The problem is not a lack of funds. The problem is bureaucracy and a lack of startup infrastructure. My feeling is that the people in charge have absolutely no effing clue about how to most efficiently deploy this money so they will do what sounds good on paper but will have 0 effect in reality.
If it goes how it usually goes the largest part of this money will likely to to universities and other research institutions where it will be spent financing open-ended research projects that, in virtually all cases, go exactly nowhere, due to lack of proper incentives to produce something that works.
The rest of the money will be "up for grabs" by companies who have perfected the crafts and arts of getting grant money from the German or EU government. The bureaucratic hurdles and time frames are typically way too large for most capital constrained nimble startups who need to move fast. So it's mostly established and/or zombie companies that take advantage of this.
Sorry but why Berlin? Munich has several very successful startups and excellent engineering community with serious investors and companies who can be either clients or potential purchasers of these startups. Why do you chose Berlin as a representative of German startup scene? I know they had some success but there is so much more in Germany.
As this thread is (mostly) about investments in AI, which in the German startup scene has been happening more in Berlin than in Munich AFAIK, it's not a understandable choice. Also as Munichs startup scene is younger, there have been less exits, so "success" is something the jury is still out on.
Munich is generally not as open to foreigners as Berlin. Even more foreigners are in Frankfurt, but most hate living there, despite getting a funding is much easier than in Berlin/Munich - it's fun to see ICOs popping up there 1 year after they were relevant, so if you follow US trends, you can apply them without much effort over there a year later and be celebrated for copying some already well-known idea.
I guess that would be survivorship bias? There are at least twice as many people living and "everyone here hates Munich and doesn't want to live there". I even know someone who works in Munich, but lives in Berlin. Jedem das seine ;)
I disagree. The companies in my network (anecdotal evidence) are full with international people. In our office we have nationals from 13 countries. This is the most diverse environment that I have ever seen (including San Francisco). There are some companies however who are hiring strictly Germans, just like with anything else the market will correct these mistakes. This is not the norm but the exception though. I am not sure what you are talking about when saying it is not as open. Renting an apartment is the most difficult part of moving to Munich. It is really bad. There are scammers, people do not want to deal with you if you don't speak German, etc, but this the downside. Getting registered, sorting out bank accounts, internet, mobile phone, socialising and any other aspect of being an ex-pat in Munich is average. The housing situation is the the result of supply and demand imbalance. I have had similar experience in San Francisco when people do not even reply to my email when I was using my Central European name but they were more than happy to reply to Steve. There are several options to mitigate that, you can just move to a smaller town around Munich the train connection is pretty good. Were you referring to the housing situation?
> The companies in my network (anecdotal evidence) are full with international people. In our office we have nationals from 13 countries. This is the most diverse environment that I have ever seen (including San Francisco)
I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but it's important enough that I need to: country of origin is a completely meaningless way to measure diversity. Especially in Europe, where most countries are comparable to the size of individual states in the US and are relatively racially homogeneous, national origin doesn't measure anything meaningful.
The problem with Munich is that, like Bavaria as a whole[0], it is incredibly racist. Specifically, if you look Muslim, Arab, or Middle Eastern, you're in for a really rough time. This shouldn't be too surprising if you look at recent trends in German politics, and specifically in Bavarian politics.
I wouldn't hold Berlin up as a gold standard here by any means, but it's far better than either Frankfurt or Munich in this regard.
[0] less so than the rest of Bavaria, but more so than any other comparable city in Germany
>Especially in Europe, where most countries are comparable to the size of individual states in the US
I understand what you are saying, but having travelled around the US, mostly for business but some for pleasure, there are remarkable and under-appreciated differences among the states. I would go so far as to say that my state, Washington, and its neighboring Canadian province of British Columbia, have more in common culturally, socially, and economically than say, Washington state and Florida. Within Germany itself, which is approximately the size of Oregon, I found that there are also significant religious, cultural, and linguistic differences even still today. So I'm not sure that we can easily discard the differences that come from borders or geography, even within a small area.
Silly case in point - it's been a few years, but you go to Frankfurt and ask for an alt beer, you get served. You ask for an alt beer in Munich, you get funny looks.
People will hate you if you ask for an Alt Bier in Munich...
Seriously, though. I think you make a very strong point, which I’d like to call “resolution effect”. If you look at that something like the US from far away things look petty similar. However, once you zoom in patches appear and suddenly homogenity is replaced by heterogeneity. People tend to forget that easily. Conversely, I never felt more European than during my two years in the States
> Silly case in point - it's been a few years, but you go to Frankfurt and ask for an alt beer, you get served. You ask for an alt beer in Munich, you get funny looks.
If this is what you think is remotely relevant in a conversation about a "diverse environment", I'm not sure what more can be said.
> Case in point the old joke about the biggest divide between Israelis and Palestinians being the way they pronounce “hummus.”
Yeah, so... that's a really offensive thing to say.
I know you don't live there, but if you're trying to prove that Munich is both ethnically diverse and not a place where Arab and Muslim people experience significant racism (which are two separate points), you really could not be hurting your own case any more.
Look, my own experiences are that Bavaria is like the American South - politically conservative, racist, xenophobic. Even as a white, straight, German-speaking male I have had some scary experiences there. By your commentary, I gather perhaps you have perhaps been a target of racism, which is of course incredibly disappointing. The rise of right-wing, xenophobic groups with the obvious history of 20th century Germany is shocking.
That said, none of my previous comments above were commentary on Munich. If you'd read carefully, my original statement was that there can be remarkable diversity even in a small geographic area, where I attempted to give examples of diversity than extend beyond race. The world is a richer place when we have a mix of gender, religion, language, culture, politics, and thought, and yes too, the wonderful spectrum of skin tones, eye color, hair, etc.
I also pointed out that lumping the United States together is a common fallacy. Case in point - you live in New York, I live on the West coast, and these two areas have very different cultural practices in the large, before we start talking about sub-cultures. I'd tell a great joke about the difference between the west coast and east coast, but you'd likely find reason to take offense at it as well, which ironically is the gist of the joke.
My quote about hummus came from a documentary on the history of the middle east conflict, where I have also heard similar statements made by Israelis I have known personally. One of the wonderful things about diversity is that for open minded people, we can seek areas of common ground in our diversity, and frankly food has been a way to break down barriers between people, for like, centuries perhaps millennia.
So hey, you want to take offense because you like being offended, enjoy.
Totally, people from Romania are the same that people from Netherlands. Only minor differences like history, culture, language, life expectancy, religion, etc. are different. :)
Btw. I did not say that all 13 nationals are from Europe, in fact they are from: India, Pakistan, Algeria, South Africa, Australia and United States. They did not have a rough time to come to Munich and they love it here, have kids, speak German and integrated into the society more than I am (I am from Europe). I am not sure how they managed to dodge the racist Bavarians.
Great anecdotal experience. Now have a look at the wikipedia facts:
In July 2017, Munich had 1.42 million inhabitants; 421,832 foreign nationals resided in the city as of 31.12.2017 with 50.7% of these residents being citizens of EU member states, and 25.2% citizens in European states not in the EU (including Russia and Turkey).[16] The largest groups of foreign nationals were Turks (39,204), Croats (33,177), Italians (27,340), Greeks (27,117), Poles (27,945), Austrians (21,944), and Romanians (18,085).
The largest foreign resident groups by 31.12.2017[17]
I'm not sure what you think you're trying to prove with those numbers. Aside from the fact that nationality and race are not the same thing and cannot be conflated in this context, those numbers don't mean anything.
40% of people from Mississippi are black. That doesn't mean that they don't face serious racism in Mississippi, from everyday life to their own elected officials.
The amount of immigrants in any environment is a great indication if people are racist or not.
Blacks are not immigrants in Mississippi, they did not need to make a decision to move to a new country. If Bavarians are so racist how come we have so many immigrants in Munich?
> The amount of immigrants in any environment is a great indication if people are racist or not.
No, it's not at all. There are plenty of highly racist and toxic places where people still immigrate despite the racism, for other reasons. That doesn't negate the racism.
> If Bavarians are so racist how come we have so many immigrants in Munich?
"If Bavarians are so racist against Arabs and so Islamophobic, why are there so many Turks, Croatians, Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Romanians in Munich?"
Don't know about the rest of the points, but I looked into several job opportunities at Berlin, and was shocked by how low their offered salaries were. That was the end of my interest in looking for jobs at Berlin...
I live in Denmark currently, and can attest that to some extent, salaries cannot be compared because of different social structures & expenses. Getting paid 50% of what I used to make in the US did not mean standard of living went to 50%. But, for a comp.engineer, US wins out by a huge margin in terms of money.
Well, I was saying 50% referring to my current pay in Denmark, not that of Germany. In Germany, I was offered lower than in Denmark, which would have been, like you said - 30 ish %.
UK and Germany are also the countries with highest salaries if you don't count Scandinavia. Try to go to Poland or Czechia thats german border countries where the salaries are even much lower.
Then again salaries in europe just work in very different way.
You mean London and Switzerland. Excepting London, the UK on average is even more low wage than Germany, to reuse your expression. But London, just like Switzerland has an impossible property market if you want o buy something no matter how well you're paid.
Sure, salaries in Berlin are smaller then in the Scandinavian capitals but let's talk about the cost of living. Isn't beer like 8 euros in CPH vs 2-4 in BER? I'm not even going to open the real estate can of worms.
That sounds like a degenerate organisation. But if we're sharing anecdata: My pay in this Berlin startup is very decent, I have respectable equity and it's a friendly & rational environment. I'm scared of US startup work culture, rather.
I remember one Deep Learning startup in Berlin ran by ex-Googlers that was offering 85k salary, minuscule equity, and expected a Stanford top-graduate with interview that had to demonstrate complete mastery of all Stanford Deep Learning courses and probabilistic graphical models... I hope it's not your employer, you are likely undervaluing yourself 10x otherwise.
For a graduate that would be a huge salary in germany. Most engineers with 10years of experience won't receive that. Therefore having high expectations around those candidates seems right.
(That still does't mean I find the salary situation for engineers great in germany. Just that it seems to fit into the general scheme)
You probably need to factor healthcare, rent etc for a fair comparison to, say, the Bay area -- 85k affords a nice upper-upper middle class lifestyle (it scratches the 99th gross income percentile in germany). So 10x sounds like a stretch. What profile would you suggest someone who takes 200-800k € might have? (Tangentially, out of curiosity: Are you in a position to share what the ex-googlers worked on?)
>expects constant overtime and 24/7 employee reachability
Doesn't that conflict with German labor law?
Edit: Definitely agree about credentialism ("people that are better than anyone else"). Germany takes that to the extreme. Career change in your 30s? Not possible.
I actually changed careers three times in my 30s. No issues whatsoever.
Sounds like the proverbial Germans downtalking Germany And all the Germans agreeing.
Then again, why would a society change for the better if there would not be all the internet and Stammtisch complaining and moaning about all that could be better?
As a foreigner living in Germany, this was one of the first things that I noticed and was a bit of a culture shock.
Germans love to complain and seem to think that this is how you improve things. I believe there's some truth to that, and it seems to work for them, but it can cause chronic dissatisfaction and can cause intercultural issues when living or traveling abroad (where people aren't used to fielding so many complaints about poor service).
Officially there are regulations about maximum working times of 10 hours/day. That however doesn't prevent expectations from being higher. It however prevents tracking on the employer side for a higher amount of hours.
Unpaid overtime definitely conflicts with labour law. There is also a maximum amount of hours you are technically allowed to work on a day, which is ten. Sixty hours also is the absolute weekly maximum with 48 hours being the regular maximum.
However, if you do not report these hours no one will ever know.
If you receive a salary, you don't get paid by the hour. If your contract says you don't have a right for compensation (monetary or otherwise) for extra hours, then you don't. Negotiating such terms is up to the employee (or the unions).
> There is also a maximum amount of hours you are technically allowed to work on a day, which is ten.
That's a different thing from not being paid for hours you work extra.
I think this is a good summary of the law in practice. Any overtime has to be compensated by the employer. Obviously, there are ways people work around it if the employee is fine with it...
However, if you go to court about unpaid overtime you are sure to win. This has obviously implications on your hireability though. On paper you are protected.
Drug trade is a common practice yet it is illegal. My employers would not risk to be caught and punished for unpaid overtime or more than 10 hours / day work on average. It was explicitly told us that we cannot work more than 8 hours on average and everybody is pretty serious about that. Not sure what industry or what companies are you talking about and referring to it as common practice.
> Use German resources if you want to learn about Germany.
This is an English speaking forum. Unless you have evidence that the English resources contradict the german ones, calling me out on this is pointless.
> Tldr; employees and employers have to make sure that no-one oversteps the 10 hour maximum.
That's not the point. The point is do you have a right to get compensated for extra hours. Let's say you're hired for 36hrs/week but the reality is closer to 40. The contract says you're not entitled to compensation for overtime. As far as the law is concerned, I see no problem here whatsoever.
You can include clauses that allow limited unpaid overtime, for example "36 hours per week and up to 16 hours of unpaid overtime per month", but then, as an employee, you should treat that as a 40 hours contract. Unpaid overtime cannot be agreed upon retroactively, it must be in the initial contract. Unlimited overtime is not permissible except for people in certain positions (Managing Directors or other people with full control over their time are generally exempt from that, people with sufficiently high compensation might be [the usual threshold is the Beitragsbemessungsgrenze der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung which increases yearly and is currently at about 80k EUR/year])
However, the legal situation differs from the situation on the ground. Companies still offer contracts with invalid and unenforceable rules and employees are still afraid to sue, even though you can sue for unpaid overtime after you leave.
If you actually look at the court case, the guy won because the contract was unclear on its terms, not because such terms are inadmissable in general. That's why the lower court didn't decide in his favor. The decision doesn't generalize across all contracts.
> You can include clauses that allow limited unpaid overtime, for example "36 hours per week and up to 16 hours of unpaid overtime per month", but then, as an employee, you should treat that as a 40 hours contract.
That's besides the point. The question is, is that paid overtime? If you ask me, it isn't because any extra hour worked doesn't translate into extra money.
> Unpaid overtime cannot be agreed upon retroactively, it must be in the initial contract.
It didn't claim otherwise, I explicitly said it has to be in the contract and from what I read in other places, it seems commonplace.
> If you actually look at the court case, the guy won because the contract was unclear on its terms, not because such terms are inadmissable in general.
They are. Quote from the courts press release:
> Der vertragliche Ausschluss jeder zusätzlichen Vergütung von Mehrarbeit war wegen Intransparenz nach § 307 Abs. 1 Satz 2 BGB unwirksam.
The court ruled that the terms are unclear because it is not known to the employee how many hours he might have to work for his wage. A clause stipulating unlimited unoaid overtime can never fulfill that requirement. Thus unlimited overtime is inadmissible in the general case, except for the cases I listed previously.
The relevant quote from the ruling (which is linked from the courts press release) is:
"a) Die Parteien haben zwar in Tz. 4.4. des Arbeitsvertrags bestimmt, dass der Kläger für Über- und Mehrarbeit keine gesonderte Vergütung erhalte. Diese Regelung ist jedoch nach § 307 Abs. 1 Satz 1 BGB unwirksam, weil sie nicht klar und verständlich ist, § 307 Abs. 1 Satz 2 BGB."
and
"Eine die pauschale Vergütung von Überstunden regelnde Klausel ist nur dann klar und verständlich, wenn sich aus dem Arbeitsvertrag selbst ergibt, welche Arbeitsleistungen in welchem zeitlichen Umfang von ihr erfasst werden sollen. Der Arbeitnehmer muss bereits bei Vertragsschluss erkennen können, was gegebenenfalls „auf ihn zukommt“ und welche Leistung er für die vereinbarte Vergütung maximal erbringen muss (BAG 1. September 2010 - 5 AZR 517/09 - Rn. 15 mwN, BAGE 135, 250; 17. August 2011 - 5 AZR 406/10 - Rn. 14 mwN, EzA BGB 2002 § 612 Nr. 10)."
> > You can include clauses that allow limited unpaid overtime, for example "36 hours per week and up to 16 hours of unpaid overtime per month", but then, as an employee, you should treat that as a 40 hours contract.
> That's besides the point. The question is, is that paid overtime? If you ask me, it isn't because any extra hour worked doesn't translate into extra money.
That's why I said "if your contract stipulates unpaid overtime, treat is as part of your regular work time." If you get to work less, fine, but assume you have to work the maximum time stipulated in the contract. (weekly time plus max overtime)
> from what I read in other places, it seems commonplace.
I'd not call it commonplace, but in some areas it's not uncommon. It's still inadmissible in most cases, but as I said before, people don't sue so companies don't learn their lesson.
I don't understand what you're disagreeing with exactly. I say "unpaid overtime" appears to be legal. I didn't say "unlimited unpaid overtime".
From everything you quoted, "unpaid overtime" is legal as long as it's clearly transparent from the contract and it's within other laws restricting the amount of hours total. Unpaid overtime is statistically common as per the other sources I linked to.
Obviously, if unpaid overtime clauses were clearly and entirely illegal, the lowest court would've immediately ruled in favor of the plaintiff, not against him.
> (you don't really see your taxes working for you in this city).
Or the tax-paid are even actively slowing down your work and success due to difficulties and mental barriers about understanding technology and its culture, ref. #GoogleCampus.
OK, so let's talk about what we, a Berlin startup that I co-founded, do offer:
- fair salaries for the experience and attitude
- no equity, because we believe that a fair salary is better than a lottery equity
- we don't expect people to work overtime and value work-life balance a lot
- we say thank you A LOT
- we hire people who are the best fit for the job
And since we're talking about this: we're hiring a software engineer in Berlin. We are a podcast hosting company, are profitable, have +1k paying customers, some really high-profile. Ruby on Rails, Angular, VueJS, Go, Nodejs, AWS, Heroku. Office in Kreuzberg, 60-65k €. Both founders are software engineers themselves and value solid, healthy codebases. Let's talk if you're interested.
Thanks for including the actual salary. It annoys me when companies say “extremely competitive compensation” but then you realize it’s like 50k (in London).
In my experience, not including the salary is a sign of weakness of a company. Why would you not include it, if it wasn't that you're afraid your salary is not fair? Or is it that people at your company would want to get a raise (they probably deserve) if they saw what you're willing to pay?
In any case: I'm huge fan of transparent job postings and believe that they are a net positive for both sides.
I think most commonly it’s just a game, they don’t want to be the first to say a number because that sets a minimum salary, otherwise they might get someone clueless who’d be willing to take the job for less.. Unfortunately that’s like 99% of the companies!
While that's a accurate generalization of Berlin startups, from what I can tell it's pretty much the same for startups anywhere (maybe with the exception of salary in contrast to SF, but the cost of living is absurd in comparision).
It's different if you have a shot at being rich in the Bay Area via a successful exit as an early employee, or if you, as in case of Berlin, get a laughable equity and instead are motivated by the "coolness" of startups and Berlin being a city for "hipsters", trading your peak effort/prime years for literally nothing. Of course, start up is a lottery in SF as well, but the potential wins are orders of magnitude higher than e.g. an amount of one-time mid-tier car purchase like it is with German startups.
I value equity at 0, so that's why might be seeing them as not that different.
If you are a bit of a startup veteran you can also make good bank at German startups, probably even more so if you come from SF. There are sadly (but also understandably) few software engineers that stay in the startup ecosystem for long, and those that do can be quite valued. That combined with the low cost of living, actually makes it very realistic to build up some wealth and achieve financial independence, no startup equity lottery needed. From everything I read on HN, that looks very different in SF.
In the Bay Area you now pay $3k/month for a room with 2 roommates ;-) Similar situation is going on around Seattle and Boston/Cambridge as well, though it's not as bad yet. Of course, more distant locations have lower rents, but one also wastes too much time by commuting.
"is run by people that are "better than anybody else" -> This is the same experience I made. A lot of founders in Berlin are narcissistic life artists with zero execution skills. They're good at producing pitch decks while having fancy Coffee Chai Latte at a hipster cafe in Berlin Mitte. In between making unmistakable phone calls so everyone would know after a minute that he/she calls him/herself CTO, CEO, CSO, COO or whatever and him/her is working on the next big thing of course. And it's all about global domination.
So you got fooled. It is a free market, supply and demand. If you are outstanding you can earn more. If you are mediocre you can be more easily replaced. I would quit on the spot if any company would threat me like that. I would just tell them "Please do" and walk out from meeting, getting back to my computer to print out my resignation.
You still can. Biggest marker to avoid those problems is to avoid first-time founders. While repeat founders are quite rare in Berlin, most of their startups are compareatively healthy from what I've seen.
> The bureaucratic hurdles and time frames are typically way too large for most capital constrained nimble startups who need to move fast.
Nailed it. Canada has wasted hundreds of millions investing in "startups" and it all ends up going to ex-corporate suits from some megacorp (IBM, Blackberry/RIM, etc, or even non-tech etc) who know how to game the system. That and wasted on over priced real estate projects like MARs in Toronto.
If it goes how it usually goes the largest part of this money will likely to to universities and other research institutions where it will be spent financing open-ended research projects that, in virtually all cases, go exactly nowhere, due to lack of proper incentives to produce something that works.
The rest of the money will be "up for grabs" by companies who have perfected the crafts and arts of getting grant money from the German or EU government. The bureaucratic hurdles and time frames are typically way too large for most capital constrained nimble startups who need to move fast. So it's mostly established and/or zombie companies that take advantage of this.