In the US, that kind of salary it's common only in the Silicon Valley and NY.
I don't agree with that statement. The title relates to six figure incomes, which are certainly quite common in all the tech hubs: Seattle, Austin, Denver, San Diego, etc.
You certainly have to be in a major city, and ideally one with large software companies.
There’s tons of money in engineering in the United States, but I would say it has come with a cost. The only reason so much money has been able to be plowed into software and hardware was because of financial products developed by Wall Street since the 1970’s. Obviously we’ve seen great results in software and hardware, but all the recent financial busts have shown there is no free lunch...
Perhaps the biggest example is the 401k, which shifted huge funds towards Wall Street. It’s not fintech, but just an example of a new type of product.
I hope that explains better than my original post.
I also know directors in other companies in said big cities making only 10k more than that, on-site.
I'd say you can read a lot from the general trends, but there are plenty of cases in either position or negative direction.
How come a city in a country of 300,000 people pay as much as $100k USD for a SWE?
Do you have any data to back it up? I did a quick look at Glassdoor and it's far from that.
I’ve seen jobs listed above that routinely in Indianapolis, Minneapolis & Columbus. Talked to a recruiter the other day for a job in Nashville that paid above 100k.
These are all front line Midwest towns. Get into the sunbelt and you’ll see even more cities where those wages are common.
I have family in Norway and attended part of a Master's program in Switzerland, but left because the job prospects in Zurich did not look good without German fluency. This was not in technology, though.