Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sambe | Hacker News Reader

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Could easily be true in some areas of the economy, because professionalism seems really strong there and core technology infrastructure is often ahead of surrounding areas.

However, my experience of living and working there suggests that it is very much not true in the areas I encountered: businesses cling to tradition and people prefer everything to be managed (contracts should be given to the "right" people, rules should be organised around what traditional groups want). By traditional I mean book sellers, grocers etc. You often get the feeling there is not much logic/forward thinking - only maintain what people are used to. Of course, that is a decision you are free to make, but not one that seems to tally with this article.

Designated innovation area seemed pretty dead. As a consumer the low quality of many companies' websites and ability to automate was quite surprising.

On the other hand, salaries are high almost all office jobs (debatable whether this makes sense for lower skill-sets, but nice if you live there) and it seems fairly easy to get a new job as long as you "fit" in the culture.

I can imagine that some of the big industrial tech and pharma companies are run a bit more aggressively. Finance didn't seem to be.

My experience of Switzerland is similar.

Things are very much done according to a formula. If you're an enterprise looking for a Java developer, only a guy whose CV says "Java" will do. C# is some other planet. I think it's a Germanic thing, they expect very specific qualifications. I remember meeting a guy who had a degree as a food chemist. I asked him what jobs he was after, and he said ... food chemist.

There is a startup scene in Zurich though. The tax rate is low, and people seem to have enough savings to give it a go, at least some of the young ones. It's not a huge number of people, but the Swiss are going about it in their own way, with a number "technoparks" and such. It's somewhat cosmopolitan in its outlook; people compare themselves to other startups around the world. Reasonable pay for such small firms, too. Came across more than one 6 figure job.

Salaries are high, but stuff is expensive, too. Daycare for a kid, at a public nursery, is CHF30K a year (USD is in the ballpark of CHF). I've met a number of Swiss people who'd like to have more kids, but it's just a lot of money to pay. A quite ordinary family meal at a restaurant can be 100. Buying the food from a supermarket ain't cheap, either.

I sometimes wonder whether GDP measurement is problematic. Quality of life doesn't feel like it's all that different between various industrialized countries, but the figures suggest they are. If stuff is expensive, that makes GDP higher. So a guy eating a $1 potato is enjoying a lower quality of life than a guy who paid $2 for his. This has implications for wastage, particularly when it has to do with large organisations such as government. Burn more money, get higher GDP. Tax rate also has implications. There's probably more black market business going on in certain countries, which also contributes to general welfare. But of course that doesn't go into official accounts, or at least it's quite hard to guess how much it is. Low tax places like Switzerland are more likely to have more stuff going through official accounts.

Salaries are high and daycare is expensive deliberately, or so I've heard. It's a cultural decision - they want women to stay at home with the children and raise them, so the salaries are calibrated to be high enough for a nuclear family. That's why you get things like schools sending children home at lunchtime or on Wednesday afternoons: the school schedules are deliberately set up to be incompatible with working hours, in order to reinforce traditional family setups.

Food is expensive in Switzerland partly because it imports a lot and the surrounding countries know that the Swiss are rich and thus not very price sensitive. I read somewhere that exactly the same kilo of parma ham that costs 10 EUR in Italy can cost 50 EUR in Switzerland simply due to being charged different amounts by the supplier. This is not helped by the fact that the domestic supermarkets have what amounts to a duopoly between Co-op and Migros, with other brands like Denner being owned by one of the big two. There's little price competition.

GDP is a disastrous statistic almost everywhere, not just in Switzerland. Politicians single minded focus on it is a classic case of "what you can't measure you can't manage" being harmful. The biggest problem is that GDP is trivially pumped by government borrowing and spending, hence the endless circular arguments in Europe about austerity and whether governments should try to spend their way to growth. It doesn't work - governments ideas for productive investments rarely go beyond roads and railways - but it can appear to work in the short run as spending splurges feed directly into the GDP.

> That's why you get things like schools sending children home at lunchtime or on Wednesday afternoons: the school schedules are deliberately set up to be incompatible with working hours, in order to reinforce traditional family setups.

Just an anecdote: We are (expat) remote workers raising kids on the Swiss countryside. Our fellows haven't started school yet but we are really looking forward to having them come home for lunch. The motivation for the system may well be to suit traditional family setups, and make it hard for both parents to work in an office, but it also seems tailor made for self-employed people who work from home with a flexible schedule and want to spend time together as a family. (ask me again in a few years.)

> self-employed people who work from home with a flexible schedule and want to spend time together as a family.

That's about as traditional as family setups get, isn't it? Except you're not working on your farm.

On the one hand, yes, this is quite similar to our neighbours who are dairy farmers. On the other hand I am quite an anomaly here as a high-tech worker operating under the modern and nontraditional principles of "Remote: No Office Required" :-)

I also suspect that having both of us parents at home during the day will make it much easier to manage the disruption of kids coming home in the afternoon, etc, which could be hard for one person to juggle with a career.

Last time I tried to get a gig in Switzerland as a freelancer, they told me there is no such thing as a freelancer there, every one must be hired.

State mandates that. However, the tax is so low, that is doesn't really matter.

On the other side, the cost of living is so high (Zuerich area) so that it really worth it if you plan to _move_ there for the rest of your live.

Last time I tried to get a gig in Switzerland as a freelancer, they told me there is no such thing as a freelancer there, every one must be hired.

That's absolutely wrong, you've been lied to. Which part of Switzerland was it?

I think they meant that there isn't really a freelancer visa, so most people would have a chicken and egg problem. AFAIK you can run your own business with a B permit which is in turn justified by income/employment in that business, but you would usually transition from a permit through another employer or other types of visas (family, student, etc.) I think waiting until you had a C permit would be more common, especially if your only connection with Switzerland is employment.

I wouldn't need a visa as a German ( or any other EU national ). If I want to work ( as employed ), I would need an "Aufenthaltsbewilligung".

If you are from the EU then you could currently use your right to a resident permit based on right to travel and probably transition to a B based on self-employment before your time was up. But as noted in the article, you could run into trouble since the vote indicated quotas that would somehow reduce residents in that group, while the treaties don't allow such a control. So some kind of odd technicality could develop.

If you are German then no one should have told you there's no possibility of freelancing, but it might make more sense to first take on enough Swiss customers freelancing from Germany, or as a commuter to Basel, etc. I would just recommend being conservative about maintaining a reasonable/stable salary sourced from Switzerland when renewing a residence permit.

If you really mean contractor gigs from abroad, everyone I met doing that actually works permanently for a placement agency, and most of them are not very nice. IMO it is just as easy (or hard) to find a job directly and better.

Thank you for the insight. It was hard to find this kind of information at that time.

I tried directly and also over an agency, but in both cases the requirement was to hire me, with the previous mentioned "limitation". Since I had no clear source of information, I gave them credit and didn't pursue the matter. Even if the money was really really good ( 10k+ euro monthly ).

That was Zuerich.

They told me, there is no such thing a service contract between an individual and a company. I must be either hired or I need to have my own company.

I am not inventing this, simply repeating what the companies said, and they really meant it.

That's totally wrong.

You can be a sole proprietor for basically nothing. There's also two forms of limited companies requiring 20K/100K of capital. The 100 is actually 50K because you only have to pay up half of it upfront.

I found quite often when the Swiss explain something, they explain it with a degree of confidence that is not merited by the actual facts. They cut a few corners here and there to make it easy to explain.

That presumably just means that you have to register as a sole proprietor. Some countries have special freelancer/self-employed tax categories (or whatever), others don't.

this really sounds like bullshit. a freelancer is nothing else but a company made up by a single individual.

are they alien to the concept of service companies?

I would say that the food is expensive in Switzerland because they want to strengthen their farmers and national food industry.

Switzerland is topographically not really great for farming (high mountains, no big flat areas, not enough warmth), so they have some disadvantages there. All countries surrounding Switzerland are part of the EU, so there are cheap farming products in the shops.

I am living on the border to Switzerland and it is crazy what meat costs in Switzerland compared to Austria. You are not allowed to import much meat, so you have to buy it in Switzerland if you live there.

Interesting, I always assumed there would be no protection laws as it has free trade agreements with the EU, but there are actually exceptions (from Wikipedia).

"The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is a regional trade organisation and free trade area consisting of four European states: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.[1] The organisation operates in parallel with the European Union (EU), and all four member states participate in the EU's single market.[2] ... It allows the EFTA-EEA states to participate in the EU's Internal Market without being members of the EU. They adopt almost all EU legislation related to the single market, except laws on agriculture and fisheries. "

The differences are really staggering. Comparing the prices of 1kg of minced meat

Austria 5€

Switzerland 9.5 CHF (8.73€)

> GDP is a disastrous statistic almost everywhere, not just in Switzerland. Politicians single minded focus on it is a classic case of "what you can't measure you can't manage" being harmful.

Or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" aka Goodhart's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> I remember meeting a guy who had a degree as a food chemist. I asked him what jobs he was after, and he said ... food chemist.

Could someone explain this to me? Like I assume lordnacho had expected that guy to apply for a wider category of jobs, but which jobs? And what is the advantage of that broadness?

Say you have a degree in maths. What jobs could you apply for? Just "Mathematician"?

I think you could do a whole range of things. Anything from quantitative trading to traffic management. Or something that doesn't even require math, like project management.

The advantage of broadness is you have a wider choice about what you do. If one kind of work turns out not to appeal to you, you aren't stuck. That has some economic value as well. If you have the watch industry collapse, you don't have a bunch of watchmakers sitting around on benefits who could be doing something different.

I suppose the example is poor, then. Food chemist are pretty much trained to do a rather narrow range of jobs, pretty much all called something with "food chemist". A mathematician (and most other academic degrees[1]) isn't really trained to do any particular job at all (except research, I suppose), so they need to cast a wide net. A better example might be a "Java Programmer" not even considering looking at job postings in the .NET section?

1: Plenty of vocational training takes place at universities and have degree-titles attached to them. That doesn't make them academic pursuits. I say this as a polytech-rebranded-as-"university"-trained engineer and I firmly believe that I shouldn't hold a degree that implies that I have an academic education.

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