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Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

> Let me stop you right there. Maybe that works in SV but in most of Europe(the world?) you aint getting in to any well paying job at a big tech company without a degree from a prestigious university or previous experience at equally big and famous companies.

I did exactly that though, I joined Google in Europe a few years ago.

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Google Europe in which city?

I moved to Zurich.

How do you find life there?

From some acquaintances who moved there to work in tech I heard integration/dating/making friends is very difficult as a foreigner especially if you come from $UNCOOL_COUNTRY and the real estate market is terrible, with cramped and expensive apartments in a poor state and buying is even more difficult if you're not a swiss citizen which is a difficult citizenship to get.

If this is the case Zurich sounds exactly like New York (other than the difficulty of buying property for non-citizens). Might just be the feeling of alienation that arises from living in a big city as an outsider.

Zurich is a city of 300,000 people or so, New York is a hundred times larger.

Vast majority of people rent in Zurich. I lived in multiple countries (US, Australia, Europe - Germany, Austria and more) and apartments in Zurich are better maintained than anywhere else I've seen. You can find cramped, if that's what you want, but there is plenty large apartments - bigger than US or Australian apartments. E.g. looking at our corner of the city, there are 2 bedroom 85 - 120m2, 3 bedroom 120 - 160 m2 places. In Sydney, we had a 75m2 2BR with tiny bedrooms and it was a typical apartment there. If you want to live in a house, Zurich is the wrong place, you'll probably need to commute.

Language is a big issue with integration. It's not that people don't speak English or High German, it's just that to truly integrate you need to speak the local language.

And learning a dialect without an accepted written form, and thus no textbook to speak of is not easy.

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