Share your salary progression

you never know how old those people are :wink:

I started with 30k less than 15 years ago and now it’s probably 10x.

It’s already amazing. Focus:

  • hard work (smart work is just a buzz work for a young person. You need to be seen working hard and developing your own experience and bank of knowledge, then you will be able to work smarter)
  • develop the right skills of the future, even at the expenses of a marginally lower salary
    -build your network. Over the long run, it is way more important than your Cv
    -get some big names on your resume, it always help and help with working through matrix and complex org
  • be always positive and kind with everyone and never comprise on integrity
  • while you need to work hard, set boundaries on your health

Have a great life!!

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Hey don’t be ashamed, we don’t start at the same age with the same education and with the same opportunity. Take a glance about my salary historic (a bit above :arrow_up:) :wink:

I should probably be at 110-120k at my age, but life is what it is :wink:

Wow your story is very inspiring. I’m glad it worked out eventually! Thanks for sharing.

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Hey, long time lurker. Finally decided to sign up and share some data points on my end. Software engineer at a US tech co, 7 years of experience. Zurich.

While the numbers do look good and are beyond what I ever imagined, I’m putting in a lot of effort, trading fun, interesting work and long term employability (developing new skills) for that. Stress levels are also quite high. I simply hope I can take it for long enough to go a long way towards fire and transition to a role with better life-work balance some day, likely as a solo dev, indie projects, or freelancer.

2017  CHF58,000  Started as intern in 2017, half year
2018  CHF140,000 Hired full time
2019  CHF159,000
2020  CHF266,000 Promoted
2021  CHF416,000 Promoted
2022  CHF410,000
2023* CHF622,000

* projection

The above brings me to 1.3M CHF in net worth (all invested in VT, excluding 2nd pillar), unfortunately not much more than the 0.9M I got out the job after tax and the 0.3M inherited :slightly_frowning_face: Still waiting for that exponential to kick in and take me to ~3M.

I’d love to discuss topics around opening a consultancy / one-man company and transitioning to contractor-type work. I guess there’s forum section for that :slight_smile:

7 Likes

Depends on whose life it is. If you are a chef to Putin then it might be quite lucrative (at least until your plane falls out of the sky!)

Here’s mine:

You can see the point where I stopped chasing work and decided to aim for work/life balance and then a few years later when I discovered FIRE and decided to aim for FI.

I started another thread to share side hustle progression:

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Out of curiosity, why the jump? Have you been promoted again (or very high perf rating)? Retention refresh grant?

(Otherwise sounds impressive for what I assume is equivalent to L6 at Google, my total comp has mostly been going down over the past 3 years :slight_smile: given the grant refreshes/stock market)

No, actually my performance this year might be the worst so far. It’s just decent stock grants in the past years coupled with great market performance. If things stay as they are now, I might break the 700k mark next year before heading down to 500. Don’t think I have another promo in me, it’s also getting extremely hard to gain more influence and scope after some time.

You’re at big G? I guess there’s no hiring going on anymore, right?

Yeah not much hiring, should be able to tell from external job postings (and reading external news, seems like they laid off people from the recruiting org? :confused:)

Hi there! I thought about doing this and asking you for some recommendations on how to increase my salary. Here goes my salary progression:

2019 (23 yo): 21.490€
2020: 23.590€ (+9,77%)
2021: 26.460€ (+12,17%), in June 31.500€ (+19,05%) w/ promotion
2022: 33.600€ (+6,67%), in February 130.000 CHF by moving to Zurich
2023: 130.000 CHF, Bonus 6.500 CHF

I moved to Switzerland as part of my FIRE plan, and I was expecting to move on a ~100k salary and to remain that way through 2023. So in the end I am better than I was expecting. However, I also have friends who work in tech companies and I know there’s a lot more money to be made. So I was wondering if tech is the only way, if consulting can also reach those levels of salary, or if you have any other suggestions for me. Here are a few things worth knowing:

  • I don’t have a technical background but I do work well as a consultant inbetween business and tech
  • I work in banking and I’m not very interested in moving away from financial services
  • I’m not expecting major salary increases except with one promotion in the coming years
  • Fintech companies don’t really pay much better (I guess?), nor do other banks
  • I realize my friends in tech also work much harder than I do, so in order to accept that additional amount of work, it really needs to be well compensated

Do any jobs or companies come to mind? :grin:

Thank you!

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