On the last statistics, Jobs in IT in Suisse Romande (french part) are paid quite less that in the German part.
I think it’s quite important to take into account the age, experience and in some case education
Since you are collecting a list don’t forget Red Hat that has offices in multiple places, most significantly Neuchatel and Zurich.
Most engineers work remotely though so might not matter 
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If you really want to maximize your salary, tech is a good place (engineering/product – or sales. both functions allow for big salaries).
I would strongly recommend working in Seattle (not CA/SF) – nearly same salary and top employers but less taxes / less crazy housing cost.
If you don’t like the US system (the visa system, the president, etc), I would gun for Google with an apartment in SZ (absolutely doable).
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If I am not mistaken, a lot of services in Switzerland receive public subsidy. You still end up paying for the service but at a below cost price.
How do you define „good“? If other factors besides money are important you may want to use a portal like kununu.com. As a consultant I see lots of companies and if you have a relevant sample size the reports give a good indication about the culture of the company and how it feels to work there.
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I don’t want to hijack the thread, but
What about a startup (not as founder)? small companies with less than 50 people?
Is that true that the salaries are less competitive and the work is as stressful as big companies (less people to do the job, nobody to do the back-up during the holiday, few non-salary compensation, ect)?
I work for a startup, from my personal experience salaries can be competitive. You probably lose on non-salary compensation but eventually if you actually sum up these benefits, it’s not so much.
I think stress and work hours depend on the company culture, obviously it can be very different between two startups. If you get shares or options it can also be a nice bonus, without the amount of risk and stress that the founders get should it fail.
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I worked for four different fintech startups in Zurich area. My overall experiences are positive, a lot depends on the company’s culture. I personally think their stock is worthless (it’s either literally worthless as most startups go bankrupt, or in case of success your ownership will get diluted with new investors coming in) and I’d rather get more cash or more free time. I managed to get a 115k for working 80% at my previous job (but I quit it because it was boring, so currently I get 105k for 80% and much more interesting job). It’s not Google-level, but it’s not bad. My workload is not huge, I don’t have on-calls and I can work from home one-two times a week. My current team is nice and I work on tech that I like. In general it’s ok, but in the past I used to work with some jerks that I didn’t like. Another advantage is that there’s usually less bureaucracy and less politics in small companies.
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Just beware of startups that grows and still behave like startups… Dangerous field.
How do you avoid the stock dilution effectively?
Btw I accept suggestions for SE related positions in the zurich area.
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Ask for money or time instead or hope that the value of the company will go so much up that dilution won’t be a problem. But IMHO hope in general is a crappy strategy.
yeah but companies don’t always have enough cash. that’s why they pay in stock (also a reason)
But they can give you more free time with current budget. That’s always negotiable. I did that during job switch 2 years ago, and I basically kept my 100% salary with 80% work equivalent (I started working 4 days a week). Alternative was to get a 15% rise (I couldn’t get more, as I already was close to the higher limit of market salaries).
I personally think people with marketable skills don’t negotiate hard enough. Especially in CH my impression is that people often consider asking for more than a median salary as immoral and greedy. I find it dumb.
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I’d love to see what a median job on those position is. The tool from the confederation is supercomplicated. I have issues understanding where should I position the company where I currently work.
Check Glassdoor:
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Not a fan of Glassdoor personally: they force you to cough up your salary to see the data you’re after so there is a lot of garbage in their stats. And they never ever expire their data so to calculate their “salary” figure, they use all numbers reported since they started collecting them up until those collected today. This drives Glassdoor estimates down but Glassdoor really works for employers not employees so they’re happy to keep it this way. And since employees rely on GD for negotiating, this keeps salaries low. The confederation’s tool also has issues, mostly that the figure are from 2018.
Employers on the other hand have excellent data: they purchase it from HR firms that collate all this data and to ensure it stays accurate, they force companies who sign up to share their own payroll data.
Moral of the story: always ask for more. I personally use Glassdoor + 20-30%
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There are remote-first or full-remote companies hiring in Switzerland, like GitHub, GitLab, and probably others.
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Cool, I didn’t realize they had figures for outside Silicon Valley.