I have total 7 years of dev+DS experience and have ambitions to break into 100k+ salary range in coming year. Should I must move into management role for this?
Sorry mate, but if you'd like some good advice from this crowd, you should spend more than 20 seconds to describe your issue and the type of suggestions you are looking for. That's probably lesson #1 in how to get to a 100k salary :)
You don't mention: where you are located; what current job you have; what's DS; what kind of dev work have you done.
Also, any github / stack overflow link, so that we can get a better sense of your skills?
Plenty of contracting roles paying £500-600/day in London, a few even up to £800 (and 'Head of'/CTO level consulting gigs hovering around £1k/day although very rare as most of those positions are perm).
I know some rather mediocre developers on £550 day rates.
For perm positions, such roles aren't too uncommon for senior/lead level devs in finance, tech consultancy (doing SAP/Salesforce work at some place like Accenture, etc) or the top tech firms - though you'll want to avoid the underpaying Shoreditch start-ups.
Does mean living in London though, where a £100k salary still barely gets you a mortgage for a 3 bed semi. Plus, £100k will soon be worth about €27 but right now it's about 1:1.
Belgian here. Day rates of 400+ euro are the normal rate over here for java and php developers (even to the lower side) for freelancers. But I should mention that you lose about 55% on taxes of it.
That level of salary... well I'd say you gotta sell your soul and head off into banking or into a role as consultant somewhere, but no way for ordinary devs, even in Germany. For what it's worth I know directors of 300+ employee companies that don't crack the 100k.
Alternatively try to land a remote job for some Valley-based or other VC backed company, but beware of the tax and legal implications of doing so.
Switzerland is not in the EU as OP asked, also you spend a large chunk of the gains over Germany on higher living cost (rent, but also basic stuff like cheeseburgers is up to 3x the price of Germany). Oh and they have both a strict immigration regime as well as a huge right-wing problem, which might be another factor against moving to Switzerland for work.
You can pretty much just come to Switzerland and work if you are an EU citizen, so might as well be.
Zurich has probably the best ratio of earning potential to COL in the world (for the average person, not necessarily for software engineers). If you are cheap/thrifty you can even go do your shopping in a neighboring country, since Switzerland is so small.
OP asked about EU/EEA. Switzerland is not in the EU but it could just as well be in EEA. Only reason it's not is because it has to be neutral on paper for historical reasons. De facto Switzerland is clearly EEA-like.
Yeah, put it in some months ago, when the term "alt-left" started popping up here, I believe it was a pretty flameful thread about the limits of free speech and what's acceptable to do against Nazis...
Not sure about a salary, but contracting can comfortably let you earn that based on a daily rate. I've even seen Qlikview or Excel roles at banks in the UK that pay 600+ per day! The trick is to have a niche - look at what's hot in contracting job ads and read up about it. Get confident with the tech/software they ask for and go for a few interviews. Getting a contracting role is generally a lot easier than a permanent position, and in my experience, a contracting job can be just as secure as a perm job.
Problem with contracting jobs is, depending on OPs country, they can be risky: health care costs can kill you at that salary rate (eg in Germany with its dual class health care system), contractors may not be eligible for ordinary pensions (and you might be tempted to skip over saving for retirement...) and when you're sick for more than a week (or, can't find a new project soon enough) it can burn through your entire savings sooner than you'd like.
I wouldn't do contracting again without serious money (aka F-U-Money levels, or a full year worth of expenses) in the bank.
In the UK, contractors are considered high-risk for mortgages and car loans. Even if you manage to lock-in a mortgage before starting your contractor career, it will make things difficult should you wish to remortgage (which is almost mandatory every 3 to 5 years, these days...).
You've asked how you can get 100k EUR per year. But you have not mentioned anything about the value you can offer for this money (unless DS means something there, I have no idea what DS is).
In many companies, low-level managers don't earn that much (especially green ones, which it sounds like you would be during the time frame you specified). Companies wouldn't want to distract all their employees by offering a huge pay bump just to switch fields.
When you ask for money you should first talk about what you can contribute. Which is?
100k in your pocket sure, but 100k gross? That's 120k USD, not sky high for the US. And don't taxes net out so you only end up paying the higher of the two rates in most places? In Europe total income taxes are likely higher than US federal income taxes just about everywhere.
Though technically not salary but revenue freelancing or rather self-employed consulting is a realistic option for reaching that kind of annual income.
One piece of advice though: Don't do it for the money (or the money alone, at least). If you want to run a sustainable consulting practice you have to be passionate about what you're doing and constantly deliver high-quality work.
Confidently marketing your services is essential. If you're good at solving important problems for your customers that should be reflected in your rates. Speaking of which, if possible adopt value-based pricing instead of time-based, i.e. daily or hourly, rates.
> So what makes you feel you deserve to earn more than 99.93% of the world's population?
Looks like you hit a nerve (perhaps a somewhat guilty one) with some users.
But I was wondering similar - why does the OP feel the need to earn this much money? I suspect psychological rather than financial insecurity, given that they're already likely to be a relatively high earner.
Don't be a crab in the bucket. If you're going to get angry at people having more money than you (perhaps rightly) feel they deserve, get angry at the ruling class who casually rake in millions, not at the better-paid of their servants.
You can make more than 90 percent of the worlds population by virtue of being born in the right place. ‘Deserve’ doesn’t have anything to do with it. Where I live, someone making 100k as a software engineer is being underpaid.
Considering most of HNs audience is software engineers in the Bay Area where the average salary is well north of 100k, you're making a mountain out of a molehill by raising this question.
What does income have to do with what you "deserve"? And why would they have to justify it to anyone besides whoever's going to employ them?
Determination to do something is worth a lot. Even if they don't reach their goal, they could get closer to it than they are now. What's wrong with striving for something better?
You don't mention: where you are located; what current job you have; what's DS; what kind of dev work have you done.
Also, any github / stack overflow link, so that we can get a better sense of your skills?