Looking at job specs in Zurich. Few impressions:
>90% (maybe >95% jobs) don't seem to care about CS knowledge/Leetcode. If you have some JavaEE/Hibernate/JBoss expreience or C#.NET you're fine. Presumably not interesting job and CRUD. And cobol, so much cobol.
There seem to be few interesting roles in banks but now even front office and quant devs/researchers are outsourced to Poland (at least according to ATS of Credit Suisse/UBS)
FAANG market size: virtually 0 outside of Google. Mostly FAANG buying small startups in computer vision, so 1-2 teams tops + sales office.
However, for single frugal person it's doable to save ~4k CHF/USD (on 110-120k base, nothing else) working for some random no name company or decent startup.
London has way more interesting roles (actual FAANG, proper finance, etc.) But insane tax so I would end up saving less. With 90k base (which isn't even trivial to get in London). Not even thinking about bonus as that's already taxed at progressive 50%.
What's your take on this if you aren't eligible for US visa?
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Don’t get me wrong, Switzerland is beautiful and the taxes are low but adapting to Swiss life is a challenge unless you’re planning to live in a house. Make a sound past 10pm and your neighbors will start to bang on the walls.
I would take a job at the bank in Zurich over FAANG in London. But then again I took booking.com over FAANG in London so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
London might be good if your ultimate goal is to transfer to the US. But I've already lived there during my college years / internships and didn't like the fake / plastic culture. I also value easy going life over TC. And my life in the Netherlands is pretty comfy, I own my own apartment - and manage to save and invest 2k each month. Sadly the media induced hysteria by the name of corona virus hit, so I might be laid off from my job @ booking so will have to move to London
tl;dr Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, even Germany > UK
English proficiency in NL is very high. You can easily get by without ever learning a word of Dutch. Although that strategy might not make you many Dutch friends
But to be frank as non-white expat, UK is much better place than Zürich. You can always find like minded people while in Zürich is hard. I’ve lived in both, discrimination is real in Switzerland.
Yes technically there are a few tiny remote offices of other FAANGs in Zurich: Facebook (Oculus), Apple (self driving & some others), Microsoft (AR/VR and enterprise), even Citadel, and I'm sure they pay well, but they're all really tiny. Like a few dozen people each tiny and hiring very selectively.
Whereas Google's nearing 5k people. The normal attrition rate alone can't get absorbed by these tiny other offices.
Banks and startups pay shit, 150k is their idea of a very good TC and 200k is a hard ceiling for any sort of IC work. Contractors can break through it but yeah you need to specialize in these boring banking tech. Generic Java development pays generically bad or gets nearshored to Poland for even worse rates. No interesting roles like quants, that kind of stuff is mostly in London and US, only sell side sits here.
But before yes we were hiring L3's even if not specifivally advertised. An explanation I once heard is they don't consider official job site a good channel for these, too much noise
I didn't care for the city either, crappy weather, small living quarters, limited consumer choice, and unfriendly locals. The nature and outdoors is world class though (even California can't compare). Also consider that getting a C permit and even B permit is getting increasingly hard these days (see language requirements).