What I’d advise if you asked me over coffee, instead of doomscrolling r/Germany_Jobs

First, close that Reddit tab.

I say this with love, and as someone who has spent a lot of time responding to ragebaiting, racist comments on posts by Indian students or job seekers there. Indian, 5 YOE, offer of 65k in Munich, is this good enough?. There is a worrying number of people on those subreddits who seem to be there specifically to be unpleasant about Indians, pass unhelpful, toxic comments and overall discourage the poster from every reaching the shores of Germany. Same for the Facebook groups, the LinkedIn DMs, the WhatsApp forwards. “I earn 40 lakhs, I have an offer of 70k EUR, does it make sense?” Nobody can answer that for you. The question is whether YOU want this life, and there are exactly 0 strangers on the internet who know anything about you.

Anyway. Here’s my experience, which is one data point, and I suggest you treat it as such.

How I actually got here

I moved five years ago on a work contract from a German company. I’d applied to a whole lot of jobs before that (but this was Covid era and so everyone was struggling, much like today). But I want to be clear that my job did not come out of my applications. My CV ended up on the desk of a friend who worked at a VC fund, where portfolio company CEOs drop by for coffee, and from there it got handed to the right person. So, as you can conclude, it was a heady mix of 80% luck, 19.5% network + a pinch of relevant skillset.

I think it’s worth stating this honestly, because the pretty version of this story (“I hustled and applied, interviewed, got an offer and then moved”) is the version people want to believe. It quietly makes everyone feel like a failure when 200 cold applications go nowhere. I was quite skeptical about the whole thing, to be honest. New country, new job, new everything, and I will not describe myself as particularly brave here. During this time (Covid time incidentally), I ended up working the first six months from India. Which meant my Probezeit (the six month probation, during which either side can end things on two weeks’ notice) was finished before I had set foot in the country. Although I did not plan this, it turned out to be a good thing because by the time I landed, I knew the company, its people, knew how they communicated, and whether I was any good at the job. If you can engineer any version of this, do it. A few months remote before relocating, a contract project with the team first, anything. It takes the whole aspect of “what if this is a disaster” out of the equation.

That was five years ago, though

And this is the part where I must be careful, because my story is now quite dated. The German market is obviously not great right now. It’s oversaturated, with IT especially, and a bunch of adjacent roles and industries with it. Hiring is slow, German is absolutely needed, and even then, jobs are far and few in between. Five years ago, you could plausibly plan to learn German after arriving, and I did exactly that. I don’t think that plan works anymore. There are simply enough qualified people already here who speak it, and if a hiring manager can pick between you and someone who does the same job in German, you can guess who they pick. There are some exceptions for niche skills that Germans aren’t supplying in sufficient numbers. If you’re specialized in something with a thin local talent pool, the language requirement can be relaxed.

So please, please do not take a loan for this

This is the one piece of advice here I’d give as an actual instruction rather than a thing to consider. Do not borrow money to come here on a job seeker visa in this market. Maybe in a good market but not in this one. Six months of German rent and living costs is a large sum of money, the clock is not on your side, and the thing you’re betting it on (a market that is currently rejecting people who are already here, already employed, already speaking the language) is a bad bet. If it doesn’t land, you go home with debt and without the job, and it’s not worth it. If you really want to be here, look for parallel routes instead. The one I’d point at first: freelance or contract for German companies from where you are. It converts more often than you’d expect. A master’s here is another route, if you can pay for it, though it comes with its own pros and cons. Internal transfers within a multinational are obviously an easy entry too.

The advice I’d collected, and still stand by

Before any of this worked out, I’d spoken to quite a few immigrants here about how you actually land a job in Germany from outside. Below is a summary of some tips and advice I’d received back then, which I think still holds true:

  1. Learn German. Yes, even when the job ad says English. (See above. This has only gotten truer.)
  2. Referrals over applications, always. A referred CV gets read by a human who has some reason to care.
  3. If you’re applying cold, you need to be interesting enough to be remembered. The best version I heard is, don’t just send a CV; send something that shows you’ve thought about the team’s actual problems. A short deck or document works: Here’s what I think your team (that you’re applying to) is struggling with, here’s how I’d approach it, here’s the relevant thing I’ve done before. Most people will not do this, which is why it could work.
  4. Message the recruiter separately to say you’ve applied.
  5. Always include a cover letter.
  6. Use the German CV format, and the German cover letter format.

None of this is groundbreaking but these are sanity checks to make sure you do it right.

Direct and honest will always win

You might have heard that German work culture is direct, usually phrased as “Germans are blunt”. The part that matters more for your job search is that honesty is assumed and being caught inflating your CV costs you far more here than in places where everybody inflates and everyone knows it. So don’t spruce up the CV by 1000x. Don’t own the thing you only ever contributed to. Write down the work you did and the results you actually got, in plain language, and it’s okay if it’s not as impressive.

The upside is that honest and specific beats vague and grand in this market. “I built X, it moved Y by Z, and here’s the part I got wrong” is a strong answer in a German interview.

Culture fit exists and is mostly outside your control

German companies do care about culture fit, and they will assess it, sometimes explicitly, sometimes just as a feeling in the room afterwards. It shows up as language, as mindset, as attitude, as how you handle disagreement, as whether you’d say “I don’t think that will work” to someone senior. (You should say it, albeit politely. Not saying it reads as either dishonest or spineless). Apart from the language, you can’t do very much about any of this. What you can do is know it’s being measured, so that when a rejection turns up with no reason attached, you know it’s not just your skills. Sometimes it’s fit (and sometimes, it’s a polite word for something worse). Either way it’s information about them, and not a verdict on you.

Please do not come here for the money

If pay is the main thing that you care about, this is the wrong continent. Salaries here are lower than in the US for the same role, often by a lot, and then there’s a tax and social contribution rate that will scare you. If you’re on a decent trajectory in India, or anywhere with a fast-growing market, your compensation growth there will very likely beat your growth here. What you get instead:

  • Work that stops at reasonable times. Good labor protection laws.
  • Getting to rest when you’re sick
  • Public transport, walkable cities, cycling infrastructure
  • Very good safety, for women in particular, compared to a lot of places I’ve lived in and travelled through
  • All of Europe a short flight or a train ride away, on 30 days of leave you’re expected to use.

That is in essence, a compromise. Ambition is present, but not to the degree you will see in the US. Even in terms of innovation and tech readiness, Europe is definitely behind the US.

Everything above is about getting here. But there’s also things to consider for a life once you’ve landed here. It can get lonely. I want to say that plainly, because it’s the thing I see people least prepared for, and the thing sends a lot of people home. The social fabric here works differently. Friendships form slowly and they form deep, which is lovely once you’re inside one and quietly brutal for the first couple of years while you’re not. Nobody is being intentionally cold but most adults here have had the same friends since school or university, those groups are full, and the casual “let’s go for this house party” energy that fills your twenties in India is not the norm. Workplace friendship is also not usual here. Colleagues are warm, they’re professional, they’ll help you, and then at 5pm they go home to their life. I got lucky again, honestly. I landed in an international company with a lot of people my age, several of them also new to the country, and that’s where my first real friendships here came from. That’s not typical and I know it. So, the rest of it I had to actually go and do: expat groups, hobby groups, meet ups, the works. But it is effort. Making friends as an adult in a new country is a project and often, the language shows up here too.

So, should you come?

I don’t know. Truly. (Unhelpful, I realize, after all these words.)

I would ask myself some questions, if I were you. Do you want this life, or the idea of it? Are you okay with being a foreigner for a long time, possibly permanently, with an accent and a widening gap between you and everyone else’s childhood references? Can you tolerate bureaucracy that will make you fill in a form, by hand, in German, in order to be allowed to fill in the next form? Will you learn the language, actually learn it, not as a resolution but as a thing you do on Tuesday evenings for three years? Are you fine earning less in order to live differently? And are you willing to build a social life from zero?

If most of the answers are yes, it’s worth doing. Either way, stop asking Reddit. Good luck!