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.

goo.gl/uPLVMy

https://www.eu-startups.com/tag/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.

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.

>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.

Let me compare with my "list" over nearly 5 years working here:

1. `Extremely` is an overstatement but yes.

2. Yep.

3. Yep, very common. Big egos everywhere.

4. Not really, never experienced myself.

5. That's hit and miss.

6. Yep, super common.

Throw enormous tax burden on top of that (you don't really see your taxes working for you in this city).

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.

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).

"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.

To cut a long story short: we agree. ;-)

I worked for a German startup, whenever i asked for a raise they threatened to import labor from Romania or Poland to replace me.

Oh...I was thinking of trying out my luck in Berlin...

I would wait next spring European election before deciding to move to Germany .... my friends

That's the way it is in all European countries.