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Comment by XCSme | Hacker News Reader

I have actually applied to Google Zurich (but after 10 interviews they didn't hire me) and studied a bit how the life is there. There are many advantages or living there, but the cost of life and the fact that most people in Zurich are immigrants makes it a pretty cold city where it is hard to make friends or stay for a very long period of time. I think that now your point about "tech friendly environments" is not relevant anymore, because many countries support tech companies and offer a lot of grants for programmers and tech-related activities.

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Can only confirm this too. I lived and worked in Zurich and it it indeed very hard to make friends. They are polite and well meaning but very distant. A (german) coworker told me this (sad but oh so true) joke about Zurich inhabitants : "How to make them laugh ? Point a gun at them and order them to do so". No way I'm going back there.

Don't a large number of immigrants make it easier to make friends? My experience in a different large city - immigrants new to the city are eager to make friends, as they won't know many other people in the city. People who grew up in the city often still have their friend group from childhood, and thus are less interested in meeting new people.

in theory yes, but in this specific case (or anywhere else in Switzerland), not that much. it's hard to make long-lasting friendships here - turnaround of foreigners is massive, Swiss are not extremely welcoming to foreigners, most of whom don't know the language well (and they don't like that much germans/french either for various reasons, go figure).

Bear in mind that Zurich is not large city in London/NY/Kuala Lumpur/whatever sense. But if you adjust, it can be a nice place to live. Salaries are far from current SV trends and all stuff & services are very pricey. As I said, if you adjust...

My parents were immigrants in Zurich and I lived there the first decade of my life. I can confirm what OP said, it's a very expensive city and people are really cold and lonely.

10 interviews? is that normal for a research job? that feels like a lot

I work at Facebook, I think I had ~10 interviews in total. I think 5-10 is pretty normal for large companies: 3-4 on the phone, 3-5 on site, plus followup. It's very exhausting. In my case it took 4 months from first contact to offer accepted.

I had a total of 21 interviews at Apple (oh which 4 were phone interviews). Was not hired in the end. I would not recommend it...

These sorts of stories point to it still being an excellent job market for employers.

In a market that was more favorable to employees, there'd likely be less interviewing and more provisional hiring.

Or a terrible market for housing, you know..

For the allegedly best employers only. Your run of the mill company or consultancy can't pull a Google.

Apparently Apple, Google & co have so many applicants that they can do whatever they want. How incompetent can one be at interviewing to need 10 or 20 interviews?!

Soon they'll make candidates crawl through broken glass.

We typically do 5, in one day. 10 sounds like the rare case where the hiring committee was on the fence after those and asked for another interview day.

> How incompetent can one be at interviewing to need 10 or 20 interviews

Yes, after a full day of interviewing and five interviews, presumably preceded by phone interviews, the people responsible for hiring should be capable of reaching a decision.

I've found that hiring managers who don't value your time lead to managers who don't value your time. They say they want to screen for the best and brightest, but maybe they really want people who are subservient and willing to jump through hoops.

It's more likely both. They want good subservient people.

Well, in my case at the on-site interviews one guy had to ask me from a specific domain (JavaScript/front-end) but asked me questions about system-design, even though other interviewer already did that and they pass a sheet from one another so they don't ask questions from the same category. Not surprisingly, the recruiter called that I have to take another 2 interviews because they were unsure of my front-end skills. To make it worse, one of those 2 interviews was actually re-scheduled because the interviewer simply didn't show up. I did average to ~half of the interviews, for the other ~half I was well above average, for some of them I offered solutions they never thought of and were better in terms of complexity then the one that they had (even though they asked the same question many applicants before, that was an online interview and the recruiter told me that the guy told her that they should definitely hire me). Their decision was simply decided by the fact that the last interview (the one that got re-scheduled for a friday-evening with some guy from USA) who asked me some very, very basic JavaScript questions (such as: creating a form input and showing a message when that input is changed), I was really confused as the questions were so easy and I did not know if he was really expecting the obvious answers. My recruited called me, said that I aced the first (out of the two extra interviews) but the last interviewer said that I'm definitely not fit for the job (did I mention that the guy fell of his chair during the interview, after getting his coffee or something like that, maybe this has influenced his decision).

The interview experience was great, but the outcome really left a sour taste in my mouth, especially after bumping into their poor organizational skills.

TL;DR: Everyone was happy or really happy with my performance during the interviews, except the last guy (who was not even from the same office).

I do 1 or 2 interviews max. 1 hour interview each. I've hired 12 people so far. It's not perfect, but it's worked out ok. Granted I don't exactly work for Apple or Google, but it is $100B company...

There have been problematic hires, but issues wouldn't have been detected during interview processes.

I think 3-4 is probably optimal.

It's also possible that this was for two different jobs. In other words, after a phone interview and 3-4 onsite interviews the first position passed and then another group felt the feedback was good enough to try them in another role. I could see it getting to 10 total interview sessions pretty easily.

7-8 is a typical minimum for Google. 1 non-technical with the recruiter to check for fit, 1-2 technical phone interviews, 5 on-site. So 'only' 1-2 extra if the hiring committee can't decide.

The immigrant part would make it appealing for me. The amount of outsiders is one thing that makes New York City and Silicon Valley more culturally interesting than Cincinnati or Iowa City.

As for being cold - I have several Swiss friends in Zurich. They are warm and decent people, but they are more reserved than most Americans.

I'm moving back to Google Zurich. The male/female ratio is a huge issue there, so it's good to bring a girlfriend, but cost of living was never a problem. Taxes are minimal, salary at Google Zurich is huge.

Glassdoors shows pretty average. What do you call huge?

In most of the world (and certainly Europe), even barely touching or crossing six figures is virtually unheard of.

Facebook average inc. bonuses £210K In London last year:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-3268356/F...

In London, Google was paying GBP 70-80K, same for Skype/Microsoft.

That seems low for London since it's also a city with high living costs... Do they give any other extra benefits, or what about bonus/stock?

Surely there is a big range of salary from intern -> managing director? Does "the mean" matter in this discussion?

That was for experienced engineers.

I think you must be referring to base pay, not bonus or equity, which is a very large part of total compensation.

Yes, but Switzerland is a special case in general. Even post-docs (research assistants) at academic institutions have near six-figure salaries (CHF 85K, in quite theoretic field). A lot of non-hype tech companies provide six-figure salaries for engineers. I can't imagine any non-junior engineer to relocate to Zurich for anything below that.

Glassdoor doesn't look at the tax differences (use a tax calculator), the fact that Google gives you 8.5% pension that you can use either to buy a flat (I have done it from my Swiss pension money), create a company or use it in emergency, and also you can take it out (after paying taxes) if you leave the country. Also I don't believe the 200k pound figure for Facebook London as a median compensation package. Can somebody confirm it?

No, I meant pretty average/standard within Switzerland, compared to other [non-hyped] Swiss companies.

You mean there's an imbalance at Google or in the city in general? Any idea why?

My colleague worked in Zurich for 6 years, he didn't even try Google because he was already making comparable money in other company, so I would call salary in Zurich as "huge", just average for Zurich.

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