r/cscareerquestionsEU

Is €50,000 a good salary for a software engineer in Germany in 2026?

I’ve been looking into software engineering salaries, especially around Bamberg, and noticed quite a difference between sources.

Here’s what I found:

* StepStone (Bamberg): ~€51k/year
* Jobvector (Bamberg): ~€62.5k/year
* Kununu (Germany): ~€61k/year
* StepStone (Full-Stack, 3–5 years): ~€60k/year

These aren’t exactly the same roles or experience levels, but the differences are interesting.

For someone with 3–5 years of experience working with Node.js, Spring Boot and DevOps, I’m wondering whether €50k is still considered a fair salary, especially outside big cities like Munich or Berlin.

I’m also curious how AI has changed things recently. Are developers expected to deliver more because of AI tools? Has it made your work easier, or has it affected salaries and job opportunities?

Would love to hear from other developers and hiring managers, especially those working in Bavaria.

I’m an Android/KMP engineer since around 9 years of overall experience. I’ve been considering pivoting careers away from Android/Kotlin to something more diverse, obviously considering the situation as of now. It’s honestly kinda fun too being able to build products quickly using AI.

A few directions I have in mind:

- Learning more of backend using Kotlin (Spring/Ktor): I’ve been working as a KMP (Android & iOS) since while now, switching to backed seems like a good direction.

- AI engineer route: Well will have to learn backend and implementation first. Could stick to Kotlin, with Koog Agentic framework, vLLM

- Mobile OnDevice LLMs: Go all in on this, become an expert at knowing whats most efficient across different device providers etc.

- Just stick to whatever you were doing before, just move faster using AI (?). Take up more project management responsibilities along with development maybe.

- Nah Imma setup an animal farm instead

Anyone else on the same boat considering pivoting?

Hi, I am a software developer with 7 YOE. I learned to code in a bootcamp and since then I fell in love with the profession. Coding gave me purpose, a fun way to spend 8 hours a day working, and made me sharper as a person overall.

Now since AI, coding doesn't exist. Before AI, I would spend 20% of my time discussing and understanding problem specs with the business team, 30%ish in engineering/design, 30-40% coding and implementing, and the rest was reviews/tests/quality assurance, etc.

Now since AI, I get the feeling that all the coding time I used to spend has been replaced by more reviewing/testing/quality assurance, which is around half or a bit more of my time, and it sucks. Not to mention the attitude I see in engineers—pretty much a lot of YOLO in the Pull requests. I'll try to ask them about the logic of their work and many of them don't fully understand what they are doing, and only know about the feature they are building. It's the first time in my career where I feel very disconnected from the profession and not just the job. I also feel that my learning has stopped.

I always try to have a positive mindset, so I would love to hear different perspectives/experiences on the new way of working as a dev in the age of AI.

Edit: Also, is any of you considering pivots or change of careers?