5 ms·

Interesting. Looks like I'm in the exact opposite boat. I'm a Swiss citizen and moved to a developing country (that has huge population outflow atm due to illeg

Interesting. Looks like I'm in the exact opposite boat. I'm a Swiss citizen and moved to a developing country (that has huge population outflow atm due to illegal immigration) to live and work. I achieved in 2 years (from scratch, no savings whatsoever) more than I ever could in Switzerland. My standard of living is incredible because of better purchasing power, and life is so much more fulfilling because you can actually change people's lives here. In my experience the Swiss industry is also mostly non-meritocratic and hugely biased towards authority and xenophobia. Not to mention the rigidness of work culture itself. Looks like about 10% of the Swiss would agree with me. [1] In my opinion, if you want to be an office employee, Switzerland is awesome, but if you want to be an entrepreneur or do anything of importance for the world, Switzerland is not the place. [1] https://www.eda.admin.ch/countries/china/en/home/living-in/swiss-nationals-living-abroad.html https://www.eda.admin.ch/countries/china/en/home/living-in/s...

s3nnyy 11y ago
Could you also tell what you did in Switzerland and what you do now in this "developing" country? Power-distance or empathy to foreigners is no different to Germany, at least in Zurich. Switzerland can't be that bad as a place for software engineers: 1) Google placed the biggest software engineering office outside the US into Zurich. 2) The ETH is the only place except for Oxford and Cambridge that can compete with top-US schools.
- Inthenameofmine 11y ago
  We do Bitcoin and Blockchain development [1]. Full stack JS and Go. Founded the company a year ago, we're now 17 full time employees, fully bootstrapped. Equity and cash flow with several US based startups. Not to mention that we're now finishing projects international teams located in Switzerland weren't able to pull off. As a side note, half of the team we replaced in Switzerland were from the ETH and Lausanne. Our interns here get more work done than those guys! It's completely surreal, which is why I felt so strongly about your comment. I got a US Engineering degree from RIT, when I got back to to Switzerland I couldn't even get responses to waiter jobs, let alone programming. That said, I'm first generation Swiss with a non-Swiss name, they probably didn't even look at my CV. I know people with similar stories in the industry, most of them in the Ukraine and Thailand actually. [1] https://bitsapphire.com/ https://bitsapphire.com/
  - s3nnyy 11y ago
    Did you grow up in the US? I can totally imagine that people have issues adopting anywhere in Europe, as the culture here is not better or worse but just different. I have a CS degree from a top-CS school in Europe. I would also not get jobs in the US, because no one knows anything but Oxford overseas.

s3nnyy 11y ago

Could you also tell what you did in Switzerland and what you do now in this "developing" country? Power-distance or empathy to foreigners is no different to Germany, at least in Zurich. Switzerland can't be that bad as a place for software engineers: 1) Google placed the biggest software engineering office outside the US into Zurich. 2) The ETH is the only place except for Oxford and Cambridge that can compete with top-US schools.

Inthenameofmine 11y ago
We do Bitcoin and Blockchain development [1]. Full stack JS and Go. Founded the company a year ago, we're now 17 full time employees, fully bootstrapped. Equity and cash flow with several US based startups. Not to mention that we're now finishing projects international teams located in Switzerland weren't able to pull off. As a side note, half of the team we replaced in Switzerland were from the ETH and Lausanne. Our interns here get more work done than those guys! It's completely surreal, which is why I felt so strongly about your comment. I got a US Engineering degree from RIT, when I got back to to Switzerland I couldn't even get responses to waiter jobs, let alone programming. That said, I'm first generation Swiss with a non-Swiss name, they probably didn't even look at my CV. I know people with similar stories in the industry, most of them in the Ukraine and Thailand actually. [1] https://bitsapphire.com/ https://bitsapphire.com/
- s3nnyy 11y ago
  Did you grow up in the US? I can totally imagine that people have issues adopting anywhere in Europe, as the culture here is not better or worse but just different. I have a CS degree from a top-CS school in Europe. I would also not get jobs in the US, because no one knows anything but Oxford overseas.