>Totally uninformed hunch: USA attracted perhaps too much talent? I'm just wondering because here in Germany I find it hard to find a good front-end developer

How about another view point: there is no such thing as "attracting too much talent", this is the free market at work, and USA and Germany both attracted the exact amount of talent they deserve based on the pay and working conditions they offer for skilled workers, fair and square, and that's considering that getting a US work visa is insanely more difficult than a German one which is a rubber stamp since they left the immigration flood gates wide open to attempt to fix the "labor shortage" which is just corporate b.s. for "we want to get away paying shit wages and need more people desperate enough to accept them".

And I don't mean poor pay in absolute terms, because obviously Germany can compete with USA on pay, I mean pay in relative terms an national levels. SW devs are still paid blue collar wages in Germany when you look at how expensive everything is, especially buying housing. While in the US SW dev is a top % pay relative to the national wages levels and expenses. German workers in finance, controlling, marketing, management, get paid way more in Germany than SW devs which are treated more like cogs.

There's also the somewhat racist traditional old-school German culture at play that sees anything non-German as being of lower quality, including products and also people, making it more difficult for foreign talent to rise through the ranks and get top positions in German companies, as opposed to immigrant friendly countries like US, UK, Canada, Australian that don't have such tough glass ceiling for skilled workers. Case in point, the CEOs and execs in many US, UK, Canadian tech companies have migrant background while in big German companies they're as white German as it gets, with the newsworthy exception of the CEOs of BioNTech and Crytek who're Turkish.

For many SW engineers in Eastern Europe emigrating to Germany is no longer attractive. Take home salaries 50% more than back home, with a 100% in cost of living with ridiculous hoops to jump through to find a decent rental, and 300% in housing price increases. Germany wants workers but doesn't have the housing to attract them because it's also trying to use immigration to enrich the landlord gentry at the same time by squeezing the migrant workers.

When I (an Eastern European) was working for a US tech company, the colleagues in Dallas-FW area owned big houses in the suburbs (on mortgages obviously) while the colleagues in the Munich offices were all stuck renting with no prospects of ever being able to afford to buy something in the greater Munich area unless they had well-off parents, which migrant workers obviously did not. Munich land prices per square foot/meter are similar to SV but not the wages. Absolutely insane.

Germany is just not an innovative powerhouse in the international SW sector that's capable to generate the biggest returns and pay the best wages, nor does it have a great housing market, or the lowest taxes, or the best openness to employing migrants in top positions. Considering all this, they will continue to have a skilled workers' shortage for the foreseeable future that will decimate their international competitiveness. Sure, they make Zeiss mirrors and Trumpf lasers, but those niche low-volume precision manufacturing sectors don't scale as well as SW, which makes it a much more profitable industry that's dominated by the US.

But you don't have to take my word for it, the comments on that Youtube video you shared tell the exact same story.