What is up with Hamburg Software Jobs? Some Trends and Numbers

What kind of jobs are available in the field? What kind of numbers do we see from companies, and what is the trend overall? On a quest to answer all of these questions, we captured the current state of German software jobs in one big consolidation of numbers.

Hamburg Job StatisticsSection titled Hamburg Job Statistics

What are the jobs that we actually see in the Hamburg job market? To answer this question, we used the job-scraper tool jobspy to get current job data in Hamburg for the term “software developer”. For these 157 available jobs that were posted this year, we then extracted the required languages, framework and more using the gpt-4o model via the openai api.

Consulting definitely plays a sizable role in the software market. If you’re a software developer in Hamburg, there is a good chance, you’re going to do it in consulting.

With JavaScript corresponding to frontend jobs, we see Java as the dominant backend language in Hamburg. With Java being already a bit dated, this points to older tech stacks, which need to be maintained and extended.

It’s no surprise to see React at the top of the framework list, being the reigning champ.

The company size for available job goes across a wide range. Due to the big number of unlabeled jobs this chart is somewhat irrelevant, but it gives us some hints. The grown startup seems the most prevalent, while also many huge companies are still looking.

Market TrendsSection titled Market Trends

The general amount of jobs follows the market, which after a big boom during COVID, is still on a downwards trend. It could be that this trend falls back to to pre-COVID levels, due to a shrinking economy in general, or it could plateau a little higher. A good indicator in the past, the number of open HR positions, is still on a downwards trend. This indicates a continuation in the shrinking of the job market.

source: https://data.indeed.com/#/postings

While the curve shows the German job availability in general, the reduction of available software jobs is one of the highest, as mentioned in the indeed report, with 35% less jobs compared to last year.

InvestmentsSection titled Investments

What are the recent investments in the Hamburg startup scene? Thankfully the platform hamburg.dealroom, co-initiated by the city’s government agency, can provide us with some numbers here.

Startup Investments in Hamburg

Recent investments in the million range show well-known local technology companies like Heyflow, Plancraft, Shipzero, airfocus or Zive. These are exactly the companies which have visible on the job boards this year, providing attractive job opportunities with modern software stacks.

Last years investments like 1Komma5Grad with 430 million series B, impossible cloud’s 7 million seed, awork’s 5 million series A or nuvo’s 3 million seed round are still somewhat in the picture, while they have mostly faded away from the software job boards.

Job SatisfactionSection titled Job Satisfaction

While job opportunities are adapting to pre-COVID levels, job satisfaction is on the decline. This was captured by the recent Stack Overflow development survey.

source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024

This perceived high difference caused somewhat of an outcry, which was covered by engineering social media, with noteworthy videos from @ThePrimeagen and Fireship:

Comparing these to numbers from the pre-COVID 2020 stackoverflow developer survey, the number of people happy about their jobs has gone down by at least 10% (comparing “very satisfied” at 32% in 2020, with “happy at work” at 19% in 2024).

The Big StaySection titled The Big Stay

Coined as a US phenomenon, the big stay indicates that people are holding on to their current jobs. With new job opportunities on the decline, it seems natural that people will stay.

A report by Linkedin states, while the employee retention rate increases, at the same time the number of job applications has increased by 14%. The article hints in the end:

Of course, people can only change jobs when there are jobs available, so the state of the economy will likely dictate if and when things turn around.

From “the Big 4” to “With 4”Section titled From “the Big 4” to “With 4”

In the past, working at the big 4 was the pinnacle of software engineering. Spotify’s vertical teams, Amazon’s leadership principles, Facebook’s monorepo setup - what the big 4 were doing had widespread ripple-effects on the whole industry.

With big tech either doing massive layoffs, or holding out on hiring in favor of the big AI revolution, times have changed. From being drivers of software culture and dream companies, a job at the big 4 has not only become harder to attain, but also way less attractive.

This leaves software engineers with a new trend, of joining smaller teams, instead of massive engineering organizations. Instead of working at the big 4, working with 4 colleagues at a company of a smaller size seems much more probable. These companies are likely to not have a major focus in tech, but to only invest in software as part of their digitization efforts.

Sam Altman says 1 person + 10,000 GPUs could make a billion-dollar company pic.twitter.com/ZjtFbc31dS

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) November 8, 2024

With Enough Thrust…Section titled With Enough Thrust…

There is an old saying: “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.” With enough money, almost anything can fly. During the COVID boom, we saw many companies thriving. But which companies are fit enough to make it beyond the initial thrust? For a long-distance flight, it needs great tools and a great process.

Here we see a possible connection between declining developer job satisfaction, and struggling software companies. This can be attributed at least in part to the current software planning process, which is all centered around jira, and which we believe to be far from great. We believe if we had a new way for roadmapping for software planning, we as an industry would be doing much better (see our other post).

Rounding UpSection titled Rounding Up

Concluding the investigation, we see that Hamburg software jobs are currently rather conservative. While JavaScript reigns supreme in the twitter tech space, and Java is not that popular, the real world is different. Here, Java is still dominant. Here we found a big correlation between big startup investments and exciting tech stacks. It is fun to see great jobs and VC money almost lining up.

With more VC money currently flooding into the JavaScript echo-system, like the $4.6 million investment in the build tool vite, deno with its $22 million in 2022, or even the recent $57 million investment into PHP’s laravel, we see more investments in those technologies that we often discuss on twitter.

Tech that we’re excited to see, like the Bun JavaScript runtime, Node.JS, Go or Zig in the backend, is of course much less represented in the market. As time progresses and the tools get even better, we predict that these technologies will at some point dominate the market, pushing Java to the sidelanes.