Should You Chase a High-Paying Tech Career?
Life's a tree: every choice is a branch that will lead to other branches. Learn to climb.
I'm in the business of "High-paying Tech Careers", but I still think you shouldn’t idealise them.
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:
Land one or more top-paying roles
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.
