Best salaries I have seen in Switzerland/London are around 140K CHF or £120k as permanent or 650-700 per day as contractor. That is around 155k USD permie and roughly the same considering 10 months employment as contractor. This is a quite rare and top salary in both market but seems a fairly common salary in Bay Area/NYC. Never seen anything above that here in Europe.
Also the big bonus/shares culture is not as prevalent in Europe.
Anyone here making more than that or knows anyone that does?
I'm not disputing, I'm impressed and being debt free is an amazing luxury to have!
Freedom to do what you want does not increase linearly with income.
For example, one step is "Not affording any car" Now, affording any car allows way more freedom than not affording any car. A used, but good condition car can be a major improvement from a less reliable car, but it's not as major an improvement than car vs no car, but it comes with only a slight increase in income. A brand new car presents even less relative improvement from a good-condition used car, but requires a significant increase in income. A brand new exotic sports car is at the other end of the spectrum from "any car at all", an order of magnitude higher price for no practical value at all, but some increase in some kind of personal fulfillment or measure of success. Diminishing returns indeed. This applies to homes, goods, leisure activities.
So, unless you can get to the point of being "fuck you" rich, salary does not really matter.
It's not like 200k would grant me significantly more leisure time, probably quite the opposite, I'd be expected to work more and harder, for what? being able to buy the luxury car instead of just a normal car? Nah.
It's about achieving freedom
Moreover, I have seen eastern Europe nearshore at these rates. I believe that outside of finance and middle management you'll have a hard time to breach 150kCHF.
Myself, I don't have much skills, basically no degree, French side of Switzerland in an easy going consultancy firm and earning 120k I think I could get 130 but not much more than this without freelancing...
As long as I can see myself sitting on the bench 2-3months without being fired, I don't see a point ot leave.
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There's a lot of other companies that want their employees to work overtime, but thats probably true in a lot of countries - probably even in the US.
I wish there was some way of balancing the news coming out of countries - without resorting to censorship. It would remove a lot of prejudice,
Got promotion is not easy here, you need to be expertise in some technical areas, and pass promotion interview, there will be many questions from many experts during that interview, you won't be considered as qualified until every answer from you satisfies them, that is why many young engineers choose to leave in one or two years, there are not much chances for them, and even you are true expert, you will get frustrated.
but life is not that hard than you think, I have a Tencent's game engineer friend, he is a tennis fun, what I get from him is they have tennis activity every day, and he can go off work at about 6PM to play tennis 2-3 days every week.
and I heard some guys from google, they need the same long hours work and pretty stressful, just they don't need to stay at the same work place that long, they have the working place flexibility.
The problem for Americans (that I have talked to here) is that allegedly your IRS is absolutely ruthless at taxing you even if you decide to settle down here. I'm sure good accountants help, but some people say they are having even problems opening bank accounts. Banks are afraid or the IRS too somehow.
Otherwise it shouldn't be a big problem, I guess you do have to bring something to the table compared to the same local guy, but life's more relaxed here. If you like that, it's a good idea. If you are crazy ambitious money and career wise, nothing beats America.
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First, if I'm looking to make money that I want to put into global investment, it doesn't matter where I earn it. The absolute number is what matters. In reality, the number that matters is how much I can save, in absolute numbers, after taxes and cost of living have been deducted, but still the salary does not scale with cost of living. In that case, if I'm willing to maximize my investment, it's possible that I'm willing to move to the best paying country (i.e. the country where I can earn the maximum absolute number after taxes and cost-of-living has been deducted) for a while. "Global investment" may be quite broad and may include, for example, effective global altruism (i.e., asking the question "If I want to maximize my life's impact in improving others' lives, where should I work and where should I donate globally?").
Second, if we're talking about a job that is a seller's market, i.e., where I have has some very specialized skill, then the fact that the company is willing to pay double the amount if I happen to live in Silicon Valley but only half the amount if I happen to live in Romania, is pretentious. The reason is that the company is in need of my skill regardless of where I live and my acceptable business cost to them is a Silicon Valley salary. The difference from paying me less just because I happen to live in Romania is simply money that goes into their pockets. Why shouldn't it go into mine? In fact, if my skill is specialized enough, I should be able to negotiate for that, since their best next alternative may be a Silicon Valley hire.
(For clarity, the above are illustrative examples. I'm not an effective altruist, do not have such a specialized skill, and do not live in Romania.)
1-1,5k for high end apartment's rent (which is waaaay too much anyway), 400 for the car and 1k for other necessities.
If taxes were 33%, you'd be left with 66k.
66k - 12x(1.5k+400+1k+100) = 30k. That's still a lot more money left than if the person was in NYC without a lease/finance and with rent that's twice as much.
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Senior full time employees usually earn 120-130k CHF. Taxes are lower than anywhere in the US on top of this.
Ping me at iwan@gulenko.ch if you want to work in Switzerland and hold a EU-28 citizenship. (Otherwise work visa is impossible.) I run a local recruitment consultancy.
This is further strengthened by our educational system which promises "sexy jobs" in the tech sector that don't require a technical background.
We also don't have places like hacker news which has a friendly healthy unionizing effect.
I believe this is the primary cause we're not seeing such high salaries in Europe. I think it's also the reason we're not seeing as much innovation happening in Europe.