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Comment by s3nnyy | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I immigrated to Switzerland is direct democracy and stability. Since two hundred something years Switzerland is politically neutral. It is ranked the most stable economy in the world and the most competitive nation (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Switzerland-the-most-competitiv...). The Swiss Franc is the sixth most-traded currency in the world. If you get your salary in Swiss Francs, you maximize the chances that the salary you earn will actually be worth something in the future and is not just paper.

If you look for a tech-job in Switzerland, I work as a tech-recruiter in Zurich. Check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... and / or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.

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> If you get your salary in Swiss Francs, you maximize the chances that the salary you earn will actually be worth something in the future and is not just paper.

Or, when living in a country with untrustworthy currency, you can just exchange your savings to USD (or CHF etc.) and have them equally protected.

Your comment suggests you've never lived in a country where you would want/need to exchange your currency.

The smart money (I.e. politically well connected) gets to exchange their money. As soon as every one else finds out, capital controls have been introduced.

The politically well connected, usually, get to continue exchanging their money at an artificial rate.

The idea is to be exchanging them _in_advance_, i.e. exchanging the savings part of your monthly salary to USD every month. Don't wait till the shit hits the fan and everybody wants to get rid of their local money.

A country cannot have a widely distrusted currency for long, because everyone will do as you say (exchange away).This causes capital flight, so the gov't introduces capital controls shortly thereafter.

So the only way to do as you say is to be (far) more prescient than your peers. You need to be far more prescient because you have to beat the gov't insiders too.

Also, prescience does not save your future earnings (I.e. after controls have been imposed)

Or you take a risk and use the black market

In Yugoslavia all deposits were blocked at one point. You couldn't withdraw your own money from the bank. So, it's not the same which country are you living in.

I'd keep my long-term savings in a foreign bank, so the authorities could at most get my grocery and rent money (still bad, but not quite as devastating). If foreign bank was not an option, I'd just keep my money in the proverbial matress - in fact, that was a common option for saving in communist Poland (US dollars stored at home).

The downsite is that you loose liquidity then. Assuming you live in Russia, how / where are you going to buy bread with USD, let alone with CHF?

I don't know about current Russia, but in communist Poland (with a terrible currency) you could exchange the USD for a local currency in an instant on a black market, and at an extremely favourable rate (which reflected the weakness of the local currency).

What kind of IT companies are there in Switzerland? I can't name off the top of my head any products or innovative organizations coming out of there.

Switzerland is only 8 million inhabitants, thus it obviously can't produce on Chinese/US/German scale.

Some Swiss IT-highlights include:

- The biggest Google software engineering office outside California (around 2000 employees).

- Logitec

- ETH university

- Many ETH-spinoff/startups: Doodle, Bitspin (bought by Google), Teralytics, Archilogic, Fashwell, Getyourguide, Numbrs and I surely forgot many others.

Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, etc., etc.

Voat [0]

[0] https://www.voat.co/

As someone who has worked in Switzerland, how did the Swiss Franc cap removal (against dollar) has impacted tech industries around Zurich ? Some of them took a 40% hit on their margins.

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