Wie geht's?
I spoke with my friend about our German. I am almost fluent in listening, but still lack the confidence to speak, which is, in turn, making me more dependent on the international bubble in all aspects of my life. The only way to leave the comfort zone is by being forced to operate in a foreign language. So I went to a Sprachcafe yesterday, and it was an interesting experience. Shall we organise one? Reply if you’d come.
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📌 Pinned
Managers in automotive are losing their jobs. Are they also the ones to blame for the mess? Some for sure. Porsche will cut 40% of its management jobs. And they aren’t alone: Volkswagen wants to cut a quarter of its management positions, and BMW a fifth of its divisions and their top managers, with similar cuts in the levels below. On top of that, Cariad, VW's software unit here in Berlin, is cutting about 1k more jobs. Roland Berger, a consultancy, expects the German auto industry to lose at least 200k jobs by 2030.
Why management? It's probably the easiest place to cut. And in many companies, those layers grew because becoming a manager was the only way to get promoted, and you had examples of managers having no direct reports (=being parked) or 1-3 team members. That was the case at my previous company too.
Does your company have too many or too few managers?
👀 Jobs
4 job highlights of the week
JustPlay — Senior Product Designer — Berlin
RobCo — Director of People & Culture — Munich
Lemonaid Beverages — Head of Finance — Hamburg
🌍 Community board
Simple Supper finds vegetarian recipes using ingredients you already have, then builds the meal plan and shopping list for you. It's free, and the app is looking for testers.
Have an ask, offer or useful project? Share it! You need beta testers for something you built. You're running a survey or research and need responses. You're stuck on a problem someone here has already solved. You're volunteering, mentoring, or building something non-profit. You learned something the hard way and wrote it up.
💸 Funded in Germany
Restate | Berlin | Distributed systems and workflow management | $20M Series A | Careers.
finmid | Berlin | Embedded lending infrastructure for platforms | €17M | Careers.
Everphone | Berlin | Smartphone leasing and device management | €15M debt funding | Careers.
Deepslate | Berlin | European speech-to-speech voice AI models | €7.7M seed | Careers.
hexafarms | Berlin | Greenhouse sensors and scouting robots | €4.8M | Careers.
Procuros | Hamburg | B2B supply chain connectivity platform | €20M Series A | Careers.
RobCo | Munich | Industrial robotics for manufacturers | $40M at $1B valuation | Careers.
Turn2x | Munich | E-methane synthetic natural gas technology | €20M Series A | Careers.
calliora | Munich | AI hospital billing error detection | $6M pre-seed | Careers.
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📡 Signals
Galeria (Essen, department stores) filed for insolvency for the fourth time in six years, leaving about 12k employees uncertain over their jobs and insolvency payments. Its 83 stores remain open.
Accell (Netherlands, bicycles) is insolvent in Germany, putting about 370 jobs at risk across its Winora, Haibike and Ghost brands.
Varta (Ellwangen, batteries) has four subsidiaries in insolvency proceedings as they look for new owners. [more]
Mistral (Munich, AI) is opening its first German office, starting with around 30 staff and growing to over 100 by the end of 2027. [careers]
Langdock (Berlin, AI software) has grown to €50M in annual recurring revenue.
Pliant (Berlin, fintech) has doubled its revenue. [careers]
Deutsche Post DHL (Bonn, logistics) is buying Austrian parcel-locker operator Myflexbox and plans to grow its parcel-box network to about 50k by 2030. They are discontinuing DeinFach. [careers]
SAP (Walldorf, enterprise software) is planning to acquire Belgian AI workforce-planning specialist TechWolf.
Personio (Munich, HR software) has acquired Berlin fintech Circula, the expense-management startup.
init (Karlsruhe, public transport tech) bought up a 67.74% stake in autonomous-driving startup Applied Autonomy, pushing into driverless buses. [careers]
Deutsche Bahn (Berlin, rail) is raising its office-presence requirement to three days a week. Staff are revolting on the company intranet.
McKinsey (Berlin, consulting) is being taken to court by three employees of its Berlin office trying to force the firm to set up a works council. [more, €]
German industrial production rose 2.0% month-on-month in August (2.3% year-on-year), beating expectations after months of weakness. (Destatis)
European defence-tech startups have raised $7.4B in 2026 so far, almost 3x last year's total, with Dealroom projecting $10.5B by year-end. But they still struggle to get actual contracts despite a defence budget above €100B. [more]
Germany is adding just over 1k new civil-service jobs (mostly at customs) to enforce two new taxes on sugar and plastic. The sugar tax's final form is still unclear. [more]
A new IW Köln study finds Germany's public sector is short on AI specialists, limiting the efficiency gains it could otherwise capture from the technology. [more]
📅 Events
This week we reviewed 82 events and handpicked 8. Check all 30 events at luma.com/handpicked
Featured events
We have TWO spots left on our redesigned workshops: We are building two products that will help you to really UNDERSTAND how AI works. This means avoiding vendor lock-in for you in the future. People ask for L&D budget at work and they get it. Saturday, 10th and Tuesday, 13th of October.
Hurry up! We have two more early-bird tickets for our Coworking at the Delta on Monday, 26th.
BIRCON 2026 is a two-day pen-and-paper tabletop roleplaying game extravaganza with games, vendors, panels, an epic raffle and more. Use 10OFF-HANDPICKED for 10% off weekend passes. | Sat, 10/10 10:00 | Vollgutlager
Our picks
The Delta Studio Open Day | Mon, 12/10 09:30 | The Delta Campus
Need for Speed (Networking) | Tue, 13/10 17:30 | Impact Hub Berlin
On Product: How is AI changing the world beyond software? | Thu, 22/10 18:30 | Alte Jakobstraße 85, Unit 86, City Centre
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🧭 Career compass
Zalando is big and full of Reddit rumours: its works council asked for flexibility around school pickups, and a leader called it "a personal choice".
Whether €85k is a realistic senior salary in Berlin right now (also Reddit). Some pretty solid advice in the thread. You can also always check our Salary Trends data; the link is in the footer. Related, here is some data from a recruiting company, Instaffo, and they claim that IT seniors are asking for 16% less compared with 2023. I don't know. I'd take it with a grain of salt.
Have you ever used StackOverflow? When my former company paid for my Python analyst training in the late 2010s, it was my only way to complete the assignments. (This was also the time when I felt the stupidest in my life, but that's a story for another time.) Anyway, it’s now more or less dead because of AI. And this is a nice message: "If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?" about losing the community collection.
Some anecdata on Reddit about the length of the job search. Keep going and invest most of the time in networking. The AI flood seems real.
And finally, some more advice from Redditors on how to negotiate your salary raise (spoiler: the easiest way is to change jobs).
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