how? SAP/ERP consulting?
Then there are people who work on compilers, image recognition, AI, browsers, server work of all kinds, etc etc. the variety, depth, and scale of work is much larger than web and can pay better as it can require a deeper level of expertise. I’m sure there exist web developers who make more than people who work in these spaces just as the converse is true. I don’t think it’s possible to say which pays more. Web dev may be an easier avenue to break into things with a low amount of experience though.
Compiler/AI work and the rest exists where I live as well but it's strictly in academia, not in private companies and has a high barrier of entry as it's mostly PhDs or post-docs and is also paid poorly.
Web dev work you can find in pretty much any major city in the world.
For example, in a city nearby to me there's a major VR/AR headset company which I'm pretty sure solves really interesting problems. The issue is, what happens when you want to change jobs but want to stay in the same city as that city has no VR/AR hub so there's no other demand for specialists in this specific niche.
Genuinely curious as I'm open to a move.
If you look around a bit, as an in-demand (meaning - chasing the latest tech fads, maybe some tech lead experience as well) senior backend developer, you can get take home 250,000 PLN per year on a long-term (meaning usually multiple years) contract basis. Assuming 60,000 PLN of that goes to living expenses, it takes less than 16 years to save up the required 3m PLN to retire. And, if you're really hot in terms of CV, you can take home much more than 250k per year. Also, there are options to contract in Western Europe or get six figure remote US job (this one's harder than the other options) for more pay.
Also, I myself happen to make over 400k net PLN per year, but I didn't want to use myself as an example, as I only know a handful of people who make that much - so it's perhaps not something you 100% can count, whereas the 250k per year number is absolutely attainable by any senior dev with reasonable/modern CV and good negotiating/job hopping skills.
I have worked on mobile OS, PC software development, web, machine learning problems, and now VR. I’m not particularly worried about getting pigeonholed because any company I’d want to work for can recognize the value of a generalist - I’m not going to solve hard domain-specific problems but I can architect the SW and plug all the pieces together and dive into domain-specific problems when necessary. To be fair though I’ve heard this concern from other people who want to move back to Europe, but the framing was different - how do I explain to them what I do in a recognizable manner.
However some places are 10, sometimes 20 years behind into best practices, be that in coding, tools, PM practices, innovation, etc.
There's a reason a lot of mobile phone companies closed down (as an example).
As much as I like the area I don't miss staring at a hodge-podge of C/C++ code done in weird style that might or might not have been auto generated and will as many memory bugs as possible.
My team's responsibilities include configuration management, fault management, and certain KPI monitoring. We don't need to write webapps for that (though we do integrate with them) :)
Not sure if I would make more doing webdev, but am not in US so it would be normal middle-class income anyway.