Comment by fusslo
10 hours ago
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
China seems to be good at all of the above.
China is good at all the above and subsidizes all of the above.
Engineering salaries in the EU are far lower than in the US though.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
Based on what data? A quick google search says the average automation engineer in Germany makes 90k euro to $107k in the US.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
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Median automation engineer in Germany made 78 840 € in 2025, according to government statistics
https://web.arbeitsagentur.de/entgeltatlas/beruf/59351
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The German value seems very suspect. Glassdoor, for the same job role, says €53,000 to €80,000 per year which is probably lower than the truth (Glassdoor overweighs junior roles) but looks much more realistic to me.
It’s really not a disputed fact at all that engineering jobs in the US pay more than in Europe, but that European jobs have more benefits such as vacation and social security, and US generally has higher cost of living.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
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The vacation time is genuinely better, yeah.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
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Former member of the Senior Management for a huge global bank operating in Germany.
1. These averages are an average. Rarely are they paid. I don't know where these numbers are from but the these numbers are for top earners in good paying industries.
There are junior, normal and senior devs, sometimes above is a lead dev. Business maybe has 2-3 leads that govern a head count of dozens, and many working off-shore.
It is called blended average. People who rank in 107k are paid including bonuses. And rarely make any further wage jumps. The dev who is paid 200k fixed in Germany is a myth, not even close to 120k.
Germany hates IT and devs. Business comes first, and anything and everything regarding IT is considered a cost factor, a necessary burden.
2. Freelancers
Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions. So a day rate of 800-1000EUR per month is a pay off and freelancers have to take care of the taxes etc.
Companies on the other hand can deduct those "investments" and roughly pay half the price in the end. So, this is the problem with employment: you are a cost factor and you are a liability from the beginning due to worker rights etc.
Germany punishes workers as well as freelancers. But I could not raise payment as I saw fit. Germany means yearly total times 1,25 = total cost for a company ("employers' part of the tax" as sugar coating for taxes above 60%).
100 workers with a yearly raise of 2-5% in payments amount exponentially and are a risk factor especially considering the fact that productivity rarely increases as well as value to the company on average. So ever increased payments over a span of 10-20 years.
That is the problem with the system: socialism favors keeping you poor. Don't steal people and companies their hard earned money, lower taxes, allow for higher payments at will not by "number comparison and increase to all" and let companies workers decide where they spend their bucks.
3. Conclusion You might wonder how much the guys really perceive on their bank account in the end. It may be lower than you think. Rule of fist: if you do not immediately make the switch to stay in the US you have lots of cuts along the way: company share, taxes.
Before I went to Senior Management I was totally on your page. Now knowing both sides I see the matrix so to say. I am still on your side however business doesn't benefit from all the taxes.
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Maybe the engineer makes 90K, but there are still thousands in social contributions. Can be up to 15K.
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My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
Globe-trotting contractors are probably well-paid specialists. GP is probably not commenting on the German labor market.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
German engineering salaries are definitely not cheaper. If you want cheaper then hire people from Poland, Romania or even Spain, Portugal.
They were probably thinking of German *software* engineer salaries which are noticably lower than the USA.
They make less money as salary but aren't cheaper overall when you take into account all the other expenses and regulations.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „killed themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group of them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's a boom because other so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
OP made clear they were talking about automation engineers, not test or design jobs.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
> I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
A tell-tale sign that you're touching the third rail.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
Invest in proper education first. The USA has been dropping the ball consistently over the last decades.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
The US on a PPP-adjusted per capita basis is on the upper end of OECD but 1) not the top in the world, and 2) not even uniquely high among what Americans would call their "peer countries" (Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc)
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
I think we spend about half of state budgets on education actually.
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
This just shows you how evil and greedy companies such as Amazon are.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
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More like in turkey amirite lol