Although this is my first post to EF I've lurked around here since, well forever. I've been working as an IT contractor around Switzerland, mainly in Zürich, since 2002 and have had nine-and-a-half years of back-to-back contracts. Naturally the pay has gone down each year and I earn now about 50% of what I used to earn, but it's still better than I would get anywhere else.

Until now that is. What happened to all the jobs? I'm not a Swiss citizen yet and I cannot vote, so I do not pay close attention to Swiss politics. Can somebody please tell me, did IT workers - freelance workers in particular, and salaried workers in general - just get banned in Switzerland?

I can see the agencies are still going through the motions of making their presence known on the job boards - but they are all advertising the same job and that got off-shored last month.

Unfortunately, Zürich is not the right place for IT in finance jobs. Lots of jobs were offshored either to India or East Europe and the few jobs remained are not that exciting. Furthermore, in the upcoming months most front office roles will be trimmed, or moved to back office due to the upcoming regulatory rules being deployed. I also noticed, specially on jobserve.com, that all agencies post the same J2SE multithreading (from a non J2EE background -) developer contract over and over again. Sad story.

Cheers
Nick

How depressing...

It'll swing back, the economy will pick up, more jobs will get created and more firms will bring certain IT jobs back from out sourced and off shored locations. But whether we'll see a difference in the short, medium or long term is anyone's guess.

The Swiss franc it too high when they can pay 70% less out sourcing / moving these jobs. And the jobs that remain have 30% more applicants.

It's getting tough. Time to look for a permi job, if you ask me, which you didn't .

Good luck.