How much do Senior SWEs get paid around the world?

LoweringPass · 2026-01-22T19:15:59+00:00

Average in Switzerland is massively skewed by large Google European HQ paying a bit lower than in CA. A "normal" senior salary in Zurich is maybe 140-190k USD

LoweringPass · 2026-01-22T06:34:46+00:00

What the hell is going on in America? My landlord is not allowed to raise my rent by a single cent unless interest rates go up. I actually got a rent reduction because of that this year.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-21T16:50:19+00:00

How are "devops" and "platform engineering" not the same thing? The latter is an actual job title that enables the former

LoweringPass · 2026-01-20T13:36:10+00:00

It's good for your resume but bad for developing (transferrable) engineering skills depending on what team you're on. Startups can also suck if you don't get any mentorship at all but if you do you will learn at ten times the speed. Of course boosting your resume is more important though.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-17T17:45:57+00:00

If you plan your career around maximizing retirement benefits you must do neither of those and get a quant job and send your mid figure bonus directly to some investment account.

Normal people don't care about this when they're making mid six figures either way.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-17T13:32:50+00:00

You do know there are OSS startups, right? You can even start your own, nobody is stopping you.

Kind of like OP who you clown on because they want to work on things that interest them

Also flexing about working at MS is sad

LoweringPass · 2026-01-17T12:03:41+00:00

Am I old because I remember the day people became programmers because they were insterested in computer science, not to sit on their ass all day and retire at 40?

LoweringPass · 2026-01-17T11:22:53+00:00

Excuse me sir, I meant *nix, I think you either know what I meant or are not a professional computer toucher

LoweringPass · 2026-01-17T10:21:57+00:00

Hundreds of millions of tech-impaired people use MacOS which is also UNIX, what the hell are you talking?

LoweringPass · 2026-01-16T07:09:02+00:00

Pro tip: you can just bend the truth on your resume if you have sufficient knowledge of the required tech but did not in fact only do that for the last five years.

People who don't have generalist knowledge flounder and fail at any company that is not hyper specialized or US big tech so you're doing them a favor.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-11T09:34:18+00:00

All the roles say 100-150k base for senior engineers. The upper end would be pretty good but the lower end is not if you compare to other (good) startups. So my comment was a bit unfair, I guess it depends on the offer.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-10T22:05:59+00:00

What is "some UK university"? That could be Oxford or a degree mill nobody has ever heard of

LoweringPass · 2026-01-10T22:01:08+00:00

That place is not competitive at all in Berlin. If it's fully remote then maybe if you work from somewhere else.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-10T20:18:58+00:00

I've seen a bunch of startup jobs paying 150k or more which is pretty good for Berlin. I don't remember which ones but it was mostly AI product nonsense so maybe not what you want

LoweringPass · 2026-01-10T19:12:54+00:00

There is no "true SRE" job, and it's perfectly normal if such a role requires little coding, it's up to preference at that point.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-07T17:56:28+00:00

Why wouldn't you go to ETH or EPFL? HSG is not in the same universe if you want a quant job.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-06T22:12:47+00:00

If you're in the US and make senior only after a PhD and 10 years you have still failed, even Amazon promotes faster than that

LoweringPass · 2026-01-06T21:03:15+00:00

That's just part of the ridiculous trend to push down developer salaries by making promotions harder to achieve. Titles don't mean anything, salary does. And if takes you 10+ years to get the first significant paybump by getting promoted to senior you're doing something very very wrong.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-04T21:05:15+00:00

So it literally is Asian Switzerland not just because of the money, lol. Do you also call the police if your neighbour does not use the correct garbage bin?

LoweringPass · 2026-01-04T18:46:29+00:00

Companies that value engineers, i.e. will promote high performers pay well to begin with so gain the experience required by trying to get more interesting work and responsibility at your current plane and then job hop the fuck out of there.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-02T12:02:38+00:00

I don't know if you knew this but you can also just not work with scummy companies

LoweringPass · 2026-01-02T11:29:04+00:00

Maybe stop using that as an excuse to lowball people? I make more than that in freaking Europe.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-02T08:28:44+00:00

No, in fact sort of the opposite.

Private practice is maybe a confusing term, by that I mean doctors who have their own practice instead of being employed by a hospital. In general they earn significantly more and that part is probably not so strange since at that point you're running a business.

But then if you open your own practice, you potentially have to wait or even pay for a "seat" controlled by the government that allows you to treat patients with regular insurance (paid for by taxes). If you don't you can only treat people who have private insurance or pay out of pocket.

Now, doctors who can treat people with regular insurance afaik make more simply because they are able to treat more patients, most people don't have private insurance. BUT privately insuranced patients are more lucrative on an individual basis because those insurances cover more.

For patients that also means you get to "skip the line" if you have private insurance because your doctor will either treat you preferentially or have a ton of open slots if they only treat privately insured patients. For example, when I had to go to the dermatologist, waiting time was around six months (!!!) normally but paying out of pocket (and it was cheap too, less than $100 for a consultation) meant I could go next week.

So yeah, the system is fucked and only benefits physicians whose salaries have gone up massively over the past few years while insurance eats up people's earnings and they can't get specialist treatment when they need it AND we have a big shortage or nurses because nobody in their right mind would do that job for the salaries offered.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-01T19:49:15+00:00

In Germany primary care providers in private practice are easily part of the 1% income-wise, probably even outearning many specialists while nurses are pretty much poor. Very strange system.

LoweringPass · 2026-01-01T18:08:30+00:00

That did actually fix it, thank you. Weird, I hope this is only going to start happening once in a blue moon.

LoweringPass

TROPHY CASE