Some German companies see the layoffs of thousands of workers in Silicon Valley as an opportunity to recruit top talent, in light of the scarcity they face in the labor market and a shortage of workers with basic software engineering skills.
The American West Coast has long been a prime destination for aspiring software engineers looking to work among the elite and more lucrative in their profession, but the mass layoffs have created a pool of job seekers that Germany is eager to tap.
“They terminate their services and we hire them,” says Rainer Zugeher, head of human resources at Cariad, a software company belonging to car maker Volkswagen. “We have several hundred positions available in the US, Europe and China.”
Fearing inflation and the possibility of a recession, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta collectively cut about 40,000 jobs.
And the "Bitkom" group said that Germany had 137 thousand vacancies in the field of information technology.
The German government is working to simplify immigration rules and promote the possibility of easy citizenship to lure potential skilled immigrants, and the authorities in the country's states are moving towards this.
"I would like to cordially invite you to move to Bavaria," said Judith Gerlach, Minister for Digitization in Bavaria - Germany's wealthiest region - on Linkedin.
But German bureaucracy may present another challenge, as companies have already reported months-long delays in securing appointments for new employees seeking work permits.
"The bureaucracy in Germany severely hampers most highly qualified workers, especially if they don't speak German," says Diana Stollero of start-up Lendis in Berlin.