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Current State of the International IT Market?
psxndc asks: "My fiance's boss is recommending my fiance to a biotech company in Switzerland (the boss is leaving and thinks my fiance is too talented for her current position). We're in the US currently, but if my fiance moved to Switzerland, I'd have to go too (shucks). My question is: "What is the state of the job market over in Europe (specifically Switzerland) and the rest of the world?" For me specifically I'm looking for *nix work and Java, but the question stands for just IT in general. In the US it's still pretty dismal (in Boston at least), but I wanted to know what else might be out there."
Jobs schmobs, I'd be more worried about things like
;)
1) The massive delay in TV bebtween the US and europe. 6 months plud before it even appears on some channels. Some countries dont have voyager 6 or 7 yet!
2) The language barrier. Can you speak French?
3) Visas (naturally)
4) Internet access - you Will need broadband, you'll go insane with 12 channels of porn (Well, my experience in TV in that part of europe suggests this)
5) Laws - We dont have a DMCA, and Switzerland is usually OK, not even being a UN member I believe.
6) What about your possesions. Moving permanemtly, or for a year? Sell house/car? Ship car over?
Remember theres a lot to think about. If your fiances moving, shes moving, and so are you. Regardless of the job. My parents have just moved from the UK to greece. Nightmare. And those are two EU countries, and it isnt a permement move.
As for the actual job: in the UK theres lots of adverts about for tech jobs in the trade papers, and I know a few graduates that already have a job, as long as they get certain grades.
However in the south west of england especially, advice I've heard is to stick in your job for another 6 months - a year, there should be an upturn from christmas onwards.
Besides you can always take a year off and work on an OSS project
A good place to look for jobs is www.jobserve.com - it's a UK oriented site but has a fair amount of european jobs there too. It's a good site to get the address of europe-wide agencies too (there is a link off the main page listing all the agencies that advertise there.)
;-) ) but don't expect to walk into a job.
But the european market is dead, especially here in the UK. Our dense government has bowed to pressure from large consultancies that have convinced them there is a skills shortage - so the consultancies can now bring in cheap contractors from india. There's nothing wrong with that in a buoyany market of course but as most contract workers I know are 'inbetween work' it's a dense attitude on the part of our government.
I'm okay because not working gives me time to work on my PVR project (and to watch the England v Argentina football match today
Also don't expect an agency to reply to your emailed cv - out of >100 cvs I have sent in the last couple of months, only *5* were acknowledged. Sorta says something about the number of people looking for work if they can't be bothered to send a 30 second email. Mind you, when the market picks up, guess which agencies I will be working with?!
seany
I agree that the main problem might well be the culture schock. In my experience, people from the US tend to underestimate this factor and have trouble adjusting to the way things work around here. Things are usually not better or worse than in the US, but simply different: paperwork, the way things are done, relationships between people, social customs, etc.
Also don't underestimate the paperwork - switzerland is a nation of bank and insurance companies. There is a lot of paperwork especially if you are a foreigner. And if you only speak english, it will be even slower.
Whenever you end up in the german speaking part or the french speaking part, you'll need to learn a local language. Many people, especially in cities like Zurich or Geneva know some english and many things are labelled in english nowadays. Still learning a local language helps for day to day life and socialising.
You can, to some extent, avoid this, especially in Geneva, where there is a large english speaking community. Some of those guys stayed for more than twenty years in Geneva and still don't know a word of french. Somehow I thing that by doing this, you miss something...
What I've found to be very hard are the day-to-day details of life. Renting a house was relatively easy (once we convinced them we really did need to rent a house sight-unseen for our visa paperwork). But buying furniture, establishing credit, getting a bank account, dealing with foreign checks, etc. is a pain. My wife, 15-month-old daughter and I flew over and signed our lease, and went straight to our new house -- big mistake. If I had it to do over again, I would deinitely have one of us come over in advance and stay in a hotel while finding a place to stay, getting furniture, etc.
We're only going to be here two years, so we decided to sell everything we could, store only a small amount of stuff ($50/month storage unit), and ship almost nothing. We spent around $1,000 to ship a couple of boxes of books and papers, and two boxes of toys/clothes for our daughter. Most things arrived OK, but one of the boxes of books exploded and arrived as a pile of books held together with tape.
We've been here around two months now, and we're still looking for a lot of things we had back home. It's astounding how much stuff you use every day and take for granted. Unless you can pack your whole house and move it all, you'll spend a lot of time tracking down odds and ends.
-Esme
As a foreigner who has worked in switzerland a few times, here are a few pointers...
.ch, talk with the other ex-pats (find an irish pub) and find out all the things they had to do to get a visa and then a job. Plan on at least one trip back home to gather documents and to apply from outside the country.
.ch right now, not one of them has anything lined up after their current contracts end. They all work for banks, the biggest IT employment sector in .ch, and the banks are now all cutting back on projects leaving the market saturated with programmers. The slowdown in the US is arriving in Europe, just delayed about a year, since we had Y2K and then the euro conversion to spread IT spending over several years. Now the euro exists and nobody has any more large IT conversion projects on their budgets.
1) TV. Forget about U.S. shows, the crap over here is just as bad as the U.S. If you want to get the premium UK satellite channels (meaning in english), you must have a mailing address in the UK to get the decoder cards. But there is a ton of old US shows dubbed into various languages, great fun to watch reruns of Seinfeld in kinderdeutch. Best idea, don't buy a TV, go out more often. You wont regret it after the withdrawl symptoms stop.
If you get broadband, you can always P2P/IRC the latest episodes of the major shows like friends and sex and the city(Rachel dies, the lone gunmen die, Carrie dies). I know americans who regularly have sitcom nights in their places, watching low quality divx bootlegs of US shows. Tomorrow night we are watching the new spiderman movie a few days before it opens in cinemas.
2) Language may not be a major problem in Geneva, but is a complete barrier in all other parts of the country. Plan on spending your first few months in language classes. Life will be much, much easier if you can carry on conversations with government officials (i.e. visa officers) in their native language. You will not get a spouse visa if you don't speak the language, period! No matter what the law says, the petty beaurocrats come up with an infinite number of impossible tasks until you can argue with them about the details. And Swiss German != German German (hoch deutch), Swiss German is much, much easier and flexible.
All the Swiss IT workers speak fluent english, so you don't have an advantage being a native speaker.
3) Visa. If your wife accepts the visa offered by the company, it will have a clause forbidding spouses from ever seeking employment or even attempting to gain a work visa. I've seen couples ejected from the country because the husband had taken the standard spouse-never-works visa, and then the wife tried to change her resident-only visa after they had been there for a while. You must make sure your wife insists on a spouse-can-work visa, even if they say it is impossible or will take too long. Otherwise you will sit around as a house husband while she works (not a bad idea).
Also, to get a work visa, you must be a universite graduate, and bring all the supporting documentation. Thats bac+4 (high school diploma + bachelors or 4 year uni equivalent). Bring the originals with you in your carry on luggage, they are worth more than their weight in gold. Get a signed and stamped letter from your universite in addition to all the other docs, with a contact number so they can validate the diploma.
After you get to
4) broadband. It exists in the centre of every major town in the country. Does not exist in outlying areas or small villages. Cheaper than in the US, and some providers let you have servers, static IPs, etc.
5) Laws, who cares. Have fun, stay off the drugs.
6) Don't ship anything from the states unless this will be a permanent move. Sell all the big items in the US (car, white goods) and buy the same over here. Expect to pay 25% higher over here, due to purchasing power parity (the big mac index). Everything you can get in the states can be found here. Everything. Except decent mexican food.
I've known americans who shipped their cars over from an east coast port. Cost is about US$800 shipping, US$500-1000 making it compliant. Then you are forbidden to sell it for at least one year after it gets legal on the road, but the re-sell value is often about the same as you paid for it new in the US. Just the way the market works.
New Topic - 7) Housing. If you are renting, the landlords will never refund your security deposit (2 to 12 months of rent) if you don't play the game like a swiss from the very beginning. They will always claim in some sub-clause the apartment was in a perfect, new condition before you moved in, and when you leave they will find a few flaws and keep the money. Before you sign a lease, get a bailiff (huissier in french, I forget the german word) to inspect the place and note all the damage and problems. That legal document will help you when you move out. Swiss landowners are some of the worst in Europe for cheating renters. Cheating foreigners is a national sport, and supported by the local cantons.
Getting back to the original question: job market.
Someone already mentioned jobserve.co.uk. Start there, see what is available. In my opinion, not much right now, but things seem to be picking up slowly.
I know a bunch of oracle/J2EE programmers in Zurich and Geneva and Basel. They are all looking for something new outside of
If you are lucky enough to move to Geneva, working for an international org is your best bet. But beware, these places are nothing like an american company, they are festering cesspools of political manoeuvering and infighting (bitter, moi?). Google around for some horror stories from people who have escaped these kafka-esque places. Pure coders are not needed, but people who can admin systems, networks, servers, as well as whip up simple new interfaces to purchased software packages. Lots of SNA, X.25, MVS, GCOS8, SAS. If these don't strike terror in your heart, you don't have the skillset needed to work in the antiquated environments of the internation orgs, but many of them are moving to almost 100% mickey$oft nightmares.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on