From EuroTopTech.com/data.

The latest of my 4 research articles so far.

Check it out!

In August I had my first €10k month

I’ve also spent the entire summer working :)

September is looking promising too!

One thing that applies pretty much everywhere career wise:

Work hard and smart, with consistency, and things will work out

If you can find someone who has the answers to doubts you might have, try to reach out. You can also consider my coaching program. Recent grad testimonial:

If you can find something that you enjoy doing, even better: it makes the hard work easier.

Revenues going up also simplifies a bit my relocation plans, making Switzerland a bit more sustainable for me.

About that…

I’m moving from Zurich to Lugano

It’s a bit of an experiment, and partially a reversible choice. So we’ll see!

This is how I plan to go about it:

Most likely I won’t be replacing Warsaw with Milan, as a big city base, and here’s why.

That’s all for today!

If you haven’t read it yet, make sure to check out this 2030’s Survival Guide for Tech Workers in Europe.

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re a Euro Top Tech paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 3,000+ fully remote six-figure roles. Save your CV once and both boards rank jobs by fit to it, flag relocation support, and warn you when a posting offers no visa sponsorship.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Ask the coach: an AI coach built from my 1:1 coaching, inside Career Lab. It reads your saved CV and your plan, and answers the way I would, at any hour.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from any job board by pasting the link, follow your pipeline by company, and get your LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and livability by country and city, built from 1,500+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who have 2 to 3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

And admit that the waters around you have grown

And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth saving

And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times, they are a-changin’»

Times are changing

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

1. AI

2. From Big Tech to startups

3. Seven-figure remote packages

4. “More traditional” opportunities will worsen

5. What you get in exchange for your taxes will deteriorate

6. How to save yourself

1. AI

• Companies need (much) fewer people for the same output/results

• Many new companies start, as problems that were hard to solve in the past are now crackable

• The way tech professionals work is changing majorly and very quickly

If you’re an “AI skeptic” tech worker, you’re professionally dead.

If you think “AI is not good enough / only produces slop / is a bubble” you’re not gonna make it.

AI is extremely powerful and of “seismic impact” when it comes to how people work and produce value in the tech/software industry.

Many companies are quickly adapting to these changes.

New startups are “AI-native” and start with new ways of work from scratch.

Companies that won’t adapt will likely shrink or die.

In the majority of profitable and high-growth companies developers are already not writing code by hand since at least one or two years.

It’s still early days, so companies and teams are still figuring out the new ways to work: you might have already heard about agents orchestration, workflows, loops, systems that automatically react to events and act (fix bugs, analyse outages, monitor production systems, do customer support, etc).

Interviews are probably next.

The window to enter big tech by just focusing on Algorithms and Data Structures and System Design is likely closing.

IMO it’s not unlikely that in one or two years that will not be enough to enter, and a mix of project work or AI-assisted interviews will be introduced.

High-paying startups are already interviewing differently from Big Tech. Which leads us to…

2. From Big Tech to Startups

2015-2025 was the decade of Big Tech:

• Learn about Big Tech pay and interviews

• Get a referral from Blind

• LeetCode for 2 months and get interviewed with some medium and easy questions, occasionally a hard if you’re unlucky, get the job

• Work 4 to 6 hours a day, make 2x/3x what engineers outside of big tech make, enjoy free food and other perks, no layoffs just growth

As everyone knows, that era is over.

2025-2030 might be the decade of high-paying startups (including remote ones)

Everyone knows that Anthropic and OpenAI now pay roughly 2x what traditional Big Tech pays.

Not many know that there’s a lot of up-and-coming AI startups paying high-six figures for remote workers too

And I’m not talking about the usual $100-200k remote jobs that I’ve mentioned many times in this newsletter.

I’m talking about startups paying $200k+ for remote engineers/scientists, like this recent coaching client job offer:

3. Seven figures remote packages

It gets even crazier!

One thing that I was happily surprised, and genuinely a bit shocked, to see, is the new heights that remote compensation has reached in the past 2 years of AI revolution.

This 24 y.o. AI Engineer is making $350k in base salary + 7 figures in yearly stock options, remotely:

They’re currently in Czechia 🇨🇿, but the job is fully-remote, and they could move anywhere.

Interestingly, they’re moving to the US: <<I’m actually moving to the US. If you want to build cutting edge AI, it’s not possible here. I’d much rather take $6000 rent in San Francisco and a chance to build with enough resources than a penthouse for €2000 here in Central/Eastern Europe. But who knows, maybe someday people won’t have to make that choice>>.

Which is fair enough. Although, personally I still think that there’s a great middle ground of high income opportunities from the US/internet and European lifestyle.

NOTE: The stock grant is not liquid, since the company isn’t publicly traded (yet), but probably will materialise soon. Anyway, even “just €300k base salary” is already nuts, for being fully remote and just 24 😄

This is not an isolated case…

This 23 y.o. is making $300-400k remotely from Kosovo 🇽🇰

• Working as a CTO for a crypto startup

• €180k base salary

• €100-200k on top in bonuses

• <15% tax rate

Talk about geo-arbitrage…

I verified their salaries and packages (they sent me the actual documentation like Deel contracts and so on)

Because to be honest these numbers sounded crazy and unheard of to me too.

But here we are:

• It’s 2026

• Companies care about making money

• A 10x engineer can now make a top company 10x more money than an average engineer

AI has certainly contributed to this:

• The increase in productivity and value produced hasn’t grown uniformly across bottom and top of the skill market (top engineers benefitted more, more on this later)

• The same logic applies across companies: some companies are just way more profitable per employee unit than others, so they can pay much more (this is the same principle that allowed big tech companies 10/20 years ago to pay much more than the rest of the tech market)

Another case (last one for today): making €155k after taxes in their 20’s from Kosovo

Again: verified salary and documentation.

Here’s what they had to say about their setup and life:

• Mid 20s

• Paid off house

• Making €155k after taxes

• Proposing to gf, investing in metals

• Beach clubs in Albania, SPA resorts in the mountains

No worry about nothing.

Talk about CEE REMOTE LIFE MAXXING.

Another bonus example: 210k eur remotely from Serbia.

4. “more traditional” opportunities will worsen

And become harder to get and more competitive.

Here’s what I mean:

The above situation might look good today, but it’s not going to be pretty 10 years from now.

And this is true everywhere in Europe, it’s not a Germany specific thing.

That’s because European and/or older companies will suffer

Anywhere you’ve been in Europe, especially in the higher-paying half of it, you will for sure have seen it yourself already: “the market is tougher”.

That is, the average or lower-paying half of the market, or even the lower-paying 80-90% of the market.

Companies don’t adapt to AI in order to boost their growth, they simply leverage it to cut costs (=workforce) and stay profitable for a bit longer, until Claude or any of its competitor finishes eating the “older company’s” lunch.

This is why people complain about how hard it’s to find a job, especially well-paid one, in Germany, UK, Switzerland, and so on.

The old script of “well-paid job with good work-life balance" is effectively expired.

Or rather, the extreme version of it: building CRUD apps for a European bank or similar, working slowly, being average IQ, etc.. While getting paid well. That whole deal is getting scraped out of Europe.

Not tomorrow, not even in 2/3 years. But in 5-10 years, most likely yes. And in the meantime, it’ll progressively get harder as years pass (from a few years ago).

5. What you get in exchange for your taxes will deteriorate

People today might be happy with deals such as this:

Many seem to find 50% tax rates “worth it”:

But it’s not only an objectively bad deal today, it’s also set to become worse.

I made a few posts here about Italy’s pension system “scam trajectory”, and similar mechanism apply to most of EU.

The Tl;Dr version:

1. Aging society means that you’ll keep paying 20-30% in social security for a pension that you won’t really see

2. Aging society also means that there’s gonna be few people paying contributions but A LOT of people consuming services, welfare and pensions

3. Aging society paired with low growth (<2% in most of Europe) means that a lot of the income taxes will have to pivot to pensions (already happens), which leaves less budget for infrastructure and public services.

4. The above point means that public service quality will deteriore, while the high taxation will stay. So, in summary: you’ll pay 50% taxes for little to no pensions and low-to-mid quality public services

Italy is a great example here because it’s already in the “it’s too late” territory.

And it shows, in the satisfaction and happiness of tech workers (compared to Poland for example):

A couple of ways to address this issue:

1. Get a remote job and move to a low-tax place and buy a nice life through private services

2. Go to a mid/high tax place with good balance sheets and migration control, to protect you from too much “inshittification”

6. How to save yourself

Or, in other words, how to thrive in the “Brazilification” of (most of) Europe:

Which, in short, is about:

• Working hard

• Wisely choosing where to be located

• Becoming 10x more productive thanks to AI

• Having a solid career strategy that adapts to the new market and is well-planned

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 3,000+ fully remote six-figure roles. Save your CV once and both boards rank jobs by fit to it, flag relocation support, and warn you when a posting offers no visa sponsorship.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Ask the coach: an AI coach built from my 1:1 coaching, inside Career Lab. It reads your saved CV and your plan, and answers the way I would, at any hour.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from any job board by pasting the link, follow your pipeline by company, and get your LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and livability by country and city, built from 1,500+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who have 2 to 3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

First, I introduced Career Lab. It started as a job tracker. Now, it’s six tools that work as one system:

1. Path. Six-stage roadmap I coach with, made self-serve: profile and target thesis, CV and LinkedIn positioning, targets and gap analysis, interview prep, referrals and networking, then apply, track, iterate. It tells you the next two or three actions so you’re not just “lost with a bunch of jobs you apply to and get rejected from”.

2. Tracker. Target roles, applications, and referral contacts in one place, with the companies you are aiming at and who you know there.

3. CV Reviewer. AI feedback on positioning, bullets, structure, and gaps, against the standard I hold coaching clients to.

4. Skills Pattern Analysis. Paste the roles you want; it finds the requirements that keep recurring and turns them into an upskilling plan. It tells you what you need to prioritise learning, either in your free time on in your (next) job.

5. Outreach. Gathers people you should add on LinkedIn, then helps you write messages to them.

6. Ask the coach. New. Answers from my 1:1 coaching twin, based on your context.

The platform itself also grew:

• The job boards now hosts 15,000+ tech jobs from top companies in Europe and 3,000+ fully remote six-figure roles: engineering, product, ops, sales, etc. If you save your CV, the boards rank jobs by fit to it. Big tech listings show an estimated compensation and, added recently, a minimum-comp filter. Also, added this week: relocation support visa sponsorship tag.

• Job alerts and a weekly digest bring new matching jobs and your plan’s next steps to your inbox, instead of you remembering to check.

• The data side kept growing: crowdsourced salaries by city and country with savings and livability views, the free Compensation Report, and a research library answering questions like where a software engineer actually comes out ahead after rent and tax.

All of it is included in membership. The data side is free.

Coming soon:

• Big improvements on the UX side of things

• New videos on my YT Channel

• An article telling the story of where you should move to as a tech worker in Europe, from our new “R&D Lab”

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re a Euro Top Tech paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 3,000+ fully remote six-figure roles. Save your CV once and both boards rank jobs by fit to it, flag relocation support, and warn you when a posting offers no visa sponsorship.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Ask the coach: an AI coach built from my 1:1 coaching, inside Career Lab. It reads your saved CV and your plan, and answers the way I would, at any hour.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from any job board by pasting the link, follow your pipeline by company, and get your LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and livability by country and city, built from 1,500+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who have 2 to 3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

Since then, many successes:

And a system that I’ve iterated on over and over, which delivers very reliable results:

While working with my clients and getting them results, refining my coaching system and processes, I’ve gathered a lot of data.

The systems, I’ve been adding them in ETT Career Lab

And within it, one latest addition went out this week in beta version:

The ETT AI Career Coach

Trained on my coaching material, built of variations of the most common themes and questions discussed in my 1:1 coaching program:

• What should I focus on now

• What’s preventing me to land interviews

• Which roles should I target

• Which offer should I take

• How do I get people online to give me referrals

• etc etc etc

It’s already live, since over a day (for ETT members, in the career lab).

What people asked in the first days

I read some conversations (as disclosed in the coach itself, for me improve it).

The early questions asked so far have been exactly the ones I hoped for:

• how to prepare for a specific company’s interview process

• how to choose between two career tracks

• how to target companies that sponsor visas

• whether an offer abroad was enough to support a family

• whether and how to connect with strangers on LinkedIn

And more.

Privacy

Your conversations are saved to your account so they follow you across devices, and you can delete any of them, or all of them, at any time.

They are never used to train any AI model, never published nor turned into content.

The coach is in beta: if an answer is off, or good, let me know! You can reply to this email too. I read all the replies, and good feedback is how I decide what to build next.

If you are a member

Just go here and ask the coach.

Best part is that it’s also context-aware regarding your activity on Euro Top Tech and your job search, so it can give very detailed advice.

For the best results, make sure to upload your CV to your ETT account. And make sure to start with the Career Lab path too, if you haven’t yet!

Ask the coach

For now: it’s included in the normal Euro Top Tech membership.

29 euro a month, or 11 a month, billed nine months at a time, if you take the job search plan: also includes the job boards, Career Lab, guides, and Discord community.

January-February is the best time to apply to top tech roles in Europe

A good prep takes 2-5 months within the 1:1 coaching program, 4-9 months with the DIY Career Lab approach.

Now it’s a good time to get started 💪

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 3,000+ fully remote six-figure roles. Save your CV once and both boards rank jobs by fit to it, flag relocation support, and warn you when a posting offers no visa sponsorship.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Ask the coach: an AI coach built from my 1:1 coaching, inside Career Lab. It reads your saved CV and your plan, and answers the way I would, at any hour.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from any job board by pasting the link, follow your pipeline by company, and get your LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and livability by country and city, built from 1,500+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who have 2 to 3x'd their pay and freedom over the past few months.

Hope you’re having a great week!

Here’s a little update on what changed in the past few weeks :)

Last formal update was about Q2 economics, and the last “technical” update was on July 18th.

Since then…

On Euro Top Tech:

One membership, everything unlocked

• Job Board, Gold and Master are gone. There is one membership now, in three lengths: €29 monthly, €99 for a full 9 month search, €119 for a year. Every plan unlocks everything: both job boards, the AI Career Lab, all guides and the Discord. The yearly plan also includes Remote GOATs.

Career Lab

• Outreach, a new tab. Paste the LinkedIn message you were about to send and it reviews it against the templates from my outreach guide. It plans who to contact, and it reviews your replies mid conversation as well as cold openers.

• Tracker rework. Add a job from other job boards by pasting its link, see your pipeline grouped by company, and choose which roles feed your Skills Pattern Analysis.

• The Path updates automatically. Use the CV review, the tracker or Outreach and your stage progress moves on its own.

Job boards (15,000+ European roles, 3,000+ remote)

• More precise location filters for the remote job board and more accurate view of roles you can actually work from your country.

Data and research

• A new research library at eurotoptech.com/research, with a new analysis of where in Europe you should move to, based on your needs (will do a separate newsletter article with insights from this document). You can also request the next study there and upvote what others asked for.

• Several iterations and improvements on the Crowdsourced Data section.

• 1,400+ tech workers have now submitted their pay, savings and quality of life.

Everything else

• Added a light theme (in addition to the default dark theme).

• You can view all coaching+platform reviews in one place at eurotoptech.com/testimonials.

• Rebuilt ETT homepage with live demos of the actual product, and for logged-in users a view that shows you the key info and where you stand in your path.

On Coaching:

Prices went up, now:

• 1300 eur/mo for the full program

• 1000 eur/mo for the lightweight program

This was pre-announced in this newsletter a few weeks ago.

The reasons are many:

1. Offer and demand: as people see more results of my clients (also through word of mouth), and as I build a reputation after 2+ years of making content, there’s more applicants; but only so many clients I can serve.

2. Better filtering: usually, the most cost-sensitive customers I have are the worst ones. This has always been the case since I started the first edition of the program 2.5 years ago at 500 euro per month (back then I would get many more low quality candidates than I do today!). My ideal customer is someone looking for a 120-300k remote job, or a big tech / HFT / high-pay scale-up job in Europe; the usual raise you’ll get is in the 50-200k range, so if you’re serious about actually landing the job and you’re not there to waste each other’s time, spending a few thousands euros on coaching is OK.

3. As EuroTopTech develops, the role of coaching changes: before, I would do everything “manually” in the coaching program; today, I’ve worked hard to automate a lot of it through the ETT Career Lab, which means that you can:

   1. Start autonomously with a cheap ETT subscription, doing the Career Lab on your own, following the path.

   2. Eventually join the program if you feel like you’re 80% there in landing the role, but you want to actually get there in the next few months, then maybe 2 or 3 months of coaching will be enough to get you there. So the program costs more but you’re expected to stay less time on it. In the end you spend the same or less, and my time in the coaching is better leveraged.

Coming soon:

• New videos on my YT Channel

• An article telling the story of where you should move to as a tech worker in Europe, from our new “R&D Lab”

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re a Euro Top Tech paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 16,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 4,000+ six-figure remote roles.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from other job boards by pasting their link, track your pipeline by company, and get your networking LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,400+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

I know I did.

When I was younger, I had these goals:

• get 100-200k TC in your 20s

• get a few promos to 300k, 450k, maybe 600k+

• ave up a few millions over a 10 years time span

When you look at it like this, it seems nice.

Who, after all, doesn’t like money, or impressive career achievements?

Also, part of it seems like an no-brainer:

"why not do the same job but in a company/location that pays more for doing the same thing"

You might sometimes see some of my content, displaying salary data from eurotoptech.com/data.

Like this Senior Engineering Manager at Google Poland 🇵🇱 making half a million a year:

Genuinely insane.

With a full-time job:

• Making $520k total comp before taxes

• $350k after taxes (33% total rate including social security)

• Spending 70k eur a year to live a luxury life in Warsaw as a single person

• Saving $270k a year

Here you can find a little explanation on how this is possible in the first place.

In short:

• Google L7 (senior eng manager) pay band in Poland is $350-450k

• Big part of TC at L7 is in RSU (stocks)

• Google stocks went up quite a bit in the past few years, not hard to turn a $400k offer into a $520k one

• Taxes: 33% tax rate above is thanks to RSU being taxed at a flat 19% in Poland; so it comes from a high (45%+) rate for the base salary and bonus part, and a flat 19% for the RSU. Total equiv. here becomes 33%

BTW, Poland 🇵🇱 now has an average Total Compensation (on ETT) higher than Germany 🇩🇪: 102k eur vs 95.6k eur.

By now, I know what you might be thinking:

«Holy shit! 500k a year! Saving 250k a year… In Poland! Can probably buy an apartment in cash in Warsaw each year. It’s insane! How can I get there?!»

But, are you really sure you want a Senior Engineering Manager role at Google?

In the above data entry for this manager, you might have noticed:

• 8/10 self-reported happiness

• 9/10 satisfaction from tax-paid services

Btw, kudos to Poland for making someone who’s dropping 140k euros each year in taxes feel like they’re getting a 9/10 deal with what they get in return for that. It’s actually not a rare case, as you can see here, where Poland is the 4th country in Europe for satisfaction from tax-paid services, after Switzerland, Czechia and Austria; before the Netherlands or Sweden!

But why just 8/10 happy? With such career success and so much money!

I actually ended up talking directly to this person, and here’s what they shared with me:

Happiness is 8/10 and not more because workload, stress and responsibilities are HIGH:

• 60 hours work weeks

• A life of corporate grind to get there

• Difficulty "stepping down" because skills that apply at Google Sr. Manager level not always transfer at other levels or companies

• Ambition and passion also play a role in making it harder to downgrade the job for better WLB

With such a high TC and saving rate, the next path for this person is reaching Financial Independence, and then evaluating:

• Taking a sabbatical

• Retiring early

• Looking for a part-time / fun job

Or anything else.

Btw, if you’re curious, you can check here for a few data-driven insights on what drives happiness, from our community data.

This type of story is also why I’m personally not the biggest fan of chasing FIRE.

From what I’ve seen, a lot of people end up chasing FIRE because:

• They don’t really know what they’d like to do in life, just that they’d rather not have to work for money

• They’re in a high-paying career that doesn’t really fulfil them much, but they also have no idea on what else to do, and maybe little time to figure that out, so they just postpone this evaluation to after they’ve reached Financial Independence

I think chasing CoastFIRE is a more rational and “sophisticated” way to go about building and living a fulfilling life.

The Value of High-Paying Tech Careers

In my opinion, it’s not in chasing a 5M net worth or a director role in a big tech company.

Obviously, we’re all different, and for some people that might be an amazing path!

I just think that this subset of people is a strict minority.

And I think the majority of people will benefit much more from a path like this:

1. Target top-paying tech companies

2. Land one or more top-paying roles

3. Save 50-300k euros

This will teach you how to:

• Grind

• Perform at high levels

• Carry a tough task to completion

And it’ll give you a life-changing money buffer.

(compared to having nothing to your name and needing your pay check for next month’s bills)

A few years of chasing high-paying tech careers can benefit a lot of people.

Dedicating 10+ years to that same game though... meh.

I think it’s only the right path for few.

One thing I often discuss with my coaching clients, is their mid/long term goals.

Some want to become industry experperts (maybe even within big tech), others want to grow a real estate portfolio, others want to retire early and start freelancing, other wants to grow their career and later leverage their experience in small startups, others want to do something similar to what I did (content + small businesses).

Life is like a tree 🌳

Taking the branch of high-paying tech careers, at least to the 100-300k comp levels, can have many benefits.

From there, there’s many other branches that become available and that you can choose from: one of them is climbing the big tech ladder, but it’s far from being the only one.

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 16,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 4,000+ six-figure remote roles.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from other job boards by pasting their link, track your pipeline by company, and get your networking LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,300+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

Tl;dr:

• It did a nice +18.9% YoY growth compared to Q1 2025

• But, it did only +6% compared to my quarterly avg of 2025, while my goal in 2026 is to make 20% more than in 2025; so it's ~14 points off below target, not 6 as I originally wrote in last quarter’s recap (I’ve now updated the article, correcting the math)

What about Q2

• Only +1.3% compared to Q2 2025

• But Q2 2025 had been my best quarter last year, so the flat YoY is less bad than it looks

• Against my 2025 quarterly avg, Q2 did +12%; better than Q1’s +6%, but still short of the +20% 2026 target

• This leaves H1 2026 about 9% behind where it needs to be for the yearly goal

Now, I don’t take this +20% goal all that seriously, if I’m being frank.

I mostly just keep it as a small benchmark to have fun around, and a little push to make sure I do well enough.

Work wise, it’s been a good quarter

First half still kept my content / product / coaching / research split, typical of my last year.

Then after around April I started dropping all the research around relocation that has taken me literally an infinite amount of time since starting this business.

You can see some of the outcomes here:

This really exhausted pretty much all I could research around this topic.

You might have seen many attempts I’ve had at leaving Switzerland (“why still live in the most expensive country in the world if I’m earning remotely”), then I went on to create AI tools to see if it was foolish or reasonable to stay or leave.

On one hand: this was a lot of wasted time.

On the other hand: it has made me a sort of expert on these remote life setups (also useful and connected to helping remote tech workers in Europe), and cleared my mind about what’s out there.

At some point during Q2, I finished my research on the topic, with these conclusions/countries:

• Switzerland gonna stay my base for the foreseeable future, since right now I don’t have kids and I can balance out its costs with a trifecta setup, and enjoy the benefits as well as quite and nature-full months there, while alternating with different vibes when I’m abroad

• Later on, depending on income and business scale, I’ll assess

• Other countries I have found that would be good options if I’ll want something with different vibes and lower costs are Cyprus and Croatia - great in their own versions (and with their own pitfalls, same as Switzerland and any other country, in the end); Poland, Czechia and Estonia could potentially also be some options, but even less likely as of now

This freed up a lot of time, which I channelled into core business activities.

Which allowed to be shipping much more.

End of Q2 and start of Q3 have been high shipping months.

On all fronts: coaching, EuroTopTech, content.

This wasn’t reflected in Q2 yet, but

Q3 started with my biggest month ever

In fact, first time hitting $10k a month 🎉 🥳

And month is not even over yet! 😁 Would be cool to end at 10k+ eur 🤞

Next month is also looking promising, so there’s a good chance that Q3 could be a good quarter, and a sort of payoff quarter after 2+ years of building this business (my first business, after my career working in tech as a software engineer).

Only time will tell.

I’ll just keep building, happy about my day to day life feeling more tranquil, energising and rewarding than ever, which for me is the real win, rather than this or that revenue milestone.

In the end, my 2026 goals were on both business and life fronts, as I also wrote in my end of year reflection last year.

It’s also amazing to see the impact of my work, with a growing number of customers (of both coaching and platform) landing new top roles and changing their life thanks to that.

Feels like compounding of all the work done so far.

Since 10k a month is a bit of a milestone in the online business community, I’ve dropped a little reflection post on X about it, feel free to read it in full here.

Here’s a preview:

And, on a less serious note, on my ig you can see some ways I enjoyed my free time in the past quarter 😊 In short: Swiss nature, lots of cooking with my gf (we’re 100% foodie), some little trips to France, a vacation in Italy, and a bit of Warsaw city life.

Lots of focus on work, but also some resting and life enjoyment :)

Thank you for tagging along this journey!

To the new joiners, and (especially) to the early days “fans”!

None of this would be possible without your support 🫶❤️

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re a Euro Top Tech paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 16,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 4,000+ six-figure remote roles.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from other job boards by pasting their link, track your pipeline by company, and get your networking LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,300+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

• Remote GOATs bundle for tech workers focusing on worldwide remote roles.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

Tech compensation in Europe is a complex topic.

It demands a high level of sophistication, if one wants to understand things well.

I consider myself an expert in this domain, having spent years researching it for my own tech career in Europe, and later having built a business around it, comprising of:

• This newsletter (The European Engineer): to the best of my knowledge, the nr.1 newsletter on high-paying tech careers in Europe.

• Euro Top Tech: the nr.1 job board and career platform for high-paying tech careers in Europe.

• My coaching program: which allows me to regularly work side-by-side with tech workers in Europe in landing six-figure tech jobs in Europe or remotely.

Euro Top Tech gathers lots of data, which I leveraged to create a free-to-consult artifact, summarising a lot of insights:

The European Software Engineer Compensation Report

It blends 1,388 (as of July 2026) data points around pay, cost of living and life quality, from tech workers in Europe with data from 15,255 curated top-tier job listings.

It builds a nuanced picture, worth looking at and keeping as a reference.

It will be constantly updated, in real-time, and the plan is for every year to progressively build a new one, creating “logs” of Europe’s tech market.

In today’s article, I’ll share a few key findings from the report (and more).

You can consult the full report at this link.

Community data (1388 entries, at the time of writing this article):

Median pay across Europe, for senior engineers:

The white line (whisker) shows the tail percentile (data that sits around the median).

You can see how Switzerland has the highest median, but the UK, Netherlands, Lithuania, Romania and Poland can significantly punch above their weight for top profiles and comp packages.

Savings (what is left after tax and cost of living) reorder the map:

Switzerland stays on tops, but the median gap shrinks, and countries in Central and Eastern Europe like Poland, Romania or Lithuania shoot up.

The UK climbs down, due to high cost of living and high taxes.

Do people save more in capital cities, or in smaller towns?

It depends.

Looking at eurotoptech.com/data/financial (tracks averages instead of medians), we see a different picture between Western and Eastern Europe.

• Average savings in Western Europe:

  • Switzerland: 50k; Zurich: 60k

  • UK: 37k; London: 48k

  • Netherlands: 34k; Amsterdam: 44k

• Average savings in Central/Eastern Europe:

  • Poland: 36k; Warsaw: 36k (interesting!)

  • Romania: 32k; Bucharest: 35k

  • Lithuania: 41k; Vilnius: 36k

The reason for this discrepancy, is that there’s more remote work in Central/Eastern Europe. Especially at higher levels of pay.

And if your country highest pay packages are for remote roles, you’ll naturally be saving more living outside of expensive capital cities.

I’ve asked Fable if this theory is backed by data, and the answer is YES:

With a couple of caveats:

How seniority impacts compensation:

Median reported total comp: €45,000 entry, €61,750 mid, €88,000 senior, €120,000 staff.

This proves that the two (obvious) levers for increasing pay and savings are:

• Better job/company/country

• More seniority

Also, around 32% of the 1,388 engineers reporting clear €100k before tax. This also shows how Euro Top Tech community data doesn’t track national averages, but roughly the top 10-50% of Europe’s tech market. In other words: you guys rock! 😎🤙

Does money buy happiness?

From our community data, it seems like: yes, it kinda does.

What CORRELATES THE MOST WITH HAPPINESS:

• How much you spend / your lifestyle

• How much you save

People who manage to do both, report highest happiness.

And… Majority of them, are high-pay remote workers living in Central/Eastern Europe. Frugal savers in high-cost locations report lower happiness than those.

Further proof:

Don’t be a frugal FIRE-seeker!! It’s bad for your happiness :)

Job Board Data (from 15,255 curated top-tier job listings)

As you know, Euro Top Tech job board splits in two:

1. Big Tech / HFT / Scaleup jobs (high-pay, mostly onsite/hybrid):

   

2. Six-figure fully-remote companies/jobs:

   

I looked at both, and I promise:

The insights you’ll now see are something you’ve never seen 👀🔥👇

Looking at the first group (onsite/hybrid jobs):

This is my favorite graph from the report.

It shows, in very clear terms, how much these jobs make you save, but also how many of them there are.

I’ve always said, especially on LinkedIn:

• Companies being equal: Zurich offers the highest pay and savings in Europe

• Problem is that Zurich is small, number of high-paying companies is little, jobs are competitive

• London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Warsaw: offer lower pay/savings than Zurich, but also have much bigger markets, meaning that it’s gonna be easier landing top jobs there than in Zurich

• This explains why, in the previously-shared community data, Zurich and Switzerland average and median pay and savings aren’t radically different from other top spots in Europe (‘cause more people can enter top companies in larger markets)

One data that is missing - but that I’m collecting and that I’ll be sharing in the future 😈 - is how many people apply to each location.

I’ll get this data, then layer it onto the graph, and it will improve the intel on how hard it is to get a job in each market (function of both market size i.e. number of jobs, and demand i.e. number of applicants).

A little spoiler 😉:

That’s not all.

This graph is the same as the above, but from the remote jobs page:

And, to close this 2D analysis:

Merging both job boards (onsite/big-tech + remote):

This puts data behind a claim that I’ve made over and over again:

That Poland is a top market to target as a tech worker in Europe.

Combines great onsite big tech opportunities, with a very geo-optimised setup for remote work.

The early data (shown above) about where people apply shows how few people apply to jobs in Poland, likely making it the easiest market to get top roles in.

The UK remains the biggest market no matter how you look at it: not just onsite, but also for remote roles.

There is more local high-paying startups than anywhere else in Europe, hiring remotely from there is easier for US startups than elsewhere in Europe (due to simple setup and low language friction).

Switzerland stays the niche, cream of the crop option for:

• Top talent who can land top roles in the toughest market

• Average talent who’s OK with local low-six-figure jobs

Other markets offer interesting opportunities, depending on what you’re looking at.

Being open to more than one market is one of the highest levers you can pull, to boost your tech career in Europe.

Here you can see which countries rank well for reported happiness and satisfaction from tax-paid services levels, from our community:

For more data from the community, go here.

I hope you found this report valuable!

It’s not gonna be the last of its kind.

In fact: we’re just getting started!

Lots of new intel coming in the next few weeks and months 🔥 Stay tuned!

If you want to help the data to get sharper, add your numbers anonymously HERE.

It takes two minutes and feeds the same live dataset.

If you found this useful, forward it to one tech worker in Europe who needs to see it!

Best,

Nicola

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re already a paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 8,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 4,000+ six-figure remote roles.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from other job boards by pasting their link, track your pipeline by company, and get your networking LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,300+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

New features, results, possible price changes, etc.

To stay more uptodate with insights and reflections on tech careers in Europe, make sure to follow me on X or on LinkedIn.

And stay tuned here: some really tough/cool articles in the making! 🔥

New features and updates for Euro Top Tech:

All paid tiers, including Job Board Tier:

• Job alerts: save a search on either board, get new matches by email.

Gold tier + old “premium”/grandfathered tiers:

1. Career Lab Outreach tab:

LinkedIn message reviewer with the guide’s templates:

But also: contact planner, past messages reviews history, conversation-reply mode that reviews replies against the whole thread, and more.

To support you in making meaningful connections on LinkedIn, expand your network, get pivotal advice, and apply with referral to the top roles (hard to land interviews otherwise).

2. Career Lab Tracker rework:

Add as many roles as you want (from EuroTopTech as well as from other platforms), add a job by pasting its link when a job comes from outside ETT, view target roles or target companies by switching toggle (useful if you have many roles from same companies), check/select which roles to feed the Skills Pattern Analysis.

3. Path activation:

Introduced last week. But further iterated to make it ‘better’.

What’s next for Euro Top Tech

My goal is relatively simple: with my coaching program, I reliably get people incredible jobs; with Euro Top Tech, I want to democratise access to these results.

The Career Lab is what I build trying to replicate and automate the work we do in the coaching.

The other changes in the job board (better filters, AI matches, more companies, more precise compensation estimates, etc) make the coaching/job search easier.

Pricing and plans

I’m thinking of moving away from the current Job Tier + Gold Tier model, and moving to a single paid model that includes everything.

Let me explain:

When I started the Gold Tier model, the product was quite amateurish, and almost a “crowdfunding initiative”: «show me some financial commitment, and I’ll work on making this MVP much better».

This was the idea of every early plan: the 5 eur/mo 50 eur/year, the 9 eur/mo 75 eur/year, the 19 eur/mo and 89 eur/year, etc.

Then, the product started having too much stuff to be given away in cheap monthly plans. So I created the job board tier: to have cheap monthly/quarterly/yearly plans offering jobs but without giving away all the value and intel for too cheap.

The problem with the current Gold Tier:

• It’s too cheap for what it offers

• It’s too expensive for many people who’re new to the product and unsure if to commit for one year

The likely new/future model:

I think I’ll remove the Job Board Tier, and only have one paid tier: with monthly, quarterly and/or half-yearly, and yearly plans.

This paid tier will include everything: not just the job board, but also the guides, the career lab, the community, etc.

Not sure about the prices yet, but maybe about 2x what I’m currently charging for the job tier plan.

This would:

• Make the price per use/time more fair

• Create lower barrier to entry to the full Euro Top Tech experience

ETA:

Still unsure, maybe sometime in the next few weeks.

Coaching

Very dialled-in program at the moment.

Improving Euro Top Tech also allows me to automate part of the program, and make the 1:1s with my clients much more high leverage.

Moreover, the 2 years of experience running the program made me develop a better intuition on what works and what doesn’t. And this enables me to stop people early from paths that waste them time (often: personal projects, courses, certifications, etc).

As well as noticing anti-patterns early (having too broad of a focus, not narrowing down the target roles/companies enough, not putting in enough hours per week, changing strategy too often, etc).

The various successes also led to some word of mouth, that led to a steep increase in applications.

Right now the program is SOLD OUT

You can still apply and, if passing the selection, can secure a spot in the waiting list (by paying a retainer of 500 euros in advance).

To adjust offer and demand, keep my schedule sustainable and demand low enough, work with the most motivated candidates, as well as reflect the increased value the program provides, prices might increase here too.

If you apply now and enter the waiting list, you’ll be assured the current prices for the entirety of your coaching journey: 750 eur/mo for the lightweight program and 1’000 eur/mo for the full program.

If you apply after the prices have changed, you’ll have the new prices: probably, 1’000 eur/mo for the lightweight version, and 1200-1300 eur/mo for the full version.

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re already a paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 8,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, plus 4,000+ six-figure remote roles.

• AI Career Lab: a six-stage path to your next role. It scores your target roles, reviews your CV, shows your exact skills gaps, and preps you for interviews, with a weekly email that keeps you moving.

• Application tracker + outreach tools: track your target roles, add jobs from other job boards by pasting their link, track your pipeline by company, and get your networking LinkedIn messages reviewed before you send them.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,300+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for connection, feedback and networking.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

Good news:

You can also actually do 10x what you could do before AI :)

Here’s how I used AI to encode 2 years of coaching into Euro Top Tech 👇

Big update today.

I just shipped this: https://www.eurotoptech.com/career-lab?tab=path

Here’s the tl;dr story:

I fed an AI a lot of documents and logs from my coaching sessions, gathered over two years of work, and had it help me try to “automate” the work we do in coaching for EuroTopTech customers. So that it becomes easier for you all to land the roles you find on ETT.

One thing is having quick, convenient access to these roles and their pay, another (arguably, much more important) is actually landing them.

Anyway, what it created is a “Path” tab on the Career Lab page.

There, you quickly describe your current role, visa/permit, experience and goals, and it gets you started on the process of getting the role of your dreams.

The first thing it does is give you an AI-generated assessment of your situation and recommend a track. (You can always iterate on it later and re-create another track/path if you don’t like the one you got.)

I told it I’ve been an entrepreneur for two years now, but that I want a 120k+ EUR/yr remote role, and/or a similarly paid Swiss role that’s remote-flexible (just for testing it).

It created this analysis, and to be honest, it’s a very good one:

It’s a bit crazy, because I’ve sometimes thought: “I wonder how easy it’d be to coach myself into a new role, in case I want or need one later.” And, genuinely, the analysis it gave me is not one I could have done this well on my own, without an external coach looking at my situation from the outside.

And that analysis is just the first step of the path the platform outlines for you.

What follows a six-stage automated path:

With specific tasks you can work on and get feedback on from a custom-trained AI.

It links you to the correct guides and tools along the way, so you also know when to use what.

It should really help you in the challenging path of getting a top-paying role in Europe or remotely!

To help you stay consistent, you also get weekly emails reminding you where you’re at and pointing you to the next steps:

(you can unsubscribe any time from the email reminders if you don’t want them)

Try it out if you’re a Gold/Master tier sub!

Or sub here if you aren’t.

Let me know if you have any feedback or recommendations on how to improve the experience!

Either replying to this email, or on Discord, or on my other socials.

Have a great rest of the weekend!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, including remote roles paying $100k–500k.

• AI Career Lab: track your applications, get AI feedback on your CV, and see the exact skills gaps between you and your target roles.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,000+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for referrals and intros.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

If you want to learn more about how they’ll change check out this article.

2 weeks ago I published an article on how “slowing down can speed you up”.

And that’s more or less what I did recently:

Took a few days to slow down at end of May, then June has been one of my most productive months ever.

So much shipping for EuroTopTech:

As well on internal tools that I built to help with ops and content.

And just clarity on vision + intensity of execution.

Creating the right environment for locking in can be quite useful.

In this sense, the quarters I spend in Switzerland (within my trifecta setup) are always very good for these grinding streaks:

So, what did I build for y’all?

First 2 weeks of June:

You can check out this and this article for what was built in the first 2 weeks of June.

Tl';dr:

• UI/UX revamp

• Automatic CV → Jobs matching

• Shareable Career Lab dashboard (with your coach)

• Cleaner jobs data with better filtering

• Moved out of Google Sheet for the Crowdsourced Data page

Past 2 weeks (new):

1. Gave steroids to the Crowdsourced Data page

FYI: this data page is about tech workers in Europe sharing how much they earn, spend, save and pay in taxes, and how happy they’re (in general, and with their country).

Progress here has been really insane.

A few notable things happened:

1.1. Over 200 new data contributions, largely thanks to X, where I’ve started sharing posts like this which got a lot of tractions

1.2. This was also possible because now you can check all the single entries and not just the medians/averages:

1.3. And you can also click on each submission to see the single entry in detail (which is also what I started sharing on X → got traction → 200 new entries):

But I didn’t stop here.

As I got more data, I was able to gather a lot of data for the happiness + infra stats:

1.4. Which then allowed me to have enough data to startup an “overall ranking” page:

Pretty cool shit if you ask me, and can only get better from here.

1.4. Ah, I also added a Map Visualisation for checking Gross TC and Yearly Savings in Europe:

2. Created a compensation report page / study

This is a big one, and it deserves its own newsletter article and YouTube video.

In the meantime, you can check it out here (lmk what you think :)).

3. Further iterated on UX/UI and improved homepage

4. Job Board

4.1. Added a “Remote from Anywhere” filter in the remote jobs section

4.2. Significantly improved the compensation and savings estimate for each job

Especially in the onsite jobs section (easier to estimate those for onsite jobs than in remote, but improvements on this will come also for the remote jobs ;)).

Before I was using broad estimates, mostly influenced by seniority and country (since the jobs in the onsite page are all from high/top-paying companies).

But now I introduced clustering of compensations levels: companies like Anthropic/OpenAI/Jane Street in tier 0, Palantir/Databricks/Citadel in tier 1, Google/Uber in tier 2, Booking/MongoDB in tier 3, Revolut/Bending Spoons in tier 4, etc.

Plan is to expand number of clusters and more specific location data to make it even more precise, both on income and on taxes / cost of living (and thus savings) side.

4.3. Few minor things like possibility to remove your CV if you don’t want to see the “CV-job fit” badge, or some mobile UX/UI polishes.

Pretty cool stuff, right?? 😃

Also decent growth on X reaching over 2400 followers there:

It’s not all success and celebrations

Some days have been harder than others.

It’s not been a way of working that is very sustainable.

Not every improvement I made - be it on ops/automation, software and social media side - has corresponded to an increase in revenue.

But, all in all: very proud of all that I’ve shipped.

Now I’m very excited to land it in your hands and listen to your feedback!

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re already a paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, including remote roles paying $100k–500k.

• AI Career Lab: track your applications, get AI feedback on your CV, and see the exact skills gaps between you and your target roles.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,000+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for referrals and intros.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

At the end of this week:

1. Euro Top Tech Gold Tier goes from €89 to €99/year

2. Remote GOATs’ yearly plan also goes to €99

3. Master Plan (gives access to both Euro Top Tech and Remote GOATs) to €139

If you’re already subscribed, you keep your current price.

Nothing changes.

If you’ve been on the fence, you have a few days to lock in the current prices.

Why the price is going up

This shouldn’t come as a surprise as it’s the strategy I’ve always applied since I started selling things online (day 1 subscribers of what is now Euro Top Tech are still paying 5 euro a month and 60 euro a year :)).

The logic is simple: as the product grows and improves, prices adapt to reflect that.

Here’s some of what I’ve shipped recently:

• The second CV guide (published today). This one includes 3 real examples from my coaching program: actual CVs from people who landed top roles.

• AI Career Lab: AI based tools that reproduce ‘for cheap’ what I help coaching customers with

  • AI CV reviewer

  • A Career Strategy helper that helps you map your Plan A / B / C, and assess what skills need work

• AI CV matching for jobs: every role on the board gets scored and ranked against your actual CV, so your filtering and job browsing becomes 10x faster.

• A meaningfully better UI/UX across the platform: faster, cleaner, less in your way.

And more is coming.

Remote GOATs got a little revamp too, as well as having landed the AI CV-Jobs matcher and most of the above AI Career Lab and guides.

When I launched Gold at €89, Euro Top Tech was a job board with some guides.

Today it is a:

• Curated job board

• Growing library of guides built from real outcomes

• Private community

• Stack of AI tools that support you in the ambitious path of six-figure tech careers in Europe

€99 is honestly still cheap for you get, and for what the platform can do to your earning potential.

The €139 Master Plan gives you access to 2 platforms.

And it’s best suited to those with a focus on remote work (since it includes remote jobs outside Europe and the relocation advisor), and/or to those wanting to move to Europe from abroad (it can offer six-figure remote roles you can do in your country, and with whom you could move to Europe under a DNV).

Thank you for your attention 🙏

See you inside,

Nicola

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, including remote roles paying $100k–500k.

• AI Career Lab: track your applications, get AI feedback on your CV, and see the exact skills gaps between you and your target roles.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,000+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for referrals and intros.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

That’s what happened when I took a break few weeks ago and then came back to work.

Last week I shared some features that I had recently shipped, and others from the backlog.

Stepping back, as well as marking 2 years since starting Euro Top Tech, helped me clarify the vision for this project.

AI has also been getting very good, and it’s making me much faster.

This is why, today, I’m excited to share with you:

✨👽 THE VISION 👽✨

To turn Euro Top Tech into a powerful AI platform that gives you ALL YOU NEED to land TOP tech jobs in Europe.

And makes it as easy as possible for you to get there.

This has actually always been the goal. But I can now better leverage:

• The knowledge acquired in helping over 15 coaching clients land six-figure roles

• The technological power of AI + my skills + what the platform already does

To actually make this a reality, fast.

Without further ado…

Here’s some changes shipped this week 👇

(which go in this direction 👽)

1. FRESH new look

Full redesign, check it out at eurotoptech.com!

2. AI-powered CV → job matching

Drop in your CV (stored safely just in your browser) and:

2.1. Each Job get a Fit Score based on your CV

You can also sort jobs based on it:

2.2. You can also run an additional AI-powered analysis

To see, among the jobs with the highest match, which ones really do match very well:

When you click on the job, it’ll also tell you more in detail the result of the analysis:

3. Levelled-up /data page

Browse individual (anonymised) salary entries in a sortable table, click into any country, city, or entry for detail, and share any view with its own link.

The entire Google Sheet (if you remember) moved to eurotoptech.com/data now.

You can also add your contributions without leaving the site.

Plus a few other improvements:

• Tech Role filters: Engineering, Data & ML, Business, Ops, etc.

• Smarter location classification: Europe-focused with cleaned-up locations.

• Easier navigation + nicer sharing: Career Lab and Guides are easier to find, and sharing any role, city is made easier. Share with your coach is also a new way to privately share your Career Lab dashboard with a mentor or coach.

• Better UX: tidier, more mobile-friendly filters, views, and overall experience.

Not bad for a week of work!

Made also easier by the compounding of the past two years’ work, of course :)

I’ve also managed to improve my internal ops, which should allow me to handle all my work (platform, tech, coaching, admin) much faster.

So, stay tuned 🤓 👽

And let me know how you like things so far! Both in the Discord or by email.

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe

• 15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, including remote roles paying $100k–500k.

• AI Career Lab: track your applications, get AI feedback on your CV, and see the exact skills gaps between you and your target roles.

• Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,000+ real engineer reports.

• Private guides plus a members’ Discord for referrals and intros.

Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers

• Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.

Six Figure Euro Engineer — work 1:1 with me

• Coaching with me, Nicola Amadio (who writes this newsletter). Join the engineers who’ve 2–3x’d their pay and freedom over the past few months.

As you might have seen, for the past ~3 weeks, I’ve taken a break from the newsletter: from the 21st May article until yesterday’s robotics vs software comp article (12th June).

Why take a break?

When I published the last ETT update, I mentioned I was going somewhere.

That was Dijon, France.

A great place at a 2h20m train from Zurich, highly recommend!

Lots of fun!

Before Dijon, I had been on a 2 months “semi lock-in” phase.
(common when I go back to Switzerland after spending time in places like Warsaw)

But, sometimes, I try to book some time off work, and going on these little trips is a way to enforce that.

For instance, before Dijon, I promised my gf I would complete my important task before leaving, such that I’d be free and present.

Then, after I came back, I still had a somewhat clean calendar (cause I cleaned it before leaving). Also, the weather was super hot (like 30 degrees Celsius everyday).

So I ended up spending the following week roaming around the city:

Which was great and very refreshing :D

I also did some work, but without pressures or schedules. No tasks.

That’s also why I “forgot” (rather ‘forwent’) to post my newsletter articles.

Taking time off is not a waste of time

We all know it, and we all kinda don’t believe it either 😁

But check out this interesting framework:

That’s a bit what I did too.

Taking time off from the “urgent” tasks and the regular deadlines (including publishing articles), allowed me to zoom out and see the big pictures.

I kinda realised that sending newsletters every week doesn’t really move the needle.

If I have stuff that I want/need to do, that can speed me up long term (such as automating some ops), I can just pause the newsletter and do that.

“slow down to speed up”

It can work sometimes.

Anyway, here’s some updates on what I did in the past few weeks, and on what I plan to do next 🤓

Done ✅:

• Shipped UX/UI upgrades on ETT: smoother search, keyboard shortcuts, search bar, better mobile experience, and general polish/accessibility improvements

• Migrated EuroTopTech.com/data out of Google Sheet / Google Form: now you can simply add your data (anonymously) there, and see it impact the resulting stats, after I’ve manually approved it; next is building some cool new ways to view this data on that same page

• Started building a new European tech compensation report, with some very cool data in it, targeting shipping it later next week

• Improved job data quality: better automated cleanup for expired jobs, and a new way for users to manually flag expired jobs for review

• Internal ops and infra work

• Other stuff (coaching, content, SEO, business strategy etc)

Next, on ETT ⏳:

• Add a “remote, not require explicit location” filter

• Better data collection and visualisation, and data-driven insights on the European tech market

• Improve location classifiers and filtering in general

• Mid/long-term: speed up / automate the job search even more, and more reliably get people job offers

As always, feel free to request features and provide feedback on my work, including on this newsletter!

Either here, or in the Discord, if you’re already a paid sub.

For more frequent updates, don’t forget to follow on:

• X - for relocation, lifestyle, taxes, tech careers

• LinkedIn - for tech careers and remote work

• Ig - for travel pics

Have a great Sunday!

Nic

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

These are two Zurich startups with small teams:

• Founded by Italians

• Born around 2025

• ~4-6M funding

• High-caliber

• Small teams

One pays interns 2.7k eur net/month.

The other, according to their listing: 3k to 4-4.5k eur/month net.

I guess the difference in full-time salaries will be similar.

There is a stark difference in pay between software and robotics

Usually, at comparable “tiers”, robotics companies pay less than software companies.

I started noticing it 13 years ago, when I started my bachelor in robotics.

This was in fact one of the reasons why I switched from robotics to software. In addition to software being more interesting for me, and software companies having offices in big cities’ downtowns and generally nicer perks.

Why does robotics pay less than software?

Software companies are generally higher margins: in robotics you need to pay hardware and manufacturing, which in software you generally don’t.

They are also easier to start and scale. This in turns creates larger markets, high labour demand, and ultimately higher salaries.

If you’re an AI engineer or similar, and you’re assessing if to go robotics or software, it’s worth keeping this in mind.

Will this change over the next 10 years?

In my opinion: unlikely.

Best it can happen for people in robotics is the compensation gap to narrow down. I think it’s extremely unlikely that robotics companies will start paying more than software companies.

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

And…

New Demo of Euro Top Tech

Lots of new features added in past few months!

Maybe next I’ll do a demo video for RemoteGOATs.com too 🤔

I’m almost arrived to my weekend fun destination!

If you wanna see some silly posts about the trip check out my X and read here about one of my favourite reasons to stay based in Zurich even though it’s the most expensive city in the world and I work remotely: its central location (great for little trips like the one I’m about to do :D)

Or if you like this kind of content, check out my ig too ^^

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

We out with a new video:

Since it’s my usual long rant, I asked Gemini to summarise it:

«This video by Nicola Amadio provides a detailed, unfiltered analysis of the tech job market in Zurich and Switzerland as of 2026.

He breaks the market down into several key segments and discusses the economic reality for tech workers ranging from juniors to seniors.

Core Market Segments

• Big Tech (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.):

  • The Appeal: Offers the highest salaries in Europe (up to 200k USD for workers in their 20s). [03:00 - here and throughout the post: this indicates timestamp in the video when I talk about this]

  • The Trend: Moving heavily toward R&D and AI (Computer Vision, Robotics, Augmented Reality). [05:51]

  • The Catch: Extremely competitive and a relatively small market (less than 100 open roles compared to hundreds in London). [04:03]

• Innovative Startups (Deep Tech & Robotics):

  • The Focus: Often founded by ETH/EPFL graduates focusing on “Physical AI” and manufacturing. [10:21]

  • The Reality: Surprisingly low pay. Nicola cites examples of interns making ~3k CHF and full-time juniors earning 60k–80k CHF, which is barely a living wage in Zurich. [14:04]

  • Strategy: These companies “prey” on talented graduates who want to work on cool tech but are underpaid for the cost of living. [15:00]

• Local Corporations & Subsidiaries (Banks, Pharma, Fortune 500):

  • The Setup: More traditional, boring projects with better work-life balance (8-to-5) and mid-range salaries (90k–150k CHF). [19:55]

  • The Decline: Many of these roles are being offshored to Eastern Europe or Portugal because hiring in Switzerland has become too expensive due to the strong Swiss Franc. [22:08]

Strategic Advice by Career Level

• For Juniors/Students:

  • If you can’t get into Big Tech in Zurich, Nicola suggests looking at Big Tech in Poland or Spain. [32:41]

  • He argues that earning 3k EUR (Big Tech Spain intern salary) in Barcelona provides a much higher quality of life and better savings potential than 3k CHF (Zurich startup intern salary) in Zurich. [31:00]

• For Senior Engineers:

  • Remote is King: Senior engineers can often land 100k–150k EUR remote roles elsewhere in Europe. [35:00]

  • Financially, staying in Zurich as a senior outside of Big Tech often doesn’t make sense once you factor in high costs like childcare (~3k CHF per month per child). [23:04] Unless you particularly like Switzerland’s standard of living.

The “Yay or Nay” Verdict

• Yay: If you are a “Top 1%” R&D talent who can land a Big Tech research role or if you value Swiss stability, safety, and public schools for your family. [35:51]

• Nay: For the “average” developer. Nicola argues the market is shrinking, wage dumping is occurring, and the “cheat code” of high Swiss salaries for average work is disappearing. [25:56]

Watch the full video here:

Lemme know what you think!

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

Found them on X, with just ~1500 followers and a couple of months of posting.

---

One month ago I launched Forfettariato.com, after observing the following:

1. Many countries in Europe have low cost of living and <20% taxes for 5 figures earners

Italy, Slovenia, Albania, Poland, Czechia, Croatia, and more.

2. Western companies are increasingly nearshoring in Eastern and Southern Europe

Can find great talent, half the cost of Western Europe, 30% the cost of the US.

3. I am the leading content creator for Tech Workers in Europe: ~64k on LinkedIn, 15k on Substack, 2.5k on YT

My content is about 6 figure tech careers in Europe, both onsite and remotely.

My B2C products already cater to that audience:

• Euro Top Tech: 15k+ six-figure tech Jobs in Europe + AI Career Lab + Discord Community

• Remote GOATs 🐐: 10k+ six-figure tech Jobs worldwide + AI Relocation Advisor + AI Career Lab

Not everyone can land six-figure tech jobs in Europe or six-figure remote tech jobs, though.

And not everyone wants the stress that comes with it.

There’s a space for high-quality 5 figure tech jobs remote in Europe: good companies, skilled workers.

It’s in wanting to build that space that Forfettariato.com was born.

---

Launched about a month ago.

1 month = no sales

Then, Lionel Rudaz, who I met on X talking about wine and Switzerland, posted a Head of Lifecycle Marketing role for Properstar.

Properstar is a global real estate platform that connects buyers and sellers by aggregating millions of property listings from over 60 countries.

The role is about using Hubspot and Claude to manage the customer journey of real estate agents, from sign-up to paying customer. Managing a small team of 3, and reporting directly to the CPO (Lionel).

Pay is 32-48 eur/hour (equiv. to ~55-90k eur/year if FTE), remote in Europe: enough to live like a King/Queen in 50% of Europe with the right setup.

Thanks Lionel Rudaz and Properstar for trusting me and the platform!

If you’re interested in this job or you want to post a job yourself (only 50 eur/mo for the first 20 customers), here’s the links:

• Head of Lifecycle Marketing job

• Forfettariato.com post a job

Can also share this post with anyone in your network who might be interested in the role.

Pro tip 😎: since you already know who the hiring manager for this role is, you can also write a WELL-CRAFTED (no AI slop or 10 pages romance novel) DM to the right person.

If you want to learn how to send these DMs, here’s a guide for you on just that.

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

To celebrate 2 years of being in business, I’m offering a:

10% discount on Euro Top Tech and on my Coaching Program

For the next 24 hours.

Learn more about it at the end of this article (or just use the promo code ‘BIRTHDAY10’ at checkout if purchasing a Euro Top Tech subscription).

Now let’s get started!

I’ll tell a bit on how the business went in the past 2 years since I started it, if I’m happy with the results, and if I think it was worth it or not (no spoiler :P).

In April 2024, I launched the first version of my coaching program

The first cohort of clients started in May 2024 - exactly 2 years ago.

First application ever (from my man Nicola Bovolato):

He then went from “applying to 200+ positions with only rejections”, to, in 3 months, having multiple six figure offers, some of them fully-remote, to choose from:

Since then, he has:

• Moved to Cyprus to maxx lifestyle and cut taxes

• Saved up a great financial buffer before even turning 25

• Started his own freelance practice as a Senior Engineer and fractional CTO

Another early applicant was looking for top positions in AI:

And ended up founding an AI company himself 😄

Another early applicant from Switzerland:

Eventually scoring a $200k remote role:

This last one took a bit of time: a few months in the coaching program, then tried things a bit on his own, then back to the program and finally landing a very tough role to land: $200k remote in Europe.

Many other such cases and clients, that we can deep dive later in the future (let me know if you want me to do that, btw! Just reply to this email something like: “yes, please more case studies”).

Euro Top Tech went from this (June 2024):

To this (May 2026):

And more…

Will probably do a new demo video about how the platform has changed recently, with all its new features and improvements.

How much money did I make?

Well, as you might already know…

• About ~70k eur in 2025.

• Now targeting ~85k eur in 2026 (i.e. +20% from 2025) 🤞

This means that…

Even if in 2026 I achieve my financial business goal, I’ll be making HALF of what I made in 2023 with my last tech role.

That’s the truth that online business gurus out there don’t tell you 😄

I recently called out one of these gurus on X:

Same guy that says these things:

It’s sad that people fall for this stuff, but it is what it is.

I have a bigger audience than him (about ~80k total followers vs ~40k), make more than him with my business, so according to him I should be ELITE.

Which in a way it is the truth: I am a very rare case of someone who was able to build a large audience on social media and bootstrap a diversified business that actually makes (some) money.

What is also true, though, is that:

I make less than half of what I made 2 years ago as an employee in tech.

And that majority of the people I help out in my coaching program (regular people that invest in their job search) land roles that pay 2x/3x of what I make.

They get to buy houses etc:

This is the reality of the situation here, and the reality of bootstrapping your own business.

I know I posted often about this topic lately, and I don’t plan to touch on this topic again anytime soon.

I just see too much misleading content out there and I feel a strong urge to call out on a lot of it being bs and misleading marketing.

Am I happy about it? Do I regret going this route?

I think, 2 years in with my business, it’s the right time to ask myself this.

I don’t have an answer, but I tend to think that: yes, I’m happy about it and I don’t have regrets.

Here’s why I’m happy about it, despite the opportunity-costs:

1. Impacts on customers

As you’ve seen at the start of this article.

2. The raw satisfaction of creating an ‘artifact’ that people use and love, entirely with your own hands

3. The learnings

It’s cool to have been able to go broader with my skillset: not just backend engineering and distributed systems, but full-stack (finally reaching a decent-looking UI after 2 years in 😄), learning about writing, filming, talking, content, marketing, sales, coaching, taxes, accounting and more.

I learnt a lot, for it just being 2 years.

4. The fun

One of the reasons I was able to learn a lot is because I worked a lot.

And I was able to work a lot because I genuinely like 95% of my job.

This is important.

I once asked a SVP at Oracle for career advice, and he told me: “Work on something you like. You’ll still burn out, but you’ll burn out less.”

I find that to be true, in my experience.

5. The alignment with my skills and interests

Somewhat related to the above point.

I had always been a bit 360 with my interests and passions: focused on humanities in high school, considered cinema for uni, but also loved math and tech and business.

In this role I can feel like I get to use and take advantage of all of my interests and skills.

I like tech but there are people who’re deeper into tech than me, and that dislike some of the things I mentioned above (like content or marketing): what’s optimal for them can’t be optimal for me, career wise.

6. The finance side of it is also not bad

Let’s be honest: had I continued my corporate career, I’d probably be sitting at $250k-300k comp right now, with some effort but also without overly pushing it, I think.

So we do see a clear opportunity-cost and loss here.

But, it’s also not the full picture:

• I’m now fully-remote: I can spend as much time as I want outside of Switzerland (if I wanted to, I could also relocate somewhere else cheap - which I’ve looked hard into but which I’m also taking my time to assess). My corporate job was Swiss/Zurich-based, had I targeted remote roles, probably I’d score $100-200k, not more.

• I can optimise my taxes.

• I can make personal interests and life stuff work for the business, like these researches that I do, or anything that I post on X these days, or trips I do, etc.

My business could go down, but it can also go up: that’s the reality of business.

My intuition tells me that working in your “area of genius” is often a good proxy for choosing career paths, also financially.

If you do what you enjoy and are good at, work will feel lighter, you’ll get better at it, you’ll create more value and deliver more results… Eventually the market should also reward you.

Of course it’s not guaranteed, but that’s how I see it at least.

That said, of course, sometimes I think about it.

Few more years of corporate would’ve also meant a few more $100ks of savings, which don’t hurt:

But hey, in the end… There is no “right” path or answer.

Also: YOLO.

Regarding the above-mentioned 10% discount

It’s quite simple.

You can purchase anything on EuroTopTech.com with a 10% discount by using the promo code ‘BIRTHDAY10’.

The promotion starts now and ends tomorrow Friday 8th of May at 13:00 CET.

If you apply to the coaching program in this time frame, and we do the selection and you “pass”/are a fit, and the payment of the first month of coaching happens before tomorrow at the end of the day…

You’ll have the discount on your first month of coaching (900 euros instead of 1000 euros), no matter when you decide to start (but obviously only apply if you plan to start now or in the next few months, not if you plan to start in 2027).

That’s a wrap guys.

May/June is always a time of birthdays/celebration around here :)

Since both my coaching program and job platform were started in this period.

And this year we also recently got to celebrate the 15k subs mark on this newsletter as well! And the Q1 recap.

I hope all this “business content” didn’t annoy you (but according to your reactions to the previous articles on this line, you seemed to like it!).

Expect more hardcore content of tech careers in Europe in future articles 😎

Thanks for all your support so far.

And have a great end of the week and weekend!

Here’s a bottle of Valais wine 🇨🇭 I’ll pop later today to celebrate 😁😋

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!

This is a belayed ETT update for last week.

Means I’ll probably send out another one towards the end of this week too, with more news.

Short and to the point. Let’s go!

A few Country/City Reviews for Remote GOATs

1. Slovenia as a 20% tax haven for remote freelancers

2. Sion, Valais: an exceptional option in Switzerland for remote workers

Coaching Results

0. Some old customers building real estate “empires” with their new Six-figure incomes in Europe:

In this case: this person is already FIREd and their rental income already covers for all living expenses. But they want to build a more comfortable buffer for the future, and they like their job, so they keep going on expanding :)

1. A (young) client recently got a $240k job offer in Big Tech Zurich

2. Another client is in the final steps of their interviews with six-figure remote roles in Europe 🤞

It’s the same client that in the past landed Google Zurich and Meta London, but this year’s trying to land a six-figure Euro-remote roles:

Already got a six-figure offer actually, but turned it down and is shooting higher with a few open interview processes 🥵

As you can see: no reason to get demoralized by the current job market.

See you in the next one!

This article is brought to you by:

Euro Top Tech - The #1 SaaS for top-paying tech careers in Europe:

• 10000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.

• 6000+ jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.

• Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.

Remote GOATs - The operating system for high-earning remote workers:

• Curated job board with thousands of six-figure remote tech roles (Europe-remote, global-remote, NA, LATAM, APAC).

• Career Lab: practical guides + AI tools to land and negotiate top remote roles.

• AI Relocation Software: decide where to live using data, not vibes.

• Real-world data from remote workers on income, taxes, cost of living, and overall life satisfaction.

• Private network of location-independent operators building borderless lives.Full access to paid content, deep dives, and the Remote GOATs community.

Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maxx your pay and lifestyle as a tech worker in Europe:

• Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 2x/3x they pay and freedom in the past few months!