Hi All,

I have an offer of a job in Switzerland (head office of the company I work for in Sydney), and am after some opinions.

I'm currently on $86,000 AUD, and the offer works out to about 92,000CHF, including bonus. (Both are pretax figures).

According to http://www.australia-migration.com/p...0calculator/95

To maintain my current standard of living, that page says I need $137,600AUD, which seems nice, but excessive.

I would working in the Niwalden canton, probably living in Luzern. I have a wife and child (and maybe a second in the next 1-2 years) who I would be supporting.

I spent some time trying to find salary averages for Switzerland, and I found figures that varied by %100, depending on which web page I read - any ideas on a salary for a senior IT programmer guy, with +10 years experience, and a Masters degree?

I will have further questions, but this will do for now. I'll spend some time reading other posts

Thanks

gideonal

Heya

How are you ?

According to my fiancee if you would be working for a bank that would be low , he thinks 120k and up but if you are working for industry then that would be good. Im not quite sure on why there is such a huge difference depending on the sector but if you want send me a pm with your email and maybe he can explain it more fully to you.

Hope your Xmas and NY were great.

Enjoy
kt

The A$ and Swiss franc are about on a par, but you will find prices here higher. Difficult to say how much and Nidwalden and Luzern are cheaper than Zurich, but in all all I'd reckon you'd need to be getting some thing like 20% more in Switzerland to have the same buying power as in Sydney. They seem to be offering about 10- 11% more - and this could easily be wiped away by currency fluctuations. Taxes are generally low here, but you my just get 33% deducted at source.

I think you need to get clarification on what else is in the package. Housing, car etc.

I also got an offer to move to Switzerland (Baden), to our lead center office (same company as right now).

I have been working for this company (industrial) almost 10 years and in the last four years I am doing the work for the lead center and I am the key person in the team.

They offer me for CHF 7,600.00 / month gross => CHF 98,800.00 / year gross for IT Systems Engineer position (basically same job as before).

I am married with 8 months baby.

Do you think this is good offer? Because I expect litte bit more .

Let me provide some real down to earth facts and not the bull you can read on the websites telling you how much you should earn.

1. When we are talking IT two companies employ a very healthy minority (big double digit percents) of the workforce.
2. The companies are UBS and CS.
3. They determine more or less what the market rate is.
4. Since the end of 1999 they have been reducing the importance of IT functions ie reducing the remuneration.
5. In order to get over ca 140K you will need to be UBS Direktor/CS VP.
6. This level is not available to techies unless you have some exceptional and rare skill - but then they are likely to employ you as a freelancer in order not to disturb their internal world order.
7. Neither UBS or CS has any problem with having a freelancer working for many years.

So the top and bottom of the above is that the starting salary for a computer person non-management is not going to be above 120K in these banks and therefore it is not likely to be elsewhere either. It is possible to get more from some of the smaller banks or private banks and from industry, just the competition is going to be stiff...

Project Management, Programme Management and technical management roles can and often do pay more but the days of the highly paid techies are now restricted to niche markets or niche products