Ask HN: Engineering Job Market in Switzerland?

You would likely be surprised. There is a ton of strong software talent in the Ukraine and not quite as much demand as they’d probably like, with predictable outcomes in terms of the balance of market forces.

Contractor working from Ukraine could bill less because of low taxes for contract work (5%) and much lower CoL compared to Switzerland. But yeah, you are not going to hire anyone remotely competent for $50k in 2022.

This isn't quite accurate:

- You can only stay 3 months to look for a job. You can stay indefinitely without a job if you can prove you have the means to support yourself.

- You can stay in Switzerland indefinitely with a job, you just need to renew your permit every 5 years, which is essentially a rubber stamp because of freedom of movement agreements.

- You're only able to get a permanent residence permit after 5 years if you're a national of a subset of EU countries (list at [0]) or you're able to demonstrate that you're well integrated (the most burdensome criterion for that is speaking one of the canton's languages at B1 or better). Nationals of other countries who don't go for the exceptional integration pathway have to wait 10 years like most other countries.

[0]: https://www.sem.admin.ch/sem/en/home/themen/aufenthalt/eu_ef...

I'm Swiss and worked at a couple of software companies, mostly smaller in size.

1. Engineers are highly sought after. The companies I worked for always had a hard time getting local people (and capable ones at that) and are pretty much continously searching. I'm hearing the same from friends at other companies.

2. Pay is very good, if you go for some of the larger companies or into the financial industry even better. (For swiss people, maybe can't compete with ridiculous silicon valley salaries.) Raising a family is pretty expensive though for everyday things, at least the schools and universities are cheap (and good) ;)

3. From my experience flexible working arragnements and remote work was hard to come by and often only allowed for maybe 20% of your work. Since COVID this has of course changed and we are currently forced to work from home. I think this also changed the attituded of many workplaces (at least I hope so) but it's not been a given for a long time. I can't compare work culture as I have never experienced it anywhere else but as others have mentioned, 42h workweeks are standard with 5 weeks of holidays (depending on the canton you move to you might also have more or less public holidays in addition to that).

The big cities are of course always the most expensive ones to live in but Switzerland has very well built out public transport that is also mostly on time so getting into the cities to work while living outside of the city is mostly a non issue if you are willing to spend the time traveling.

If you care about the FAANG titans, we have Microsoft and MS R&D in Switzerland, Google has their largest Software Engineer campus outside the US in Zurich and AWS is just moving in.

(As already said, no, you will have to choose your own insurance and pay for it) And you are required to have basic health insurance but can't get rejected if you have prior conditions. There is also a market for additonal insurances or higher tier ones (so you get your choice of doctor and single bed rooms in hospitals).