Obviously there are exceptions and not every EU dev is paid less than every US dev. The point is that there are large numbers of developers across the EU who can stand to gain a lot by working remotely for US wages. Not every last one of them, but many. Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.

Switzerland is 0% of the EU population because Switzerland is not in the EU.

> Switzerland is only 2% of the EU’s population.

The Bay Area is, similarly, only 2.5% of the US' population.

Part of the draw of hiring remote is that you don’t have to pay Bay Area salaries.

I wasn’t referring to Bay Area salaries. I was referring to normal US developer salaries, which are still higher than common EU salaries.

My comment was about general hiring, not the outlier edge cases. If you want to pay Bay Area salaries you can obviously compete on compensation with just about anyone, anywhere with very few exceptions.

I think that's the wrong take, personally.

The draw of hiring remote is that you will get access to great engineers that would otherwise never want to move to the Bay Area. You get to compete for their talent if you're offering full remote, but so do other companies that pay "Bay Area salaries".

I think it's great for software engineers everywhere, but not great for the Bay Area itself since the incentive to move there becomes lower (salary is not the only reason people move to the Bay Area, but it's definitely a big pull). Although if you live there that means less pressure on real estate ;)

In Germany, even good software engineering jobs pay on average 2-3x less than their US equivalents.

Taxes are a bit complicated in Switzerland. While they are nominally low, you pay separately for things that are covered by taxes in most other countries. One example would be health insurance.

So while you'll definitely be paying less if you don't have dependents, if you have kids and are earning "normal" money (e.g. 50-100k CHF gross/year), your total tax-like expenses would be similar to most of the Western world.

But marginal taxes *are* way lower than most other countries. E.g. if you're earning 200k CHF gross/year, your marginal tax rate (in Zurich) would be something like 23%.

Salaries in Switzerland reach $500k-$1 million/year? Honest question, I know nothing about Switzerland.

For software engineers it's not unheard of, but that will be at banks (in specific cases), or FAANG (who have offices in Zurich, typically)

EDIT: I'm a Swiss software engineer if that wasn't clear. I don't make that much though unfortunately :)

Cool, thanks for sharing. It's nice to hear salaries like that are not limited to SV.

It's really not the norm though, to be clear. 500k-1M is really outliers (senior staff engineer with 20 years career in a private bank etc...)

Most of the jobs are "normal bay area" salaries, but cost of living in Switzerland is as high or worse as San Fransisco, roughly.

L6 or L7 at Google can have total compensation in that range.

See https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerlan... for the very top.

For a more meaningful view of the Swiss market (there's almost only Google on this site for Switzerland), I would have a look at https://swissdevjobs.ch/. There's not a lot above 150k.

For the bankers they do :-).