Zero Salary Increase: Is This the Norm in Switzerland?

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45

I think you either have a career which you can invest in to make a lot of $$$, in which case it makes sense to go all in and do it.

Or if not, you can either make money on the side or switch jobs.

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46

I agree with your point. Would add that whichever of those routes you take and regardless of how successful you are at following that path, with FIRE as an objective, being restructured/terminated/etc. once (or twice) during your career can represent a meaningful boost to reaching your targets.

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47

I had the same experience. Perhaps with the exception of US employers, staying in the same job is not as well paying as switching and so changing jobs regularly is a good way to boost your income.

However, we get way too comfortable staying in our jobs. Each job move I had improved my pay and I should have made more jumps. I didn’t take the last job offer I had (which would have about doubled my salary) as I decided to coast on comfortable easy path instead - and that didn’t work out as expected anyway


I’d say you should switch at least once every 5 years and potentially every 3.

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48

Used to be like that but it’s a few years that in certain sectors wage are compressed because of firings and even staying at thd same salary when changing is very difficult

49

Hey, I lasted four days with my New Year’s Resolution (“don’t argue with random people on the Internet”).

Here we go 


Check inflation history in Switzerland going back a decade or two.

Never in negative inflation years were salaries cut in Switzerland. Not even in the public sector which generously has an “automatic” (but only upwards) Teurungsausgleich.

Right. If you wanted to argue on principle, you’d have to down adjust salaries in negative inflation years, wouldn’t you?

No.

At least the (US) Tech sector wasn’t an exception. It was a well known “secret” that the easiest way to get raises was to cycle through Tech companies every couple of years if the highest salary was your primary goal.
E.g. Google to Meta to Uber to Amazon back to Google as a former colleague of mine did between 2015 and 2025. He increased his base salary about four fold, his bonus about ten fold, and his RSUs about twenty fold. The boost size is probably an exception in this particular case, but it was true in direction at least until I quit the business. Heck, I might have even advised my best reports to (just) threaten to quit for a competitor when a (deserved) salary hike was “impossible” in the corporate compensation system in due time 


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50

I probably phrased that badly. I mean in the European countries I’ve worked in, staying in the same company tended to give fairly mediocre pay rises. Whereas in the US, I’ve witnessed that you can get good pay rises even within the same company. Of course, jumping between companies might still increase that further.

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