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Comment by koevet | Hacker News Reader

Same in Switzerland, for contractors (actually more than 150k/year)

Care to elaborate? What kind of gigs yield that kind of money and how is taxation for freelancers in Switzerland?

Can't tell much about contractors but e.g. Google pays you 10-15% more in Zurich than in Mountain View and you pay much less taxes (and you don't have capital gains here). It's more expensive to live here but you'll still have much more left because of the tax advantages here.

Mostly banking and finance gigs. UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Re, Zurich, etc. Not necessarily cutting edge tech jobs though. Also, Zug, near Zurich has turned into a hotspot for blockchain-related startups and fintech companies.

To be fair, those places have also become unreasonable with cutting costs. IT in the financial industry used to be lucrative but is now about the worst place imaginable, especially since the latest fad is laying off indiscriminately and off-shoring, until the next financial scandal hits.

Gigs where people have very specialized knowledge, like SAP consulting, or where they have 20-30 years of system engineering and IT architecting experience. Taxation is low compared to the rest of the world, but since Switzerland is closed off to immigration and currently working on clamping down on it even more with all their might, it's pointless to discuss freelancing there. Which means that freelancers who work there live there, and that in turn means that you get an entire tax bill and have to cash out large sums of money on taxes in one go.

Switzerland isn't closed off to immigration and working on clamping down with all their might, I wonder where you got that impression.

It's the opposite. It allows unlimited immigration from the EU. The people voted against that it's true, but the government ignored the referendum and implemented a local worker preference instead. But with unemployment very low anyway, it is easy to argue you could not find a Swiss person to do the work, so this is effectively the same as doing nothing.

There are plenty of elder Swiss who’d gladly work if they only had the opportunity but are ausgesteuert instead, so there can be no argument about not being able to find the natives to do the work. Finding someone malleable and willing to work for peanuts is the issue here, not a lack of qualified domestic work force.

The 7000 contingency limit clause for EU citizens has been triggered, and we know how the last referendum went. Foreigners are a burning topic. Try getting a B-permit from outside of Switzerland; it’s akin to winning the lottery. Whoever got in, got in. The way is shut, and the Swiss keep it.

Was there ever a time when B-permits were easy to get outside the country? I had to come in on an L and convert, most people I know also had that experience.

I agree that immigration is a hot topic. However I'm not sure what difference more referendums will make if the government feels free to ignore them. Perhaps they'll have a change of heart.

At least EU citizens should have no problem to immigrate at the moment.

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