[bbulkow]

Yes, I pay half my us salery for tax and benefits, since you have to include putting significant money away for retirement (10 percent gross minimum ) since we don't have significant pension systems.

If you are interested in a less technical role that makes more money, check out being an Enterprise software sales engineer. These are the people who help customers with real problems architecting systems, have a poor quality of life because there is always a new project starting, but make more than engineers or sales people these days. It can be interesting work if you like variety, but can't be done the first few years out of school because experience with various architectures needs to be cultivated.