61–70 of 197 posts
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Zurich, along with London, has the highest salaries for development in Europe. You may need to work in a finance-related position, but you can make fairly big bucks.
The one major non-finance option is Google, which has a large and growing engineering office there. https://careers.google.com/locations/zurich/ Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ZRH.
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> Do not have world conquering ambitions - which kinda works against them. Works against them towards what? Not wanting to conquer the world is legitimate, I don't see why everyone should absolutely want to become the next Bezos.
Look at the example of Taxi apps. There are many in the European market, Germany alone has half a dozen local to the country. Yet, while uber operated in Germany, they could get basically 100% of the customers – simply by throwing billions of VC money at the task to subsidize rides. If competitors use such methods, there’s little you, as smaller company, can do.
There are two sides to a coin: while Uber has world-dominating ambition, that also means they aren't anywhere near as flexible to local market conditions as a local startup is. And I wouldn't consider Uber an unmitigated success yet - they still depend on VC cash to keep going, we'll see what happens when it runs out.
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Yes, that is one of the main factors. And the ground reality is that right now a new employment based Green Card petitioner from India would need to wait 70 years.
Need to get this fixed. A bipartisan bill cosponsered by 340 house representatives is there but Paul Ryan is not allowing the vote on it. Perhaps not the limit fixed, but the backlog that's currently there for H1bs. It will be extremely beneficial for the country, for the H1bs and family, and would drive up tech wages. Literally no negatives. Their cause is even more sympathetic than DACA. I sincerely believe if they…
I wouldn't go that far. DACA recipients were brought to the country as children and literally know nothing else, often including the language of their "home" country. H1Bs might be more beneficial economically, but I'm not convinced they are more sympathetic.
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There's a huge gap between investments banks consider too risky and the kinds of things SV investors in particular want to fund.
Depends on your growth strategy. If you're prepared to start lean and can demonstrate early signs of revenue then I'd imagine you'd find banks willing to cut a business loan.
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I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or lat…
I don't read the bit about the South Bay but that's absurd. gRPC - Mountain View Cgroups - Mountain View Golang, Rust - Mountain View Protobufs - Mountain View Blaze - Mountain View React - Menlo Park Buck - Menlo Park Thrift - Menlo Park And this is only a fraction of it. Do you even work in tech? You sound like a talking head...
However most of the unicorns or near unicorns since 2010 have been based in SF. Dropbox, AirBnb, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zenefits, SoFi, Credit Karma, CloudFlare, DocuSign, Wish, Slack, Github, Instacart, Prosper, Automattic, Eventbrite, Okta, Docker, Gusto, Nextdoor.
Let list could go on and on. I stand by my statement that more talent in concentrated in a smaller area vs South Bay and they are trying out a lot more things and also faster. Dynamics of an urban area also play some role where, where you can quickly walk to, use public transport or get an Uber, vs driving to another place in South Bay. All this leads to SF being ahead of South Bay in terms of learnings and trying out things.
And name calling doesn't get us anywhere!
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> Do not have world conquering ambitions - which kinda works against them. Works against them towards what? Not wanting to conquer the world is legitimate, I don't see why everyone should absolutely want to become the next Bezos.
Sure, but if nobody in your country wants to conquer the world then the others will never reap the benefits of someone having conquered a piece of it.
SF locals that are priced out of their city would have likely different opinion.
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Getting paid while in grad school? Or you're saying the pay goes up as you go from graduate degree to Ph.D?
Yes (both).
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Yeah plus the Y-combinators of this world won't want to throw cash at a 10-1 chance of making a few million, when they can do the same on a 100-1 chance of making a few billion.
This is a great observation: we need better accelerators to incubate startups that are more realistic and not willing to salt the earth to win at all costs [1]. [1] I'm not referring to YC specifically, but investors and incubators who are comfortable with Uber-esq behavior.
The post you're responding to is about economics, though, and VC math doesn't work for funding modest successes.
A VC can fund 10 businesses and have 9 of them fail (high risk) as long as the remaining one provides 100x+ return (high reward).
If you don't fund that one blockbuster then you can't fund the failures.
If you want to be in low-risk and low-reward business, then you're a bank and you're providing loans, not giving out no-strings-attached cash.
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I used to be in SF and in South Bay. Recently moved to Seattle , closely associated to the India and Swiss tech ecosystem. In my experience further away you are from SF, less cutting edge you are. In my experience even South Bay is 6 months behind SF. SF is a big melting pot, where a huge amount of talent are trying out new things and they are open to sharing their experiences - be it about latest technologies or lat…
This is satire, right? You're suggesting that ideas don't make it from SF to mountain view in less than 6 months with thousands of people commuting between the two each day and cross pollination of meetups on both sides. Containerization and its orchestration all started in the south bay. Pray tell, what was in use in SF for 6 months before it hit the startups based in MV, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.
There are always exceptions (like your containerization example), which can be attributed to serious tech players like Yahoo, Google and FB in South Bay. However holistically, SF has had much more unicorns and near unicorns. The contrast between SF and rest of the world has been more pronounced in recent year vs pre-2010 (except China of course - due to the growing economy and closed nature making it difficult for outside companies to operate).
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Zurich pay can eclipse Valley pay. I have friends who went to ETH for grad school and were getting close to 100k CHF a year. This is grad school -- the pay goes up from there.
Getting paid while in grad school? Or you're saying the pay goes up as you go from graduate degree to Ph.D?