Nigerian Engineer in Berlin: “I Send More Home Now Than I Ever Earned in Lagos”

He left a senior engineering role at a Lagos fintech in 2023. He now earns €5,800 a month in Berlin — and wires the naira equivalent of his entire former salary home every month. He doesn’t miss Lagos. He misses himself there.

This engineer requested anonymity. Income figures have been verified with payslips. Identifying details — employer, city of origin, university — have been withheld at his request.

Who are you without the details?

Nigerian. Male. Thirty-one. Back-end engineer, mostly Python and Go. I grew up in the South-East, studied computer science at a federal university, got my first job at a startup in Enugu doing internal tools, then moved to Lagos in 2019 for a proper fintech role. By 2022 I was a senior engineer at a Series B fintech earning ₦850,000 a month. In Lagos, that sounds like good money. In Lagos, it is good money. And then I started comparing.

What were you comparing to?

My WhatsApp group. There are eleven of us who graduated the same year. By 2022, five had left Nigeria — UK, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, one in the UAE. They were all earning the naira equivalent of what I was earning in their first month of arrival. Five of us were still home. That’s a specific kind of pressure that nobody talks about honestly.

But I want to be fair: it wasn’t just the money. I’d just had three months of ASUU-related internet disruptions affecting a project I was running. The naira was depreciating badly — that ₦850K I mentioned? Its dollar value dropped from about $1,050 to about $600 between January and December 2022 without my salary changing. I was getting poorer in real terms while my performance reviews said I was doing great.

How did you actually get out?

I got a job offer through LinkedIn. A German SaaS company found my profile, ran me through five interview rounds over six weeks, and offered me the role. The salary was €4,200 at the time — this was mid-2022. I negotiated to €4,500. I got a work visa through the EU Blue Card process. My company sponsored everything except flights. I moved in March 2023.

The actual paperwork took about five months from offer to arrival. A lot of people don’t know the EU Blue Card process is relatively smooth for software engineers if your salary clears the threshold, which it did. The hard part wasn’t the paperwork. It was telling my parents.

What did you tell them?

My mother cried. Not sad crying — worried crying. She’s from the generation that associates going abroad with the risk of never really coming back. I told her I’d be back in two years. It’s been two years. I’m not back.

My father asked how much I’d be earning. I told him €4,500 — that was about ₦3.8 million at those rates. He asked if I’d send money home. I said yes. He said “okay then.” That was the conversation.

What does your money situation actually look like now?

I’m now on €5,800 a month — I got two salary increases. Gross. After German income tax and social contributions, I take home about €3,600. My rent is €1,100 for a one-bedroom in the east of Berlin — which is cheap by Berlin standards, expensive by every Nigerian standard. Groceries, transport, utilities, internet: about €600 a month. Phone, subscriptions, the occasional thing: €150.

That leaves me about €1,750 a month of disposable income. I send home €500 every month — my parents and one younger sister who’s at university. At current rates, €500 is just over ₦800,000. That’s almost exactly what my entire salary was in Lagos. My parents have stopped working. My father retired last year partly because of this.

I also save €700 a month in an investment account. I’ve never saved this consistently in my life. In Lagos, saving felt like pouring water into sand. The exchange rate was always ready to undo whatever discipline you’d built up.

What do people get wrong about what it’s actually like?

They think it’s all upside. The money is real — I won’t pretend otherwise. But here are things that are also real:

Berlin in February is a kind of grey that no one warned me about. Not just cold — colourless. I went four months without eating good food. Not because I couldn’t afford it — because I couldn’t find it. The Nigerian restaurant near me is fine, but it’s not home. The jollof is serviceable.

I’ve had three friends here in two years. In Lagos, I had thirty. Some of my closest relationships are now maintained entirely through WhatsApp voice notes, and voice notes are not the same as presence. When my grandfather died last year, I couldn’t go back for the burial — we were in the middle of a major product release and I’d only been at the company eight months. I watched the burial on a shaky video call at 11pm Berlin time. That cost me something I haven’t fully calculated yet.

And there’s the question of identity. In Lagos, I was just a person. Here, I am always “the Nigerian.” Sometimes warmly, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with a very slight distance that I can’t always prove but can always feel.

Do you regret it?

No. That’s a clean answer and I mean it. What I feel is more complicated than regret. I feel like I split into two people at the airport in 2023 and both of them are doing fine, but they’re not the same person anymore, and only one of them is here.

Would you come back?

I think about it constantly. My honest answer is: if I could earn what I earn here — in dollars or euros — remotely from Lagos, I’d be on the next flight. I’d rather pay Lagos rent and Lagos food prices on Berlin income. That’s not a pipe dream for some engineers — I have colleagues who’ve done it. But my company’s policy is you have to be in the EU for tax reasons, so right now it’s not possible.

When I’m senior enough that I can go independent, I’ll go remote. And when I go remote, I’ll go home. That’s the plan. I’ve been saying two years for two years, so take that with the appropriate amount of salt.

What would you tell someone considering leaving?

Leave with a specific goal, not a vague feeling. “Things are bad here” is not a plan. “I will be in this city, at this salary level, saving this amount per month, for this specific period, then decide” — that’s a plan. The people I know who’ve struggled are the ones who left because staying felt impossible, not because going felt like a defined move.

Also: learn German. I didn’t. Don’t be me.

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