Top Euro Tech Careers in 2024 + End of Month TEE Update
`TEE` stands for `The European Engineer` 😄
Hi friends!
Table of Content
Today, we have a few things on the plate to discuss. In particular
How High-Paid Fully-Remote Dev Jobs in Low-Cost Low-Tax (LCLT) countries has become a concrete top career option for devs in Europe.
Top 3 Career Paths for Devs in Europe in 2024.
Update from the Six-Figure Euro Engineer coaching program: June’s accomplishments.
Update from Euro Top Tech Jobs: current status of the job board, planned future developments, feedback request.
Let’s get straight to it.
High-Paid Fully-Remote Dev Jobs in Low-Cost Low-Tax (LCLT) entered the room
The First European Engineer Career Template: USA careers in Europe.
I originally started this newsletter with a simple idea.
Devs in the USA have a straight-forward path to build a great career: prep for and join Big Tech.
This will get you:
High income.
Great saving rates, and good chances of achieving FIRE relatively soon.
Great chance to build up valuable skills and have a rewarding career.
And this is fairly achievable, because of how many opportunities the US offers to enter big tech if you’re a US resident.
In Europe? You can’t really use the same strategy expecting the same results: it’s more nuanced and complicated.
So I created resources to help you achieve the above 3 goals.
How to get a big tech job in Switzerland and achieve the highest saving rates Europe can offer.
How to compare different locations for saving rates within big tech.
What are some good locations for high-paying, quality careers in Europe.
How to navigate relocation and location planning as a dev in Europe.
Some inspiration based on my personal career and salary progression.
A Job Board with all the Top Tech Job in Europe, updated weekly.
How the US and Europe Tech Market changed in the last year.
Now, the Big Tech situation in the US has quite deteriorated in the last year.
As money became more expensive due to high-interest rates, LLM/AI made devs more productive, and Covid proved to companies that WFH wouldn’t hurt them much, US corporations started increasing the rate of offshoring to cheaper countries.
Learning about the opportunities that Remote Work offers to European Devs.
In 2023, I’ve been often travelling to Central/Eastern Europe, and in particular to Warsaw.
As I spent time in this area of Europe, I started realising how devs here actually had it way better than I expected: relatively high-income, low cost of living, low taxes, abundance of job opportunities, safe cities, upwards trajectory for their country, etc.
Diving deeper, I realised this was something well-known to Eastern European devs, and to some Western senior European devs as well.
You can check reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU and find many examples of discussions around these topics. Some handpicked threads:
Salaries in Western Europe look like peanuts compared to ones in LCOL countries.
Long-term risks of Careers in Western Europe and Switzerland and the offshoring trend.
I did my part in contributing to this discussion, both in this newsletter and on LinkedIn, and recently I’ve created this salary and saving rates transparency Google Sheet, where we see real data points of such careers.
People in places like Georgia or Poland or Hungary or Romania making 6 figures salaries, and spending half of it while supporting entire families and still saving up quite a bit each year thanks to low taxations.
Some days ago, I posted about this on LinkedIn and it went extra viral (almost 10k likes and 6M views in less than a week):
My explanation for this, is that this path is now officially on the map, and it’s mainstream.
People know that it’s possible, probably already know someone doing it, and many people find this path appealing.
I plan to talk more about this possible career path and strategies to achieve it in the near future. So, stay tuned for that.
What is my opinion as of today. A balanced view.
What happened to the other Top Tech Careers’ paths I’ve talked about in the past, namely Big Tech Europe and Good Tech Switzerland?
I believe they’re still very valid option, and together with this new remote geo-arbitraged option, they make up the top 3 paths for tech professionals in Europe as of today, and probably for the foreseeable future too.
Top 3 Career Paths for Devs in Europe in 2024
So let’s formalise this and give it some structure.
If you’re an ambitious dev in Europe and are willing to build up a very solid career, that gives you professional growth, high income, and good chances to build financial security and freedom, I believe these are the top 3 options available to you:
1. Big Tech Europe.
Still a great option.
Great for CV, learning and networking.
Working for a big tech company will set you apart from the competition, and make you work with great engineers on high-quality products.
Given how they manage compensation, if you work for a big tech from basically any city in Europe, you’ll have a high purchasing power.
There’ll be some differences in the amount of savings you’ll get (check codecapitals.com to learn more), but all in all you’ll have a great financial outcome too.
Usually, it’s also possible to relocate within big tech from a lower-paid location to a higher-paid location, although rarer today than some time ago.
We already talked about the downsides of this option: RTO, high employment taxes, layoffs-scaremonering vibes, etc. Checkout also this post form
for some more info on the reality of big tech.I also think that a lot of big techs will see increased competition in the future by a new generation of tech companies emerging right now. But this is just speculation so take it with a grain of salt.
2. Good Tech Switzerland/HCOL.
By “good tech” I mean a decent quality company (ideally a tech company, not necessarily big tech though): good culture, learning opportunities, pay.
This in practice could mean a 100k salary for a jr. engineer in Zurich, or a 150k salary for a senior engineer in Zurich, or a 200k total comp for a freelance dev in Zurich/Amsterdam/Munich/London.
Location plays a role in Europe, so optimising for a high-paying location can still be a good strategy.
Also, one cool strategy people nowadays are using, is to start working for a company in a HCOL (high cost of living location), and then, once they proved themselves and got some tenure in the team, negotiate a remote contract, and move somewhere else reducing their CoL and taxes while keeping the pay.
3. High-Paying Fully-Remote in Low-Cost Low-Tax (LCLT).
I feel like I’ve been talking extensively about this lately, so just check some of my previous articles.
In short: even an 80k fully-remote job can give you a baller lifestyle in a LCLT country.
And there are plenty of such countries where you can get very high QoL (quality of life) with a low cost of living.
You can check Numbeo for some data on this: the caveat here is that most LCLT places are penalised on Numbeo because salary and purchasing power for the local people greatly penalises these locations, but if you have a salary that’s 5x-10x the national average, this won’t apply to you.
I think Poland now is the de-facto best place in Europe for such a path as you have access to both good CoL/Taxes for remote jobs, and a good local employment market (with similar wages compared to high-paying remote jobs). So it’s quite a flexible option for this type of career. And you get IMO amazing QoL. I’ll have to write more about Poland in the future.
There also other great locations for such a path: Georgia, Cyprus, Romania, Moldova, Southern Europe, Balkans, Central/Eastern Europe in general. For people that are more flexible with their contracts, Asia and UAE can also be good options.
End-of-Month Update from my Coaching Program
As you might know, since 2 months, I am running a coaching program called Six-Figure Euro Engineer, where I use my experience and knowledge regarding Tech Careers in Europe, to help devs get to the next level in their career and life as tech professionals in Europe.
Mainly, I help with achieving the 3 above-mentioned paths.
I started the first iteration of it limiting it to 5 people, which went sold-out fairly soon. I plan to start a new iteration of it sometime in September or October.
If you’re interested, I recommend you to apply to the program following the instructions described here, and if all is good, you’ll be inserted into the waiting list, which will give you higher chances of securing a spot in the program.
Currently, I am coaching 4 devs, with the 5th coachee that recently “graduated” from the program to found his startup after his open-source project went viral. You can check his testimonial for the program here.
I think it would be cool to give you all an update on the progress we’re having with the other coachees, so here we go. I’ll try to be concise.
1. Full-Stack Dev from Italy, looking to improve his Salary and Technical Growth.
Joined the program in May after applying to 200+ companies and getting no result.
We refactored his CV and LinkedIn, brainstormed on what jobs to target, and applied.
Around 10 applications with 8 of them offering interviews, proceeding with interviews with 3 of them while putting the others in a backlog to pick from if these 3 don’t work out (this is mainly to keep a decent WLB while interviewing and working at the same time).
Currently wrapping up interviews and hopefully getting some offers.
Also discussing next steps and longer-term plans for his career. He’ll probably stick around for a while in the coaching program as it’s a good match and so far he sees the value.
2. Full-Stack Dev from Switzerland, looking to find optimal ways for him to progress in his career: exploring remote options and big tech Switzerland.
Joined in May too, with the main goal of learning what is needed to get a big tech job in Switzerland.
Given the small size of the big tech market in Switzerland, we then moved to a more holistic discussion of other possible paths he can take in his career.
Currently, we’re exploring different options including: long-term goal of big tech Switzerland, big tech London/Amsterdam, remote work.
Also greatly improved his CV/LinkedIn that needed a lot of iterations.
3. Full-Stack/Frontend Dev from the Netherlands, looking for a solid full-time, well-paid job with potential for growth.
Joined in June, less strong profile than the other 2, needs more support and actual mentoring.
Helping him out also on improving as a developer and in communicating within technical teams and generally in operating well in high-performing tech teams.
We’re still in the CV improvement phase, and we’re using this process to help us see where he needs to improve as a dev.
More of a long-term plan with him, but potentially we could also get some results in the next few months, given that he’s aware of his limits and is ok with not targeting the highest paying jobs.
In general, we’re targeting good tech HCOL and big tech Europe.
4. Full-Stack Dev and Data Engineer from Italy, looking to improve his Salary and Technical Growth.
Joined in June, goal is to get a decent career instead of working for ridiculously low pay and bad career prospects in Italy.
He’s less in a rush so we’re taking it a bit slower: the speed of the progress for the coachees is highly dependant on how much work they put in when it comes to iterating on my feedback.
Mainly improving his CV and LinkedIn and coming up with a reasonable strategy for his profile: this is probably on the line of targeting both data engineering jobs and general software engineering jobs, since his background allows for this.
His goal is probably big tech Europe, or maybe very good tech Europe. Pay is right now not the nr.1 priority for him (although still among his top 3 priorities).
Euro Top Tech Jobs: updates from my Job Board
As you know, I’ve recently launched a job board.
I haven’t had time to iterate on it too much, but what I’m working on right now is:
Make sure every position there has saving rates for all the lifestyle options.
Add pre-tax and post-tax estimated TC columns (so you can roughly see what’s the comp along with the estimated saving rates).
Add fully-remote jobs: still need to figure out how to do this, either I’ll make my weekly update from the job board limited to the paid subscriber and send a little list of such companies in this private email every week, or I’ll just add them in the job board (although I wouldn’t be able to put saving rates data for such jobs as that will highly depend on the location one is based in).
Conclusion
Today it was a long article. I hope I didn’t bore y’all and that you found it interesting :)
Remember: while I provide paid options, I will keep providing value for free on this newsletter and on my LinkedIn.
The more time passes, the more I will be able to provide more sophisticated, accessible and structured ways to help y’all.
I hope you’ll stick around and that together we’ll all get where we want in life and in our career!
Peace ✌️
