Well I don’t know everybody’s career path, but there are certainly consulting firms, which will pay for your education, certificates, they will place you on projects and take care of you. From there you build your network of contacts. You talk to people and find out that these 3 guys have a company together and they dont have a fixed salary, but an hourly rate. So after some time you can try to make the switch. For this you need the approval of the client, who probably does not want to piss off your big consulting firm, but also is happy to save a few bucks.
Interesting, I would have said it was good. 10 years experience would get you close to 10000 without PhD, 11000 with it, per month, non taxable meaning an actual 25% more. This is to work 40 hours a week, with 8 weeks of holidays and a large contribution to the pension and the private health insurance which covers the whole family.
OK, perhaps it is below average salary wise (is it actually?), but the whole package seems competitive to me.
Édit: I forgot that one also gets days and money to return to the family, money every year for having moved to Geneva and money for each child and the family (450 per month per small child per instance, 300 per month if married)
Seems kind of high to me. What area/stack? Figures I’ve heard were more like 800-1000 Fr/day with ~20% agency cut.
Is 200K really the ceiling in the tech scene? In Zürich I’ve been offered to interview few times for different companies for salaries in the range of 150-180K, and I don´t have many years of experience.
(Sorry if this question comes out bad or sounds wrong, I’m genuinely curious about the market here).
That might be a nice thing, I agree. I start to consider myself more than a coder.
Nice , now I have to find a friend that works in a FAANG/etc company.
Network, reach out to people online, on linkedin, in meetups etc. There’s even referral networking sites like repher.me. It’s a big company, there’s no reputational risk for people for referring and they get paid handsomely ($$$$) when a referral is hired. Well, you’re still kind of not supposed to refer total randos, but people do it anyway for money.
Ok, the non-monetary compensation is pretty good at CERN, but in general a lot depends on kind of contract. It’s super hard to get a non-fixed term staff/fellow contract, which is also paid best. As a one year project associate I was getting 4k a month net. In Zurich I doubled this and after two years I switched to 80% with the same salary
I see, ok, indeed 4k is very bad. I know staff and fellows and they have a more decent package.
Oh it’s not. (And no one is forced to live in the city of Zurich either.) California has comparable incomes, much higher taxes. At least if you work for G/M/Apple/Oculus. If you aren’t able to get into G/M/Apple/Oculus in Zurich, you also won’t be able to chase after those high salaries in CA either.
Zurich city taxes are generally similar to US federal taxes (sometimes lower, sometimes higher). California adds a bonus tax on top of that. Never mind capital gains. And crazy rent. Priced for a bedroom in a shared appartment in San Francisco gets you a 3.5 room near Zurich.
Pretty sure there are comparable salaries if you find the right banking jobs, which software engineers can get without trouble.
Does not compare, at all. US requires you to leave the day you get fired. US forces some people to wait 30+ years for permanent residence. US requires your employer to get your permanent residence for you. Switzerland can be a bit slow, but high skilled (tech) jobs have no issues getting approval. You can switch jobs with less complication, permanent residence is entirely based on you wanting to get it, and you have a large buffer when fired (== time to find a new job).
~10% state income tax on top of federal (which as you mention is indeed close to total ZRH taxes). That’s nothing for the pay and weather. And let’s not forget Seattle where you will have ZRH-level taxes, CoL and weather and some degree of presence of all FAANGs with pay comparable or not much lower than in the bay
Not really a problem if you buy & hold. Taxable event is the sale. Or exit tax if you overstay your welcome, it only kicks in 8 years after you get a green card AFAIK. You’ll FI/RE long before that.
Not true. You have 60 days to look for a new job on H1B. And current economy is such that you will not stay unemployed for even a week unless you want to
Problem just for certain nationalities.
On the hand other almost everyone else can get green card in 2-3 years and US citizenship in 5 which is much faster than swiss equivalent C permit (5 years) and swiss citizenship (12 years + good luck)
M/Apple/Oculus in Zurich are very specialized shops hunting for US visa refugee PhDs from ETH. Only G set up a big general software development shop here. A roach motel kind of shop - once you once got in, there’s no way to job hop out, no other comparable FAANG offices here, and the rest of software industry by far and large pays much less. It’s either US or stagnating TC if you overstay past your vesting cliff. In Bay Area on other hand you can job hop relatively easily to any other FAANG, unicorn and even some 2nd tier companies for an increased level and pay every few years. Many people do and reach crazy levels of pay. Definitely beats getting a promo internally at G today.
But I heard that a good developer at FAANG in California get even get $500k+? Not realistic for Zurich, I guess?
By the way, when it comes to big money in Europe, a friend of mine is a banking consultant at a big consulting firm. Not a programmer though, compliance consultant. His salary is nothing to get excited about, around 10’000 net per month. But the banks where he is assigned to do his work pay… $500+ per hour. He has meetings with top managers from big banks, all flashing their rolex watches.
$500k is not usual in California. You might expect 200-300k for good engineers with strong experience. $500k are probably outliers.
https://www.levels.fyi/ is a good source for this (biased towards the higher ends). Salaries for Google in the $500k+ begin at level 7 (or high level 6), which not that many people get to.
1 Like
Simple - google’s not the top paying employer anymore. Ever since the new CFO if you haven’t noticed all the cost cutting that’s been going on. Merely good paying, but not top. Dozens of companies in the Bay pay comparably or better. Playing your cards correctly, you can easily break $300k as a senior developer if you’re FAANG material. Now back to Zurich - there’s only Google, little wage competition, which leads to your pay lagging far behind US. Jumping ship every few years is proven strategy to increase your pay, it won’t work here because there’s only google already paying at the top of the swiss market. Even taking into account tax and rent differences, US is financially better choice.
1 Like
If the H1B to green card path is easier (meaning you dont fall into the certain nationality pool), moving to Bay Area is a good choice. Job switching is much easier and you can easily increase the total comp.
Yes, $300k as a senior developer is common. $500k are outliers as I mentioned. Note that I linked to a website and you can see that all companies in FAANG have similar ceilings in their levels. The difference in SV is that you can find more companies and startups willing to pay same ranges or even more.
Also, Switzerland has more PTO, which is very important to me. In SV you should expect 15 days off, while in Switzerland 25-30 is common. There are other factors which I do consider important, but to each its own 
As @pandas mentions, US is financially a better choice, I think, if you already have some years of experience. In my case, as a person with little experience, I’ve been getting better offers in Switzerland than in the US, which is a huge factor for me, specially when I remember having to pay $2000 usd for a room in SV.
It’s not that big of a deal. All tech companies prioritize delivery over butt-in-the-seat time and offer some reasonable flexibility. Flexible work time, “work” from home, sick days, unpaid leaves, some have “unlimited” vacation days, sabbaticals. You can have a homemade sabbatical by leaving job with some gap while negotiating a generous sign-on with next employer to cover missing pay. And conversely taking a long vacation at google switzerland can bit you if it hurts your delivery, even if you’re fully entitled to it legally.
The website you link to quotes 9200 jobs. If you sort them and skip the 300 highest ones (“outliers”), then you can see that between rank 300 and 400 you have jobs with $480k - $520k. And yeah, most of them require 10-12 years of experience, but it shows that it’s not an outlier but a realistic expectation to get $500k TC with 12 years of experience (at least if you’re good). Whereas in Switzerland? I would be surprised if you got more than 200k CHF.
And for a beginner? I guess a graduate programmer will get maybe around 75k CHF per year in Zurich. Whereas on this website the pay starts at $150k.
Few points when comparing SV to Switzerland
- SV talent is probably around the top 10-15% of the country (I totally invented this number, what I mean is that not everyone that graduated from a CS degree can fall in these high paying jobs).
- Many people with 10-15 years of experience remain as (senior) software engineers (L4, L5 at Google or FB). Just few of them are able to keep going to higher levels (staff software engineers).
- I live in Zürich, graduated from bachelor less than a year ago, and I’ve been getting offers/opportunities to interview for much higher than 75k CHF. I don’t want to extrapolate from my particular experience, but I do think that top 10% of software engineers in Switzerland can have high enough salaries (at least to ~350k for someone with 12 years of experience if you’re good).
As I mentioned above, I’m kind of new to this market, so my experience if a bit biased.
i would be intrested in the companies. never heard of such high salaries
My 4 data points in Zürich
- consultancy front end developer position: 90-130k
- bank front end position: 120-180k
- Hooli software engineer: 140-180k
- Securities dealer quant developer: 160-200k
4 Likes