How to Make 100k as a Software Engineer in Europe

The answer to this is actually quite straightforward and can be summarised in optimising over one or more of these axes: 1. location 2. company Location Switzerland is the best country in Europe for high salaries. A 100k there is achievable by a new-grad getting a junior job at a local/regular company. Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, UK, Germany are other decent/good countries to get high salaries for average companies as well. But Switzerland has a strong edge over those. Let’s say you are a new-grad, and you don’t want to stress out about getting into top tech companies, your best bet would be to get a 100k job in Switzerland - which is around 80k after taxes. If you want to save money and maybe move somewhere else afterwards, you could live frugally for a few years (let’s say 4k a month which is enough for decent rent + living cost + weekly dinner out + a couple of trips per year) and you’d be saving about 30k a year which is almost 100k in 3 years, and especially if your salary would go up a bit, you’re basically guaranteed to reach 100k-250k in savings in 3-6 years. Now, in a previous post/article (https://theeuropeanengineer.substack.com/p/how-to-reach-fire-as-a-software-engineer) I said that it should take someone who’s motivated maximum/about 3 years to get to the 100k-250k salary range. If you have an EU passport and you work in IT (software engineering, data science etc), I can guarantee you that it can’t possibly take you more than 3 years to get a 100k job in Switzerland, if you actively and consistently go for it. This is probably the easiest and least risky way to reach this salary threshold. Company Instead of (or, in addition to) optimising for location, you can also optimise for company: some companies are notoriously harder to get into and pay much more than other companies. But, basically: big tech companies pay a lot more than regular companies. By big tech companies here we usually mean publicly traded American companies whose products are software products. Some very large and well-known (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc), others potentially smaller and lesser known (Datadog, Databricks, Confluence, Twilio etc). For a very good list of such companies per location in Europe, you can checkout this article: https://theeuropeanengineer.substack.com/p/best-companies-by-city-for-software Joining one of such companies can be game changing and make locations somewhat irrelevant: as you can see in codecapitals.com, basically everywhere in Europe you can save more than 10k/15k a year as a junior engineer and 20k/25k as a mid-level engineer (which at these companies, is the level you get after being at junior level for 1 to 3 years). In my opinion, 3 years of focused preparation and consistent attempts should be enough also for joining a big tech company in Europe. Check out this article which dives deeper into the top 3 cities in Europe for software engineers, including salary numbers, saving rates and companies’ names: https://theeuropeanengineer.substack.com/p/top-3-cities-for-software-engineers. ---- full article at https://theeuropeanengineer.substack.com/p/how-to-make-100k-as-a-software-engineer

Best Companies by City for Software Engineers in Europe

The European Engineer