Those are the good parts, however, not all things are good. Everything else is very expensive. Going out to an average restaurant will cost 100 CHF for a dinner for 2. There was a study saying a household with one kid will require 8k CHF a month if you plan to have a holiday and a car. You will have to pay for mandatory insurance etc. Then again, 8k is not that much if both partners work.

Do not forget that the tax rate is very attractive and often there is a so called 13th salary at the end of the year, usually a full month salary. This is not based on KPI's this has been a tradition for a long time. Also, 5 weeks of paid holidays, the US do not know that concept yet. If you add these two to your salary, the numbers suddenly look much better.

In summary, you can have a very good life and put money aside in Zurich if you commute to work by public transport(or small scooter), do not live in the most expensive apartment you can find and so long you do not eat out twice every day, you will be very well off.

Zurich is one of the most beautiful and entertaining cities in the world. The weather is horrible compared to California, but you'll have plenty of money and paid time off work to holiday in sunny and warm destinations. The nearest being southern Switzerland, once you're through the alps, you are in a different climate zone. A 2 hours commute.

And let's not forget the social system. If you earn 10k CHF a month and lose your employment, you are entitled to collect something like 7k gross a month for 1.5 years while looking for the next job.

I hope this gives some perspective, that said, with such a salary, if it's possible to work remotely, I'd chose neither SV nor Zurich.

that said... if i could get a job paying 80% of what i make now, in either city. i would move back and take it in a heartbeat, considering it was something remotely interesting.

I hear this all the time in Vancouver - people blaming this squeeze on stagnant wages - as if the labour market could ever pay people enough to keep pace with supply-constrained, monopolistic markets. The rent is too damn high. And we know why, but ... somehow we just want to throw more money in the fire? You can pay people however much you want, but without addressing the market dysfunctions all of those higher wages will wind up in the hands of landlords and health insurance companies.

It is not. The value fire-fighters, teachers or nurses provide is much higher than, say, an enterprise developer, yet in most places the other earns more.

The same seems like it's true of teachers and nurses. They're seen as a cost centre to be reduced rather than a scarce resource to be fought over.

And it's not really fair to nurses to say "you only get a fair wage if you're putting in 60-80 hours". It's also not fair to their patients, as care quality drops pretty hard when you over work nurses and doctors.

If that was true businesses wouldn't show profit (or would show low profit margins consistently) because the value of the workers labour would have been been paid back to them.

Plus that whole thing about these billion/trillion dollar SV tech companies engaging in massive wage fixing.

You're paid the absolute minimum amount of money the company thinks they can get away with.

It should be but employee efficiency and revenue per employee has increased (in fact more than doubled on average in the last 20 years), but salary has roughly stayed the same.

So... A little bit cheaper apartment combined with a salary that is half or third (from what I read, I don't live there) of what you can get in Bay Area. WTF is this article trying to say?

Edit: And of course, not to even mention that living in $8000 apartment on $200 000 salary is much better than living in $4000 apartment on $100 000 salary.

But then again, I grew up in a family of five in a 45 square meter apartment.

More generally I've been wondering about this and can't figure it out, why are software engineer salaries in Europe are so much lower than the US? From what I can tell, Switzerland is just about the highest you'll see in Europe, and is still lower than the biggest US tech hubs. In other big metropolitan areas (Paris, London, etc.), the cost of living is at least a bit lower, but they're still major cities and not that cheap. And there salaries for engineers are even lower. As another concrete data point I was looking through the gitlab location adjustments for remote workers that they have released publicly[0], and the floor for anywhere in the US, meaning even the most inexpensive, remote parts in the country, is 63.3% of the baseline SF salary. Any mid-tier city will be higher than that, like 75% of the SF salaries. But Paris only pays 56.5% of the SF baseline. Why is that?

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...

Because in the EU there are no visa restrictions for importing foreign workers like in the US.

EU companies can secure working visas to almost anyone outside the EU in a couple of months so instead of raising salaries to attract local talent they know it's a much better deal to pay a recruiter and wait to find an outsider desperate for a job or a sucker who doesn't know the market/living costs.

Do you think SV salaries would be as high as they are if the US would have unrestricted immigration and give working visas to anyone who fit the job description?

I find that (the negative reaction to them here on HN) hilarious when it comes to RSUs of a publicly traded company such as Google and Facebook. They are absolutely unequivocally every bit as real as your salaries. Maybe it's just that people outside SV don't really understand the difference between options and RSUs. Before I came to SV I had never even heard of RSUs.

So we must not throw away the skills factor, the ability of employees to build an extremely successful company, their motivations, their awareness of new business practices, although it is very difficult to measure it. Perhaps France is ahead (after all, a lot of Linux is European, along with DailyMotion and others), perhaps it is not (...after all, DailyMotion only got the second seat and is now dwarfed by Youtube).

My brother in law moved to Silicon Valley because he had a very low salary ceiling in Vienna.

UK salaries are a joke, but you can make good money contracting and consulting.

It's definitely a more complicated way of working than being salaried, but it's rewarding, both monetarily and in the ability to set your own vacation allowances, take big gaps between contracts if you want to/can afford to etc etc.

If you want decent pay in London you go contract, not perm, and head for the finance sector. You can make the equivalent of $150k-280k depending on how good you are at landing contracts and selling yourself.

AFAICT the situation is similar in western Europe (I get feelers out sometimes at lower but comparable rates for contract work in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Belgium).

Perm workers here are being ripped off IMHO, massively. But then the technical standard of the average perm worker at the average mid sized company in the UK is terrible too. It's a vicious feedback cycle of low pay, low respect for the profession and poor results. Perm work in mainland Europe is paid peanuts AFAICT, which is probably why so many find their way to London.

Some of this difference is down to costs and rights associated with work in the EU, which are just missing in the US. And part of the reason contracting is so lucrative is that we effectively opt-out of those.

If I were to take on this work through my Ltd company it would translate to a salary equivalent of around £101,000 or $130,000 US. What you actually get out of it probably depends on your exact tax situation I guess!

Most of the work in Austria that comes my way seems to be embedded systems or kernel work, though one or two are Java related.

Would you mind sharing some, maybe in private?

Plus, in the enterprise world it's very easy to find 40/hr wk (or in practice, sometimes less!) jobs.

Not all of them have the natural beauty of Switzerland, but if you want that, you can find that too.

My next move might be working for Amazon in Nashville after I put in a few good years at my current gig. That seems like it could be a nice place to live.

[1] I find the term OP to be ambivalent. Like is it the original poster of the whole thread or the original poster you are responding to?

However, my point is you don't have to choose between an expensive, top US tech hub and leaving the states entirely if you want a more chill, laid back, and less expensive lifestyle.

There are like 50 other cities in the US that offer all the amenities of a big city, with chill jobs and without the sky-high COL.

Oh, and your tax dollars don't support wars making the world a significantly worse place with all the rest of evil attached, if you care about such things.

I'm not trying to sound defensive here, but in a global world there has to be a superpower or two playing the role of a superpower. And if you like Western democratic ideals, it's a good thing that they're aligned with those.

The whole world is living in the relatively peaceful and prosperous structure of alliances that were established after WWII, and I personally wouldn't want to see those disappear. Maybe if you live in China, Russia, Brazil, or the Middle East, or you have a different value system than I do, you might disagree.

Edit add: On the other hand, at least when I was there, the wages weren't comparable to US wages for similar work and management attitudes about software developers tended to border on considering them glorified typists.

I just think it’s funny you are 1:1 comparing a country twice the size of, with the same population of New Jersey, with its single city over 250k... to the entirety of the United States.

My 15 YOE ass left Dallas three years ago partly because I couldn't break $100k there. Where are these jobs?

That said, I bought my house in 2008 for $175k.

I'd wager the typical city in Switzerland is much more liveable (i.e. not being trapped in a car as you commute to and from suburbs or just get around the horribly laid out car-centric city) than those places.

Living in the suburbs is a choice and certainly not the only option in most cities. If you want to live near a real downtown, it's still way, way, cheaper than living some globally-recognized urban center. Maybe not quite as cool, but way more laid back.

A pity, Vienna is a beautiful city and consistently ranks among the best places to live.

Is it the market-rate units that cost 40-50% of your salary?

$1/sq. ft. ($10.76/m²) is still the norm in Dallas, and it's not too hard to find cheaper. You would pay less money for a decent-size house in the suburbs of Dallas than the cheapest 1-bedroom apartment in SV or Zurich.

Also I abhor the politics of the state and region, in general.

Unless you want to live exactly in the center of Zurich, I have never seen such expensive apartments as mentioned in the article.

The article assumes that you would share the flat with others. Sharing with 2 others would mean effective rent is 800-1300 CHF.

A commute in California or New York or London can be a real drag.

I think your math is wrong. 4,000 CHF / 100,000 CHF = 4%