how do top earners in Germany compare?
Issue #173 (10 Nov) - coworking idea; fines up, Deutschlandticket stays; supermarket alternatives; Dwarkesh and Andrej rock it.
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Programming note #173: I’d like to get out of the house more and meet some of you, so I am collecting interest for occasional or regular Handpicked coworking sessions. You can show interest here.
Do check out our sponsor, Mailbutler, they are a bootstrapped team from Berlin that can help you improve the way you manage your inbox. You get 33% off forever!
The email subject in Snippet #6.
🌟 Handpicked community
Meet — 5 handpicked events:
Leadership Unplugged #11 (The Psychology of AI Transformation) | Wed, 12/11 19:30 | Online (Google Meet)
Loosh recovery walk | Kreuzberg - Neukölln | Thu, 13/11 08:20 | LAP Coffee
Building AI SDR voice agents | Thu, 13/11 09:00 | Location after registration
How to launch new products in weeks with Lufthansa Innovation Hub | Thu, 20/11 17:00 | CIC Berlin
Founders & Friends Berlin Meetup - End of Year Party use HANDPICKED15 for a discount | Wed, 26/11 18:30 | Avomind office
Build & Lead – Security as a Team Sport | Thu, 27/11 18:00 | Near Alexanderplatz
This could be your event! Advertise it.
Show cool stuff or Ask for something:
Have you gone through a recent layoff (or fearing one)? Exitwise Berlin is sponsoring a free workshop to give you the emotional, practical and bureaucratic tools to process this news and bounce back quicker. Contact Lilyana for more info.
You can join FR8 and work on crazy ideas (in Espoo, Finland). They are starting a new cohort.
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Something interesting to share? Go for it.
👀 Handpicked jobs
5️⃣ 3️⃣ job highlights of the week
The remaining jobs are on the Handpicked job board. This week’s focus was HR & Recruitment.
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☕️ Coffee Talk with Daniel Meisen
Daniel is one of the ur-Berliners in the Handpicked community. He is a serial tinkerer and entrepreneur; his last company was an early player in cloud infrastructure consulting. This is what he prepared for you:
Food Technique Berlin - After spending a few months in Japan after university, I grew to love authentic Japanese food - something hard to find in Berlin, especially during the pandemic. That’s when I found Christopher Selig, who runs a ghost kitchen out of his apartment and serves some of the best ramen in the city. Every so often, he also organises ramen pop-ups, flying in top chefs from Japan. Follow him on Instagram or via his newsletter!
Kleine Kreuzberggeschichte - Born in Berlin but not from Kreuzberg, I moved here 20 years ago. Kreuzberg captures everything I love (and sometimes hate) about the city. We also founded our company here, because it was where we all lived. To share its spirit, we always gifted a book by Martin Düspohl, father of my dear friend Jonna and former FHXB director, chronicling 300 years of Kreuzberg’s history. A great and insightful read!
C/O Berlin - C/O Berlin is a hub for photography and visual culture, showcasing world-class and emerging artists in the iconic Amerika Haus, with talks, tours, and a welcoming creative community. I’ve loved it since its early Postfuhramt days nearly 25 years ago. Pro tip: Become a Friend of C/O to enjoy exclusive previews and curator tours that Sybille and her team put an incredible amount of care and passion into.
🗞 Snippets
Berlin & Germany, career & timeless
If you are up for coworking with the Handpicked community, put yourself on this list. We might start something if there is enough interest. I am also looking for someone to help with organisation (you can volunteer via the form).
Berlin is dirty, and we know it. I am in favour of new fines which are finally coming to force. Cigarette butts: up to €250 (previously €55), old electronics and bulky waste: €1k-€15k. Stores larger than 80m2 will also need to offer reusable cups. Cigarette butts fines are the easiest to enforce by Ordnungsamt, so watch out. But I trust the smokers reading this newsletter weren't throwing their butts around anyway.
Deutschlandticket stays! Bundestag extended the financing through 2030 with €1.5B from the federal and state governments each. But the price will rise from €58 to €63 in January 2026.
Berlin’s immigration office (LEA), with its 846 employees, is the largest in Germany. They grew from 533 in 2021 and say they will consult around 545k (!) people by the end of 2025. Still, they are severely overloaded, causing months-long delays in appointment scheduling, which is particularly affecting students and skilled workers at semester starts. Proposed solutions? LEA director says more hiring isn't feasible and calls for federal bureaucracy cuts—like extending work permits from 2 to 4 years and eliminating approval requirements when skilled workers change employers. Sounds doable to me.
11 alternatives to regular supermarkets in Berlin. In addition, we checked out a new spot with Nathan on our regular Dinner Club meeting, and I can recommend Bolle Pizza (we had sandwiches and they were slightly pricey, but very good).
People often whine about Germany and ze Germans, but did you know that top earners here are among the highest earners in the world? I couldn’t find the original article, so we are unfortunately left with this image and a thread. Each of the countries above Germany has its own problems, and I think we got a pretty good deal here.
Full thread on Reddit. Career: How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don’t want to do, for example, going for a 12km run on a rainy day in Berlin, which was oddly specific, but you get my point. A good read with techniques on how to trick yourself into finally reading good ol' books daily for an hour and a half. You get my point.
Career: Who is hiring threads on Hacker News are hard to read. This is a cool tool, filtered for Berlin. It’s mostly technical roles, but extremely useful, because you will often be able to directly message the hiring manager.
Career: The analysis is noisy and cannot be totally attributed to the AI, but it’s interesting to see how the job market is moving based on the analysis of 180M of job postings.
Timeless: I am not into podcasts, but when I put something on, I want it to be memorable. This Dwarkesh episode with Andrej Karpathy was absolutely great. Karpathy is a great educator, and I do enjoy his content. If you have at least a bit of interest in tech and AI, it’s a must-listen. They are very geeky in the beginning, but it smoothens out. I can’t believe I listened to it at 1x speed.
Stats: Just before Corona, in 2019, 35.6M passengers used Schönefeld and Tegel airports. In 2024, BER managed only 25.5M.
Most of the ad slots for 2025 are sold out.
Approach me ASAP to put your brand in front of thousands of people; we are ready to book early 2026. Now also on TikTok.
Berlin-related headlines
New subway trains for U5 through U9 coming sooner (read)
Heimstaden backs down in hundreds of disputes over excessive rents (read)
Rent increase to €12,000: Chinese restaurant "Da Jia Le" in Schöneberg faces closure (read) - It’s great, go before they need to move.
Worst monthly figure on record: Every second Deutsche Bahn long-distance train was late in October (read)
Economy Minister Katherina Reiche confirms: Industrial electricity price subsidy to launch early next year (read)
Briefly on business, tech and economy
Bad news: 36% of German companies plan layoffs in 2026, only 18% will create jobs. Manufacturing outlook is bleakest: 41% plan cuts, only one in seven will hire. (IW, n=2000)
Tesla again posted a steep slump in sales in Europe (up to -88.7% in Sweden). The only exception was France (+2.4%).
After a six-month labour dispute, TikTok moderators (150) in Berlin will lose their jobs with a €17k base severance.
JP Morgan will need to pay €45M fine for systematically breaching AML requirements in 21/22.
Payrails (Berlin, fintech) is opening an office in Ireland.
Google will announce its biggest ever investment in Germany tomorrow, with different projects in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin.
Deutsche Telekom and Nvidia are investing €1B in a new AI data center in Munich to provide secure AI services to the German industry.
DeepL (Cologne) is expanding beyond translations to launch its own AI agent for business applications.
Doctolib (healthcare, strong presence in Berlin) was fined €4.6M by French authorities for “abusing its dominant position” in the telehealth and online medical appointment booking sector.
Zalando Q3: revenue €3B (+26.5% YoY, driven by About You acquisition), adj. EBIT €96M (+3.2%). Zalando also became a new main partner of the German Football Association (DFB).
HelloFresh Q3: revenue €1.66B (-9.3%), adj. EBITDA €40.3M (-44.1%). They were under attack from a short seller.McMakler (Berlin, real estate) has a new CEO, Steve Simmons. He replaced Benedikt Manigold.
Weekly social and outside interests
Reddit: Pick up artists are still a thing. Beware.
Reddit: Why are Berlin streets so poorly lit after dark? RBB did a deep dive as well.
Instagram: In Germany (and elsewhere), the rich don’t pay much tax. Full episode here (segment starts at 14:00). All in German, and I do admire the honesty.
‘I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible’: German museum’s ‘grumpy guide’ is surprise hit (read)
💸 Funded in Berlin & Germany
dltHUB | Berlin | Python-native data engineering platform | $8M seed | Careers.
Reflex Aerospace | Berlin | Custom low Earth orbit satellites | €50M Series A | Careers.
octonomy | Cologne | AI agents for professional support | $20M Seed | Careers.
The Icon League | Cologne | Five-a-side soccer league | €15M Series A | Careers.
Maesn | Düsseldorf | Unified API for ERP systems | €2.3M | Careers.
Hades Mining | Munich | Faster drilling for raw materials | €5.5M Pre-seed | No careers.
SaxonQ | Leipzig | Room temperature quantum computers | €1M+ | Careers.
😅 Meanwhile
dad knew
Igor Ranc
Founder & Curator of Handpicked Berlin
Five articles with a treat:
How to find an apartment in Berlin: 4 unconventional methods that actually work
CV writing guide in Germany: insights from 6 tech recruiters
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