I am in Germany, and 70k EUR seems average for someone with experience and/or specialist skills. (Of course less experienced or "motivated" developers will be on a bit less than that). 70k would be low for anyone in a leadership role. Of course half of that gets taxed away, so I wouldn't really compare it to 100k USD.
Can you, without giving away too much information, tell me what kind of market you're talking about (i.e. are you thinking of embedded, financial, whatever)?
I'm from Germany as well with (depending on skill) 5-10 years experience and your numbers just don't match mine. Maybe you just confirmed once more that I fail to negotiate, but.. by a large margin.
I am drawing this from the semiconductor, telecommunications, automotive, healthcare technology, and travel domains. It doesn't really seem that relevant though as software developers are not tied to domains like say hardware engineers, or I guess non-programming domain specialists. Although now that I think about it, software developers do tend to pigeon-hole themselves a bit. I have heard of people calling themselves ".NET developers in the real estate branch", which I suppose is a psychological blocker to jumping to a better-paying job.
I guess it depends on where in Germany we're talking. The Cologne and Frankfurt areas pay better than the East, from what I hear. But 70k isn't unusual; I was paid 60k straight out of college in Frankfurt, 10 years ago.
