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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Dear blue and white collar workers, please consider coming to Germany. We need a FUCKTON of People.
Last time I checked, even most IT jobs required you to speak German. I'm not saying this is unreasonable in Germany, but I think it might make it harder to attract a fuckton of people.
A lot of Germans speak English, depending on the region. Also, I've found that some job postings tend to over state their standards, in other words, please consider my Duolingo subscription when reviewing my application.
NGL, you will get more Jobs if you speak German but I looked on https://englishjobs.de/ and apparently there are many IT Jobs which you can do in English.
I can sing all the lyrics to Dicke Titten. Does that count?
If it were only so easy. We tried. You might get a work visa, but getting citizenship is damn near impossible.
I'll go but how? What do I need to move there?
https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/visa/residence-visa/922288
"Persons holding a US passport may apply for their residence permit at the local immigration office (Ausländerbehörde) after arrival in Germany and without having obtained a visa prior to travelling to Germany. Please note that you need to register your new residence (Anmeldung) with the authorities (Meldebehörde) within 2 weeks of having moved to Germany. You also need to apply for your residence permit at the local immigration office (Ausländerbehörde) within the first 90 days of your stay in Germany. (...) We strongly recommend contacting the local immigration office as soon as possible after your arrival in Germany in order to secure a timely appointment.
Please note that you may only take up employment once you have been issued a residence permit explicitly authorizing such employment. You may also choose to apply for a visa prior to travel, effectively permitting employment from the first day of visa validity"
Basically you just have to find a company that will sponsor you? I work in IT. Where can I start looking? I've been to Berlin and loved it.
https://englishjobs.de/
(Berlin is quite expensive tho)
Berlin is the cheapest of all the large cities. Munich and Frankfurt are insane, but especially Munich has a lot of IT jobs.
Wait shit, really? I’ve heard amazing things about Berlin’s nightlife at least of the sort of nightlife I like
It's honestly insanely cheap when you compare to San Francisco 😭
Just say the country you're arriving from is run by global terrorists who are destabilising the world in pursuit of money, you'd probably get asylum 😂
The day another country gives asylum to USians is the day the CIA starts brain storming coup plots.
Do you think they're not already doing that lol
I tried. Even got a degree in German Language & Literature. Took additional language courses through the Goethe Institute in DE, etc.
Though I've spent the last twenty years as a software developer (which is classified as an Engpassberuf), I was told that the regulations would only allow me to seek work based on the skills from that degree (Berufsqualifikation).
"We already know how to speak German."
You could check on the new requirements. There are some massive changes this year to the work visa programs. One such change is that you don't have to work in your field of education anymore.
Y’all need engineers? Also y’all deal with that AfD problem yet?
Seriously though, my family left Germany a generation too soon for me to claim citizenship. I would be a dual citizen otherwise
Did any cousins stay behind? If you had cousins that either survived WWII or died in WWII in Germany, that counts. My great great great grandfather came to the US from Bavaria in between the world wars, but since his brothers stayed behind, I was able to claim German citizenship, though I don't speak a word of German.
Huh, that's really interesting!
If the pay for engineers wasn't shit I'd genuinely consider it, but getting 1/3 of my current pay to leave San Francisco ain't worth it. Especially given all my friends are here and I don't need a car.
You're forgetting all the things you don't need to pay for in Germany. Healthcare, massive insurances and rent, could even forgo a car with the great public transport and work from home. Might even have more left over at the end of the day than if you were to live where you live now.
An engineer living in Germany really doesn't have it bad at all.
I'm not saying it's a bad life at all, but I do not have to think about money at all in my day to day life because I make so much in the US. I'm really not trying to flex and genuinely live my life pretty frugally, but to drive the point I'm trying to make I bought $2500 worth of snowboarding shit and didn't even have to think about it. This was after donating $5k to my childhood elementary school for a yearly scholarship I started, maxing out a traditional IRA ($6.5k) and nearly maxing out my 401k ($18k). There's absolutely no way I'd break even in Germany given I'd have an after tax income of ~50k euros of which the above is over half and it's only April.
To go a bit deeper, I work for a healthcare data company so my healthcare is some of the best in the country with premiums 100% covered by my employer. My yearly out of pocket for deductibles is under $200 and my max out of pocket is $2500 in the absolute worst case scenario. I spend $40/month between life, dental, and renter's insurance.
Rent seems to be equivalent, maybe slightly cheaper, as I'd want to live in a big city and my current share of rent is $2000/month for a 148 sq meter apartment I share with my partner.
Then there's the much higher tax burden through things like VAT and extremely high income taxes in Germany.
The unfortunate part about the US is it is an amazing place to have a lot of money, and an awful place to be if you're poor. It would definitely make sense for someone in a lower income bracket, but once you clear $150k/year here most of the problems of the country no longer apply to you. I still very much want things to get better for the less fortunate, but I have no incentive or desire to leave given my current situation.
Edit: Someone mentioned kids. We don't plan on ever having any, but my partner and I have a combined income of over $400k per year so kids are more than feasible. Even just on one of our incomes it would be a comfortable life.
You should compare by salary minus cost of living instead of just by salary alone, almost most places will be way lower than SF in terms of salary.
Another thing to consider is work policies and overall lifestyle of the people there and see if you are compatible. For instance it's generally not ok to talk about work outside of work in the Netherlands, so if you are a workaholic it would cause some issues.
I went into this deeper in another response and having triple the salary while having a much lower effective tax rate is almost impossible to make up for. Not to mention I'd want to live in a big city if I did move which would make the cost of living a lot closer.
A lot of places put SF at 40% higher cost of living than Berlin, but the prices they list for things here are way too high. Assuming the numbers are high for Berlin too triple the salary with lower taxes easily beats the measly 40% cost of living increase. I'm sure engineers in Germany have a comfortable life, but the math doesn't work out in my favor.
As for lifestyles my friends and I almost never talk about work either as we very much want to leave work at work. I probably average 30 hours as do many of my friends so it's not like we're grinding. Just trying to do our time and leave.
Wife and I are moving to Frankfurt am Main next month from the USA. Hopefully it goes well for us.
I would love to, I even learned German (it was B1 at best, now it's worse), but I don't know if my field exists in Germany? I do habitat restoration and have skills with botany, ArcGIS, basic coding.
Seemed like y'all needed like, nurses and plumbers more than botanists 😔
Plenty of nature restoration and such. EU regulations make a lot of it obligated and subsidised. Labour shortage is general, also in your field, not enough staff in many fields (except maybe "influencer"). Specifically good GIS skills are highly valued in many government agencies, tho those offices are probably a lot harder to get into without being very fluent in german. So harder I guess than engineer or IT, but might not be impossible.
That's good to know! My biggest barrier to moving to Germany would probably just be the finances, I'm pretty good at picking up language and could study, but iirc, you need like $10-20k? USD to have in a frozen bank account.
Why is there such a labor shortage? Aren't there a fair number of migrants, and free/v inexpensive college education in Germany?
I don't know about savings requirements.
There are regional differences, some parts of western Europe have labour shortage ("fully employed" with like less than 4% not employed), some still have more unemployment. Some regions are more attractive (North Belgium, south-west Netherlands, south Germany...) because they have higher wages and in general higher QOL. The big labour migrant stream from Eastern Europe to the west has slowed down a lot compared to 15 years ago. Many are moving back east even, for example Romania offers a big financial reward to migrants moving back to Romania. And the baby boomers in Western Europe are pensioning and Germany is very far from being a digitised administration.
It's for sure not only unskilled Labour shortage as someone else comments, it's general, and definitely worth looking in to if you are interested in Germany. Wages are low compared to usa, but trains and health care are dirt cheap, that about sums it up. And in my opinion (I'm not german born): the post-ww2 guilt trip that continues to this day has made Germans some of the most kind, caring and overall friendly people in europe, but that's subjective I guess ;)
Shortage’s in low income jobs and a shitty housing/flat market are the root causes.
Inexpensive education for mostly foreign students.
Parts of Germany are very unfriendly to non white Christians that speak fluent German.
Some friends and family left to Germany, they all got better life economics wise. They found friends, had good jobs, etc... but then most of them left Germany.
They really like the public transport, functioning health system, food availability, access to nature and more.
But they all had constant encounters with neu-nazis. It didn't get to physical assault, they felt physically safe, but it did create highly hostile environments, either at work, the supermarket or the streets.
There are countries in the EU that will allow you to enjoy the same benefits without suffering harrasment by neu-nazis.
Sigh. Yeah that's sadly true but I can't Imagine there is any country without such shitheads.
But at least our civil society is fighting these pricks.
And yet, they all found better life in other countries. In my opinion, and it very much a not very educated opinion, the German shame about the shitier parts of society makes it harder for foreigners to understand the level of shityness in different regions of Germany before setting living there.
The general route of people that moved was find a jon from a far, move to the area of the job, handle 10 metric tons of paperwork, better their German just to understand more and more just how mistreated and undesirable they are.
Some chose to stay anyway, some left, tried their luck in a different place and encountered less shitiness and some came back.
Okay now you getting ridiculously Dramatic 😂
AfD
This is near the top of my list if I do emigrate. Hoping being a developer makes the process easier.
It's VERY TRUE, but no body will take that invitation, job ads in Germany DEMAND that you speak fluent German to work here. I mean you are not even considered if you you tell them you will start learning the language. This happened to 3, highly qualified , experienced colleges of mine plus with me so multiple cases. I know at least 2 cases , where People who are living in Germany are afraid to change jobs within DE because they been rejected due to lack of German language.
I agree one might need to local languages, but no talent from outside is coming pre learned German in droves. There will be change in this before Germany REALLY NEEDS people. Till then one must talk DE or work with junior/inexperienced person leading to inefficiencies ( see FOR EXAMPLE: DB and multiple of your companies)
Nah I’m non-white and support Palestine, so I’ll take my skilled labor to countries where I won’t be harassed by regular citizens and beaten by police for protesting.
Okay, thanks for sharing I guess? If you haven't noticed I'm neither the Police nor a politician so why are you telling me?😅
Just pointing out a reason why you might not see a vast influx of workers anytime soon, regardless of needs. Hope you’re well and sorry for being rude in how I expressed such.