@sparkla Working at the customer’s site is pretty much a must. You can usually negotiate the amount of traveling (e.g 30% of your overall working time, or less or more), but that will affect your salary. It’s not necessarily that the customer doesn’t trust you, but they usually don’t want to expose everything to the internet. And VPN often is no option, too, simply due to regulatory reasons. And for infrastructure/OT tests over VPN, you simply would die from all the latency that will increase testing time by 200% or even more.
Getting several benefits will definitely be the case. Especially in larger companies. But then again, those tend to pay less. And when they are “too large”, you will have a lot of (ancient) processes involved that also might lower the steps for raises (like, e.g. “no more than 5%/year, since that’s as we always did it”).
You want to work from home 100% of the time, then why on earth should any company provide a company-sponsored car to you? Also, you’d have to pay taxes for that, too.
Flexible working hours are getting more common, yet still will it often be the case that you are only allowed to perform your tests during your customer’s (extended) business hours. Simply because someone will have to restart/fix what you break. And trust me, it will break by the time the other side is on lunch break, or otherwise unavailable. But that highly depends on the target and scope.
@everyone else in here, whining about the salaries: How about some cheese. Or at least a pint of realism. You get into that job as a beginner (at least that is what the discussion originally was about), and no, you are NOT the 31337 pentest sup4h4xx0r that you might imagine yourself.
Yes, maybe the image from outside suggests pentesters being the InfoSec Rockstars. Sorry, but that’s far from reality. It’s a job you’re getting paid to do. It might coincidentally be your passion. But that’s as much as it will get. Why exactly should you get paid a lot more than e.g. a nurse/doctor/engineer?
You might start the job with some experience. That’s great, and it will definitely get you to the upper bounds of a beginner’s salary. But that doesn’t even remotely justify a senior’s or subject matter expert’s salary.
Another thing is regional differences, as @TazWake already mentioned: Salaries vary a lot between different locations. In bigger cities like Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, the average rent (and other “life expenses”) are a lot higher than e.g. in Rostock, Halle, Buxtehude, Bochum, etc. So, naturally, you’ll get a fair amount more in those cities. But then again, a lot less will remain for savings/spare-time/etc.
Moaning about taxes: “Switzerland has a max of 40% taxes”. Sure, and those 2% more in Germany make a difference of 100€ per month with an annual netto income of 60k. The additional solidarity tax of 5.5% will be quit for 90% of all employees, next year.
Yes, the US also have a lower taxes and (almost) no social security taxes. but they also don’t really have a social security system. And I would definitely NOT want to exchange a slightly higher salary for having to pay all my health expenses on my own
I wouldn’t work for less than 5000/month after taxes
Great. Good luck finding a company that will pay a beginner 120k/year. Trust me, that will never happen.