Faced with a tight labour market and a shortage of workers with key software engineering skills, some German companies are looking at thousands ofThe U.S. West Coast has always been the main destination for ambitious software engineers looking to work in the best-paid, most elite corner of their profession, but the mass redundancies have created a pool of jobseekers that Germany is eager to tap.
Germany, with one of the world's oldest populations, has gaping holes in its labor force: according to IT industry group Bitkom, 137,000 IT jobs are unfilled. Especially with the euro at U.S. dollar parity, few European companies pay rates that compete with the hundreds of thousands of dollars on offer at California's most successful companies, but some hope cheaper health care and lower costs compared to hotspots like San Francisco can help.