it seems salaries in FAANG are quite different than other IT companies. Often I hear Google folks earning 400-500 K in 10 years. The disparity is striking.
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Yeah Zürich seems very bimodal. A new grad bachelor would be well above the quoted salaries. (And with 10y of experience it would be multiples higher)
500k might be a stretch, only a small percentage gets there, can be timing/luck related as well as career aggression.
Though 300k - 400k range should be very much doable in ZH. Even startups are paying 150k++ and equity.
You could try focusing on places that value that PHD.
If you suck at interviewing, you have to look for small shops only that do not do the industry standard crackhead kind of stuff, though, if you can, it might be very well worth getting good at interviewing (its mostly a time investment and patience kind of thing) because that broadens your horizons and you could clearly earn multiples of that income.
If its mostly a self-confidence problem, thats a though one, though books help. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas | Goodreads This one is about folks whom reached certain positions. More often than not, its not their smarts.
Reading about it, might help you in the confidence area (this is also my anecdotal experience, a lot of high position high networth individuals are reckless and frankly quite dumb, but confident dumb)
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this. or also ruthlessly good at the corporate game.
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what’s your source for this?
What I saw in the market these past 3-4 years (as a potential candidate, not in SWEng, but close IT) is that 200k seems like a glass ceiling for anyone outside the FAANG circle, unless you want to go directly into people/unit/dept. mgmt.
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For the high range: Software Engineer Salary in Switzerland
For startups, you might have some datapoints in there, though very few. I only have anecdotal evidence from friends and acquaintances.
Was speaking mostly of sw-eng and eng-management in IT. I don’t have an overview of other roles in the sector.
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Looks like at least half, if not more, of all entries are from Google.
The top is basically entirely big American tech companies.
I see some entries for the others over 150k, and just a few above 200k (and barely above). UBS, Swisscom, all seem to top around 150k.
And this kind of stuff tends to be biased towards people making a lot.
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yes. Also, I’m not sure how you’d control for folks whom:
- know these platforms exist, where you can share salaries, though you only observe and do not share
- folks that don’t know and aren’t even interested.
- folks that know and share
- folks that are so far off extremes that they want to share but wont.
Because you cannot control for the above, the data remains handwavey to say the least.
e.g a good example are AI shops in zurich. Zh is now one of the world centers of machine learning. Every big player has an ai shop in ZH, and also small/smallish tech, though you don’t see any salaries present on these aggregating platforms. (you could sarch for anthropic, openAI, disney research, huawei research etc etc etc )
All of the above have compensation ranges significantly above that amount, and these are the niche companies only, generics or legacy tech can be up there as well.
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Salaries are probably 3 or even 4 modal in switzerland, however, due to the nature and psychology of money, it is somewhat hard to find a de-facto source that will erase all doubts or point a really clear picture for individuals.
I think this is in fact a wanted outcome by some companies, salary transparency is always advertised but never really wanted by an exploitative entity.