Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

nextrends.swissnexsanfrancisco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#131

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

wil421 wrote: post #94
barrkel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 population of Zurich seems quite small to support a large amount of developers. Everyone here is comparing London, SF, and other places that have over 4 million more people. Zurich also has a high cost of living and well above any US cities.

If you include rent (which is high but not as insane as in SF), it's comparable to SF: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#132

Post by richardknop »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121
barrkel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

London has very poor salaries for development, especially compared to Switzerland. Standard developers make 30-40k pounds...

Yes but high end (financial industry and top MNCs) and contract jobs can pay 3-4x more than that. So when you are a good developer and are either from Europe or looking to relocate to Europe, London and Zurich are two top places you should concentrate your job hunt on.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#133

Post by itronitron »

timewarrior wrote: post #35
kuschku wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just that. This happened when a Uber like model doesn't have any inherent global market place advantages. Most users in a city take a cab in their own city most of the time. If even having this in their favor, small players are finding it difficult to survive - imagine if a bigger player comes in a space where there is a play for global level market place.

where there is a play for global level marketplace you will see real competition (smart phones seem to be a good example here) ... Uber is basically alone at the global level because of the local advantage as suggested and also the unwillingness of other big players to lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year or ignore local laws.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#134

Post by seanmcdirmid »

richardknop wrote: post #132
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London has very poor salaries for development, especially compared to Switzerland. Standard developers make 30-40k pounds...

Yes but high end (financial industry and top MNCs) and contract jobs can pay 3-4x more than that. So when you are a good developer and are either from Europe or looking to relocate to Europe, London and Zurich are two top places you should concentrate your job hunt on.

You'll also make good money in Bern, Basel, Lausanne, and Geneva. It isn't just Zurich, the French part is good also.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#135

Post by jpatokal »

adventured wrote: post #128
nextstep wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh HN, how is this the top comment on this fantastic blog post about the huge lifestyle drawbacks from living in SV? >> 2. Behind Silicon Valley on best technology and product building practices by at least 2 years. This was clearly written in earnest, but works better as a satirical joke about the inward-facing nature of bay area tech. Please explain what "best technology and product building practices" means here,…

How much experience do you personally have with Switzerland based start-ups? Serious question. The parent's comment is valuable because they actually have direct experience with the topic. It's being upvoted accordingly. Very few people on HN are likely to have direct experience with Swiss start-ups, further amplifying the value of the parent's input.

The parent's comment is valuable overall, but nextstep is quite correctly pointing out that that particular observation is phrased in absurd terms. You know how people joking referly to something that was a recent fad as being "so 2016"? That was two years ago. Are Swiss startups hopeless because they're still focused on "millennial engagement" (so 2016) instead of "viral learning" or "augmented reality talent management"? (Yes, this apparently is a thing.)

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#136

Post by jpatokal »

timewarrior wrote: post #72
soperj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that, but there are cases even in small countries where this didn't happen. Like trademe in New Zealand which was just like ebay. Ebay still hasn't become the major place to do auctions in new zealand.

Bigger a part of your business software is, faster the growth happens. Ebay like marketplaces still have a big physical world component present. Even if it isn't ebay, it might be some other company in Australia. Or maybe trademe becomes the company which tries to take over in Austrlia. It's inevitable and just a matter of time!

Australia's eBay is Gumtree.com.au, which was purchased by eBay quite some time ago.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#137

Post by chrisper »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #117
joe3774 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a work visa if a Swiss company wants to hire you for a special skill or expertise you have. The easier way is probably to start working for a Swiss company in the US and then let you relocate to Switzerland still working for that company.

Is is still hard for US citizens to get bank accounts?

FWIW I am not a US citizen but had to fill out an IRS tax form as well when getting a bank account in Switzerland since I was living in the US for 5 years.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#138

Post by chrisper »

refurb wrote: post #113
nextstep wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can work in SV and use great, reliable public transportation to get everywhere I want in my life, often in under an hour? And I can have 5 weeks paid vacation per year? I wasn't able to find these things when I lived there...

I agree with the public transport, but I live in SV and get 23 days of paid vacation plus 13 stat holidays.

Are sick days part of the 23 days?

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#139

Post by chrisper »

kgwgk wrote: post #17

> My nationality hampered my ability to obtain medical treatment Why?

Because of this: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wissen/medizin-und-psychologie/...

(Sorry it is in German, but here is a translation https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u... )

TL;DR: They do not do it because they are afraid of getting sued by Americans.

Re: Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

#140

Post by Karrot_Kream »

richardknop wrote: post #126
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "cutting edge" mean? They don't use modern deployment startegies? They don't use recently popular web frameworks? "Cutting edge" is so vague it's not clear whether SV just cargo cults more or whether it's actually more technically innvovative.

For example while kubernetes is all the rage in Silicon Valley and every startup is using it, most companies further away from SV take longer to adopt these new technologies. They are just evaluating and experimenting with k8s and in few years might move more significant loads into it. Similar with other tech as well. I think that’s just one example but you could look at programming languages, different automation an…

I'd argue that something like k8s is a huge investment for startups and is more of a time waster than anything else. I have a friend that worked at a startup that used Terraform to deploy their stuff, and the whole thing was overkill given that they literally just compiled a binary and put it on a single host. Instead, the friend just wrestled with the Terraform based build process and complained about learning the tool instead of getting stuff done.
Post reply on HN