I am a tech recruiter and former programmer located in Zurich. Some companies treat applicants like shit nowadays. Especially the "startups" and younger ones. The best company I work with is 30 years on the market and they treat applicants like half-gods. Their interviews are all conversation-based, no homework, nothing, just two calls and then half-a-day onsite.
To some clients, I send the most competent people I can find and still they have to go through three calls and a 4-8 hour "coding task" and only then get maybe invited to an onsite. I have compiled a list of horror stories that I saw in my recruiting career (https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers-dont...). Since I wrote this, I collected many other stories, like a candidate being rejected because he took a call from a cafe and trivial stuff like that.
I think the internet made headhunting/recruiting more efficient but counterbalanced that by also generating more spam that companies have to deal with. Maybe companies get increasingly more spam nowadays and this is their way to deal with this. That is also why they pay recruiters like me.
I see that the mismatch between what companies say they want, what they actually want, what they actually need is becoming bigger and bigger and I honestly have no clue how to solve this.
> I see that the mismatch between what companies say they want, what they actually want, what they actually need is becoming bigger and bigger and I honestly have no clue how to solve this.
In the end, how do they manage to hire anyone?
The Zürich (and Swiss) job market isn't that big, but that goes both ways, the available talent pool is also fairly small, and turnover is lower than in big tech hubs.
Sure you have access to workers from all the EEA, but while salaries are high for young singles/DINK, things change when you want to hire experienced developers (I remember you're from Germany, I know people who moved from Switzerland to Germany since it made more sense financially!)
I think, having kids in Switzerland is only expensive if they are 2-3 years old because "Kindergrippe" is not public like in Germany. Kindergarten and up is public and free.
It's true there are not many embedded jobs, but I know at least 1-2 companies (e.g., bbv.ch), contact me if you want more information (my e-mail is in my HN-profile).
Big difference in parental leave also. It's true that the costs are reasonable once your kids go to school, and university is pretty affordable too.
As for embedded systems, that's not my field, but the one where my friend works. After being laid off in Switzerland, he spent a few months looking for a job (in the whole country), gave up and started to interview in the Munich area where he could pick between several offers, all upwards of 90k/year. Plenty enough to maintain his lifestyle.
On the recruitment side of things I had a coworker judge a candidate on how many pages his resume was. If his resume was over one page then he didn't even want to look at it because it was formatted incorrectly.
This makes sense to me, the number of pages on your resume correlates with your programming skills.
In the comments of the article the author mentions that the process took him 4 to 5 weeks... don't know if the time frame will change your perspective, it did for me (thought it was much longer from the tone of the article).
