Why I still live in Switzerland
Despite its challenges
You can view this article from your browser, at this link.
Most of my tech career has been spent in Switzerland.
It’s a place I know well, and wrote a lot about:
In the past few years, I’ve looked into Central/Eastern European countries
I liked what I saw, and found the region interesting for devs:
My job is now fully-remote
And I could move anywhere in the world.
Yet, despite its flaws, I’m still based in Switzerland.
I today’s article I will explain why.
Relocating is costly
I’ve moved country and city many times in my life:
At 17, did a semester exchange in Southern Germany
At 19, moved to Milan for my BSc
At 22, did a semester exchange in Seville, Spain
At 23, moved to Zurich for a full-time job
At 24, moved back to Milan for a MSc in CS
At 25, moved back to my hometown during Covid
At 26, moved to Madrid, Spain for an internship in a research centre
At 26/27, moved to Barcelona for an internship at Amazon
At 27, moved again to Zurich for a new job and stayed there until now (recently turned 31)
As you can see, that’s a lot of relocations.
Moving abroad and trying different environments is nice and rewarding, but it also comes with a cost.
In several ways, each time you start from scratch.
At 28, while at Oracle, I started getting the itch to try something new again.
The corporate life in Zurich wasn’t quite cutting it for me.
In September 2022, I started this newsletter (that you’re reading right now).
Today, almost 2 years later, creating content and building products and services is my full-time job.
In addition to trying a different job, I also tried different locations.
A good thing about Zurich is its central location in Europe and great connectivity.
This allowed me to easily travel to other European countries over weekends, vacations, workations and so on.
Since my job had become fully-remote, I questioned if living in one of the most expensive cities in the world made any sense.
Especially considering that, lifestyle-wise, while I liked Zurich, I often missed the big city vibe.
So I spent time travelling and studying possible alternatives.
The outcome of this research has often been featured in this newsletter’s articles, and in my LinkedIn posts.
Here’s how my search went:
Ruled out Western EU: I see no point in paying high taxes to live in increasingly unsafe cities, often inefficient and bureaucratic
Rules out Southern Europe and Islands: too relaxed, can become hard to get anything done, islands are a bit too isolated for me
Checked out Central Europe: I found good prices, safety, welcoming people, vibrant social scene and nightlife, promising for tech folks, growth trajectory
Found Warsaw and Poland to be very good: Warsaw had a diversity of industries and people that reminded me of cities like NYC or London; the city is exploding with a new bar/restaurant/club/event launched every month; lots of can-do attitude; people are excited and the city is peaking
Researched what it would take to setup my business there: contacted lawyers, accountants, locals, researched online using AI etc
Outcome: great for freelance developers and potentially also good for business owners, very good and promising for devs in general
Problem: if you run a diverse business like I do, where you have different streams of income (in my case: coaching, SaaS, potentially info products or other things in the future), it's more complicated
VAT: for the coaching part of my business, I would have had to pay polish VAT (23%); in Switzerland, there’s no VAT for under 100k CHF of income and only 8.1% VAT afterwards
Poland package: while I like Poland, not everything there is 10/10 (nowhere is)
Quality of hospitals: not bad, but not great in case of public ones - which you usually need for serious treatments
Political polarisation and instability: not too bad, but could be better
Proximity to Ukraine, Belarus and Russia: heated up and volatile area of Europe
EU Membership: the EU is going through challenging times, on the economic, security and immigration front - this brings friction among its members and makes the future a bit unpredictable
Polish language: not easy to learn
Compared Switzerland
No/little VAT
Very low taxes in general, with an uncomplicated business structure
Health insurance that grants access to some of the best hospitals and healthcare in the world
Stable and overall advantageous pension system
Political stability and neutrality
Decided to stay put in Switzerland
Conclusion
Switzerland is not perfect and I've talked many times about its challenges.
But the aforementioned research showed me that it’s not easy to find something better.
Especially with regards to the things I look for in a country to do business in/with, and carry out long-term life planning.
The downsides of Switzerland for me are more on the lifestyle front:
Nerdy / corporate vibe
Cities are dead after 8pm during the week most of the time
Not a lot of cool events or places to go out to
Sky-high prices
Language also not easy even though I speak German (Zurich dialect is a bit tricky)
But, since I've been living here for over 5 years now, I have found ways around them:
Day-to-day life in Zurich (ZH) + visiting bigger and more vibrant cities for weekends, holidays and workations.
Despite not being 100% happy about the community aspect in ZH, having spent here several years allowed me to make at least a few friends and know my way around the city.
Prices are high but the low taxes partially compensate for them - hopefully this will become less relevant as the business scales over time :)
Last but not least…
Here are some “speculations” (take with a grain of salt) on why I think Switzerland is well-positioned for the future:
(some of them I’ve mentioned already)
Political stability and political neutrality: the world is in a chaotic and volatile state right now (wars, energy crises, power balances reshapes, trade wars, economic turmoils etc); the stability of Switzerland is valuable
AI and automation: I think AI and robotics are going to reshape societies significantly; generally, as we become more "leveraged" value creators (because AI/robotic tools expand our abilities/capabilities), the cost of 'basic'/low-skilled/moderately-skilled labour might start to matter less in the future, and this can be a challenge for emerging economies, but it's great for countries like Switzerland with an extremely skilled labour force.
AI and robotics (GDP growth): Given the local know-how in these industries, I wouldn't be surprised if Switzerland will build some massive AI and robotics companies in the next few decades. Given how small the country is, if this were to happen, it would have a significant impact on the Swiss GDP and overall growth.
Good fundamentals: high skill + high capital + high efficiency of the admin and governance machine.
Immigration: Switzerland has good immigration. As we've seen in my previous articles, all of Europe will have a fertility crisis, and the quality of immigrants that countries will be able to get will yield outsized impact; Switzerland generally mostly imports Europeans from neighbouring countries which can easily integrate and which shape some kind of "European society" in cities like Zurich or Geneva. In general, with both European and non-European immigrants, it focuses on high-skilled migrants (the best students from other countries often try carry advanced and graduate studies in Switzerland and/or find work there).
Hope you found this article insightful.
Please note that my goal here was NOT to convince you to move to Switzerland.
Each situation and decision on where to live is inherently extremely personal.
I talked about why I’m still based in Switzerland, and, as you’ve seen, many reasons are quite personal: VAT treatment, “inertia” of having lived here 5 years and having built ‘systems’ around it, personal opinion on what the future will look like, relocation fatigue after many years of travelling, etc etc.
It could very well be that, in your case, other places might be better.
The good thing is that in this newsletter I often talk about many places, mentioning their pros and cons, so, if you’re wondering about a country, you can try to type its name in the newsletter homepage search bar, and see if I’ve discussed it in the past!
What do you think about decisions to stay? Would you have done the same?
Let me know!
And, who knows, maybe sometime in the future I’ll actually make the move.
For example, right now my business allows me to be flexible, and I don’t have kids.
If in the future that will change, maybe my decision will change too!
Enjoyed this week's newsletter? Give it a ❤️ so I know to write similar ones in the future.
This article is brought to you by:
Euro Top Tech Jobs - The #1 resource for landing Top-Paying Tech roles in Europe:
4000+ top paying tech jobs in Europe from big tech companies, HFT firms and high-paying scale-ups.
Hundreds of jobs from 100+ fully-remote companies paying $100-600k per year.
Private guides - like this one - to help you land these jobs.
Six Figure Euro Engineer - Maximise your chances to boost your Tech Career in Europe, reducing time to success:
Work 1:1 with me (Nicola Amadio, author of this newsletter), and join the other engineers who were able to 10x their tech career in the past few months!
I'm surprised that you find Zurich quiet from a lifestyle point of view - I've visited a few times recently and it seemed pretty vibrant. It's already the biggest city in Switzerland so I'm curious which other cities you travel to and find more fun?
Curious to know more about the language barrier - what level of German do you speak ? And can one manage with beginner-level like in Munich / Warsaw ?