Yea, we're top earners, but salaries in generally not high. We get the majority of our compensation in vacation, social insurance, pension, etc.
130K would put you in the 50% tax bracket here. So you'd get 14 (no, seriously) paychecks of 4642. Not bad to be sure, but not exactly space tourist money either.
That's why there's a dev shortage here since most Austrians avoid these jobs and move instead to management/consulting/finance where pay is better for less stress as those jobs are much higher up the pecking order when it comes to money and status in the company while devs are seen as replaceable cogs.
While the standard of living is good here with decent social services, Austria is definitely not a good market for devs. Maybe better than places like Italy/Spain/Portugal but worse than the other major tech hubs in Europe, including places in Eastern Europe like Bucharest or Warsaw when you factor in the brutal taxes and high CoL in Austria.
I was in the highest technical software position at a name brand company, working in the state capitol city, and I was making like 8OK.
Is the term "tax bracket" used differently outside of the US/Canada?
Here it means your marginal tax rate (i.e. the highest rate at which your last dollar is taxed). Whereas you seem to be speaking about "effective tax rate" - that's total tax paid / gross income.
The limit for the top tax bracket here is about $86k, after which you pay 15% of the difference between your salary and the top tax bracket limit.
The average salary for a software developer in Denmark is around $80k, but $100k+ salaries are pretty common, and at my company the ceiling is about $130k.
The American pursuit for the highest salary possible is blinding people to what actually means living well.
Sure, houses cost more in the Bay Area, but then when you sell the house you get more money. Meaning you can then retire in a low CoL place. But someone selling his cheaper house can't decide to retire in the Bay Area.
I live in Denmark, and the average salary for a software developer is about $80k or so. However, $100k+ is not uncommon and, as I mentioned, $130k is about the ceiling at my company.
However, if you go solo and work as an independent consultant, you can easily make $100/h or even twice that if you're in a really good position.
Since most local dutch companies pay around 50k with salaries of 130k coming only from US companies in Amsterdam like Uber which have the same brutal leet-code practices from SV that grandparent said aren't necessarily.
If all devs in the Netherlands could get 130k so comfortably then how would those Dutch companies paying only 50k still survive and not go bust?
What I have also seen, companies that pay low hire people with non-cs background, people looking for career change, people without experience but with motivation.
When I said comfortable, in this context it meant. A job that pays 130k and still is not stressful and you can have a comfortable lifestyle. I did not mean that you can easily get a 130k job.