"Say 'I won’t do what you tell me' and change jobs. There are fantastic workplaces out there; not a lot, but they exist. [...] Do not let a bad job kill your enthusiasm. It is not worth it. Disobey and move on."
Especially Europeans have problems thinking like this. I always advise engineers to keep on looking for better offers / jobs the moment they take a new job. Instead many hibernate in a job for 3-5 years without thinking of their careers and hence miss opportunities.
Disclaimer: To help engineers finding jobs / working on their careers and support IT-firms to find people, I recently started a small headhunting agency.
So mail me, if you look for a tech-job in Zurich. Salaries here after [!] taxes start at 7000 CHF / month. Find my e-mail address in my hn-handle or check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...
Compensation wise it's still a better idea to move to the USA to work at google & co then. A typical goofacesoft sr engineer gets +$250k/yr total compensation + paid for health insurance with a %30-%40 total income tax rate as a sr engineer.
Also to start a corporation, you have no capitalization requirements and it's easy-ish to hire canadians, australians and people work who work in a foreign office for +1 yr on a L visa. The waiting times for citizenship in the USA are surprisingly less than switzerland if you're not chinese or indian, which is pretty bad when the USA beats you in citizenship waiting time.
And most important of all, there is a shit ton of VC cash to get investment dollars from.
I think you confuse many things here. For canadians US is the better choice but for people from the EU who are not top 5% of the engineers, Switzerland is the best choice.
Being in the top 30% of engineers or even mediocre means you will make a decent or very decent living in Switzerland. I am not sure, if this is true for the US.
As one those engineers who has worked in SV for 5 years, you definitely do not have to be in the top %5.
You probably spent 4+ years of your life going to some sort of university to get a degree to help get something like 60k euro per year software job. So is spending a couple of months really getting good at cracking the coding interview and doing some practice interviews is definitely worth the $70k+ equivalent after tax salary bump. Even getting a job at a FaceGooSoft european office and later transferring to HQ in SF would be a good idea. Do realize though it's hard to change jobs with an L1 visa vs. H1B once you have one, so that should be your goal.
Now the USA has it's non-salary downsides for sure, but if you're just thinking in salary terms then the USA beats CH as far as I can see.
You're assuming that everyone with a bachelor or master in CS can just walk into FaceGooSoft after reading "cracking the coding interview".
That is not true.
The false-negative rate at FaceGooSoft is very high, they have a revolving door of candidates, that is why they can afford it.
I am interviewing people for IT-jobs for over a year now and I met many engineers that are Google-material but did not make it into a tier-1 firm for some reason (they where scared-off by annoying recruiters, where asked unlucky questions at interviews, did not even try or even want to make it in there).
Hence, they have to work at mediocre companies and life at mediocre companies is better in Switzerland than in the US, I believe.
That is why you apply for 10 companies, get 3+ offers and maybe try a few times. They know that people get rejected for BS reasons and it's totally cool to apply again after +6 months. They even will start contacting you again to apply! With enough prep and determination, you can do it, and the amount of time & money required is far less than getting any 2 year masters degree.
You can even apply to not FaceGooSoft, get in the USA with smaller company X and then try from a more comfortable position of having a work visa and being in the USA.
Yes, it is a software development thing. Labour market is crazy.
Employers are obsessed with "acquiring talent". If you can show "growth potential" (as in, being able and willing to learn and extend your expertise), they will overpay you for the first 2 years or so. After that, they will feel entitled to recover their investment in you, so you will continue to grow, but your salary will stagnate.
Meaning, 3-5 years is the sweet spot for getting another income boost from the next talent acquirer willing to pay you to learn even more.
3-5 years? Try 1-2. The reason is that there are a lot of opportunities, and it gets boring to work on the same thing for a long time. Also you can learn more different things and fill out your resume by changing jobs more often.
That said, I personally prefer to stay at a job for at least three years, given the opportunity.
Especially Europeans have problems thinking like this. I always advise engineers to keep on looking for better offers / jobs the moment they take a new job. Instead many hibernate in a job for 3-5 years without thinking of their careers and hence miss opportunities.
Disclaimer: To help engineers finding jobs / working on their careers and support IT-firms to find people, I recently started a small headhunting agency.
So mail me, if you look for a tech-job in Zurich. Salaries here after [!] taxes start at 7000 CHF / month. Find my e-mail address in my hn-handle or check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...