h/week each, at say 50k$/year/employee, a US startup: - has access to most VC funds - the German startup might have proven that there is money there, which helps getting VC funds - has access to (0) a lot of (1) top and (2) absurdly hard-working talent that will put as muc…
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This might also help explain why so few startups survive in Germany. If a German startup has a nice idea and start working towards it with 4 ppl 30h/week each, at say 50k$/year/employee, a US startup: - has access to most VC funds - the German startup might have proven that there is money there, which helps getting VC funds - has access to (0) a lot of (1) top and (2) absurdly hard-working talent that will put as muc…
The question is "what values are we willing to abandon to stay competitive?" If America can compete by squeezing more out of their labour and operating in a deregulated environment, do we really want to walk down that path?
That's a good question.
In the US, if you are founding a startup with 4 people, while all 4 are "employees", you are way closer to "self-employed" than to "9-4 employee at Siemens", and the startup more than handsomly compensates the employees with equity, to actually make it so: "you are working as an employee for a company that you own a big chunk of".
In Germany, it does not make financial sense to give a sizable chunk of the company to your employees. Many companies offer equity, or equity purchase plans, but as a "minor" perk, and not as the main part of the compensation.
OTOH, how long do you think self-employed people work in Germany? I know some that work 15 hours per day 7 days per week, and the system is perfectly fine with that.
So good question indeed.
My opinion is that Germany values with respect to "work" are incoherent and unsustainable.
Incoherent because Germany is fine with self-employed people working themselves to death for a miserable salary (most post man and DHL sub-sub-sub-sub contractors in Germany), the system itself keeps them miserable, while simultaneously preventing salaried employees to make the decision of how much do they want to work, and giving any freedom to their employers to appropriately compensate employees that perform better. The goal seems to be to squash the outperforming outliers, to try to broaden the average.
That's unsustainable, because cash cows (BMW, VW, Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ....) come and go, but Germany can't generate them anymore. To the point that the German government essentially has to "co-conspire" with its cash cows (e.g. Diesel Scandal, etc.) to avoid any risks of them dying. The German people complain about the cash cows doing lots of lobbying, having lots of power, etc. but the reason this is the case is because, like the Germans call it, they are "of crucial relevance for the system".