Same here in Berlin, I got an offer with 75k p.a. as Sr. DS.
I mean one could cite the living costs, but then one also has to compare the different taxation / social welfare models. $350k+/year sounds huge, I would actually switch to Google for that amount (ofc. knowing what a senior/lead role encompasses).
I think course materials should be there forever, sometimes being improved in some places, and discussion/reviews should be there forever as well.
So like a forum about a specific topic with learning materials available at all times. No deadlines, just people collaborating to improve each other's knowledge.
Here in Germany most women prefer career paths that are paid worse than IT modulo medicine. Also, IT is not considered low-class, maybe because there are many academics in IT.
In the US it's considered low status because it's considered to have questionable long-term value, due to potential future outsourcing.
He's absolutely right. In the US, software development has always, until perhaps very recently, been considered a very low status career and with low long-term potential. That is, versus one of the classic engineering or medical jobs. By the way, in the US, IT generally means support desk job, which is seen as the lowest of the low. Only very recently has the median software development job approached anywhere near a medical specialist or the classic engineering job, and it's still far below the wage of many US doctors.
I'd say that the US general public is still expecting the imminent outsourcing of all software development, to foreigners making $2/hour somewhere far away, to occur soon. People in the field don't expect this, but that's how outsiders perceive it.
This low-status is a huge contributor to what keeps most US women from pursuing software development as a career, according to women I've talked to. It really is that simple and obvious.
This is also why there's a trend of US software developers prominently adding "scientist" or "engineer" to their job titles. Pure software development still has a low status stigma.
Interesting perspective, I would have expected the image of software professionals in the US to be way better due to companies such as Google or Apple.
In terms of long-term potential medicine specialists are better off here, but it is not as extreme as in NA. If you are a top-tier IT freelancer, then you can easily compete with them.
1500€/month after taxes sounds very low. That is like 27k yearly before taxes (Steuerklasse 1 / no church taxes). Eastern europeans get paid that, because you can lowball them so easily. But as far as I know 40k is a lower bound for cs graduates.
For reference I got 56.5k/year base salary at my first job after graduation (small company) and that were 2770€/month after taxes. I even have two friends that earn more than I do. Quit that one after half a year though (russian offshore programmers communication hell).
Your rent/food prices are correct though. Small hack: your employer can pay you 44€/month tax-free for the public transport ticket (geldwerter Vorteil Freibetrag).
Being Berlin based I am really curious on how tough the interviews are gonna be.
The interviews I have had here were not challenging at all. The technical problems did not even reach the difficulty of qualification round problems in Google's Code Jam.
"Slave mentality" is a term I often use as well.