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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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 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.

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

Or a terrible market for housing, you know..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It is really a stretch to claim that Germany isn't tech friendly. It isn't pseudo-tech friendly, i.e. Germans have the obnoxious habit of separating hype from tech.

The only area where I'd agree is nuclear power, which regrettably doesn't have wide acceptance.

But that's only because nuclear power uses non-renewable raw materials, creates waste products that are dangerous for tens of thousands of years and occasionally leads to catastrophic accidents.

Not at all. Germany is one of the most tech/dev friendly country, especially if you are outside web dev. I see a lot of C++ engineering opportunities there. If only it was an English speaking country, and they had a sun... (It's a shame that we don't have a good English speaking country in whole Europe...) ;)

I hear the English can speak English quite well

Yes, but then there is the "sun" part...

Us Irish also have some ability.

As an Englishman perhaps not as well as you would think.

Yes, when I watch some British TV shows I hear a lot of pronunciations I was taught was wrong in school.

But it's not the same old english that mama used to speak...

We Swedes too, for that matter.

I had the strangest problem with Swedes where they'd seem to speak perfect English, but repeatedly mishear me as saying something offensive and never stop to make sure.

Actually I think I mentioned "cutting myself shaving" to someone and they apparently to this day believe I'm suicidal.

Haven't seen it myself, but I'm guessing it's a bit Dunning-Kruger effect + unwillingness to ask outright (the average Swede don't want to look silly, etc). While we have a significant exposure to English, few of us regularly have casual conversations with native English speakers, so our vocabularies aren't as good as we tend to think.

Lisbon fulfills both your criteria: lots of sun and even kids learn English on the first year at school. I can surely bet that we speak better english than British people will ever speak Portuguese! :)

There is another strange thing in Europe: more sun ==> less salary ;)

Most Dutch people I've met speak better English than a good percentage of Americans...

Actually, they have quite an American accent. Because they watch a lot of American shows in original language, as they explain.

This is true. Because we're such a small country, dubbing isn't viable (adding subtitles is cheaper). And I'm glad for it, because I can't stand dubbed things, but that might just be because I'm not so used to it.

English is one of the two official languages of Malta. I was thinking about this evergreen island myself, but it seems that they have mainly jobs with web dev and C#.

I am now in Germany on C++ job and I don't now German that much.

> about this evergreen island

I'd say it is somewhat ever-yellow/red-ish :)

Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Munchen, Madrid, Barcelona London (for now), hell even Malaga are tech friendly and much easier (in my experience, but that is totally a matter of taste: I find Swiss too stiff) to settle. Really wondering where you are from.

Edit: fixed Barcelona

Malaga? I visit every year, and last time I checked there was only Ericsson, Siemens and a group at the university doing human centred robotics... A quick online search leads me to the MalagaMakers meetup (which unfortunately has been quiet since January) and a few small tech companies. Do you know of any hubs or interesting companies there?

I certainly noticed the city becoming a bit more modern in recent years, with the whole SoHo thing and the Pompidou, but it generally always seems to be aimed towards boosting tourism. I'm really happy to hear that there's something else going on [:

Oracle is also next door to Ericsson in Parque Tecnológico Andalucía (PTA) but I don't know if they do development there or just sales. It seems a lot of the tech stuff is done in conjunction with the local university. I'm relocating from Malaga back to Tokyo myself after enjoying 2 years here.

See www.theworkshop.com for a good place in Malaga.

Barça is only used for the football team, the city is Barcelona, Bcn (for short) or "down there" if you are not in the area but still in Catalonia

Did not know that. Noted for the future!

Barna is the short name of the city ;-)

I think only people from the city or longing to be part of the hip people actually use Barna in speaking or writing. At least this is my experience.

...and Kraków, Poland. The beautiful city with great heritage, lots of IT companies, rich nightlife and cheap living.

Interesting. I never had the feeling of not growing up in a tech friendly environment in Germany. It's traditionally geared a bit more towards machines than software but overall I think fairly tech friendly/open. Maybe it depends on the specific region.

Entrepreneurship is another issue, I feel like "failing" had and still has an overly negative connotation here.

>where technology is not overwhelmingly debated about in a negative light

Was this really true for the place you grew up ? It sounds so luddite.

My (single)mother was looked down upon for buying us a computer when my sister was 16 and I was ten. It went as far as the local priest calling social services because he assumed neglect.

It's not like I grew up around Amish, but its just generally a very acceptable stance here to be skeptical of all new technology. It's very apparent especially when you look at the discussions centering our school system.

We still debate about the harm of too much technology in school, theres still no real IT classes and people just now start looking toward programmers as a favorable job, simply because we have stable jobs while so many other industries have problems...

My anecdotal evidence from the Rheinknie would "prove" the opposite.

And in the year 1990 we already had IT lessons in High School where we programmed in BASIC and Pascal.

I think the social stigma came from the your mother being a single parent. There was a lot of discrimination against them in those times.

It was not a social stigma in general, what I've tried to describe is more the general attitude, which is reflected by the wide usage of Google Streetview Blocking ability.

Sure there was a Pascal class, and its not like you are physically unable to learn CS if you want to, but the environment does not lend itself to leading kids down that path.

The blocking of Google Streetview and the general objection of tracking enabling technologies has more to do with the Stasi history then a general objection against technology.

Also there isn't any requirement to lead kids especially to IT. You can get good jobs in mostly all thinkable sectors of industry or services in Germany.

What is true is, that IT was more seen as a nerd hobby than a profession until around 1998. But this was true for the most parts of the world apart from a few pockets like Silicon Valley.

Sorry where was that? I do not think you have to move to Zurich to experience something better. I have never heard about this and I grew up in a bible belt region in EU.

TIL the EU has a bible belt. Can you expand on where that is?

This was in a rural place in the middle of the Netherlands: 3 times to church on sunday, not allowed anything else on that day but reading the bible. No contraceptives allowed so most families had children until they could not anymore (8-10 children were not strange), learning and reciting bible passages and singing hymns by heart etc during the week and sundays. And yet the very strict grade school got a computer when I was 9-10 (1984) and I was to teach the kids and teachers how to use it. Although they were not even allowed TVs in their houses, the town 'elders' recognized that this was the future of sorts.

Europe has a ton of rural places. If you think the US south is conservative, you should try living on an island where everyone's last name corresponds to 200+ year old farms on the same island ;)

The Wee frees in Scotland can be like that one very senior Scottish politician was excommunicated for stepping inside a catholic church (for an old friends funeral) a few years ago.

Each country will probably have their own highly religious areas. Many bible belts!

For the UK just look at Northern Ireland.

I grew up in the Rhine Valley, in a small town of 2000 inhabitants.

I live in Zurich and attended ETH, thousands of bright people! :D

Can I ask you for details about your background? I grew up in central Europe and never experienced what you seemed to have experienced

I've answered some in other comments. Its not extreme.

Where are you living now?