| 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. |
Why is it 42 hours? That is not a typical 8x5 work week.