Can I ask what Ljubljana is doing on that list? Every Slovene dev I met was driving 2h/day to work in Austria at a 50k/year job, so the local market must be really depressing if that's what they're willing to go through.
Any index like this where Berlin or Barcelona or Switzerland or any other city/country with a mature tech ecosystem (or a very nice weathe, why not?) are missing from the top spots is basically useless.
For example: nobody in Europe ever talks about Luxembourg and AFAIK even less when talking about working remotely.
It might be attractive in principle, as the richest country in Europe with the highest average salary or for being at the center of continental Europe, but it's hardly a destination people dream about.
Reykjavik too, been there a few times, it's not the place you want to go spend a long time working remotely, unless you are Icelandic.
It's simply too small and isolated.
I would not bring.my family to live there just to work remotely.
Vienna and Austria in general sucks for tech opportunities including remote due to tax and work laws. Also buying real-estate is eye-wattering expensive when you look at local wages (being non-NATO country means it's a safe harbor for oligarchs to lauder their money and also a cash based society means a lot of black untaxed money gets put into real estate).
You're getting absolutely hosed if you move here for tech work. It's great if you're on government jobs, minimum wage/unionized jobs and living in rent controlled flats though and need frequent government support but if you're a skilled professional, living on real estate off the private market, then basically anywhere else in Europe is better bang for your buck than here.
As an expat there I don't think quality of life in Vienna is that WOW to be honest, it's just that it keeps being promoted by The Economist every year at winning this title they invented, based on some random requirements they set up, to the point I feel it's basically and ad paid by the city of Vienna (Austria already pays a lot for such international advertisements to support their tourist industry) to lure expats to wage-dump themselves and work here and cover the labor shortages (the "most livable city" title comes up a lot in job ads targeting foreigners).
It's basically the Canada of Europe: high real estate costs , low wages, with generous subsidies and social nets for the less well off Austrians.
Make sure you’re making a lot of money before moving to Switzerland (very high cost of living) and forget about buying property.
Make sure you’re making very little money before moving to Slovenia (very high taxes although you can avoid most of them by earning less than 100k EUR)
Austria in general is very unfriendly to small businesses. The salaries are also heavily taxed so employees are extra expensive.
All of the hiring attempts are just companies trying to pay you as little as possible and then contract your work to rich companies or government. But to me it sounds most Europe is like this.
They do offer a 12% discount if you do not have any expenses (which you can barely have as a programmer) so eventually you can earn a bit more than being employed.
Sure, but objectively, it's probably easier and more remunerative in many ways to work for Google in the Bay Area than, say, seek out a job in Sicily, where the weather is certainly wonderful, but there are not many IT jobs and they generally aren't of the interesting variety (unless you did something, like, say, create Redis, in which case you can happily stay in Sicily and hack on your project:-). Not to mention the language barrier and cultural differences.
Our move from Padova to Innsbruck, Austria, 4 hours away by car, was far, far more difficult than when I moved from Portland, Oregon to the Bay Area years ago. For instance, there are no one-way rental trucks in Europe that I know of, so if you have furniture or things to move, it's going to be expensive and/or time-consuming.
There is a lot I want to fix in Austria from bureaucracy to taxation of stock options and more. The employment law is very fine by me.
If you think that you will get better wages if it’s harder to dismiss employees I have doubts. The main reason devs don’t earn enough in Austria is that it’s hard and expensive to have a business there and that the country is not appealing for employees. That means that the few good IT companies have a small labor pool and need to relocate developers for whom the country is not appealing.
Tech recruiter in Zurich here. I run https://coderfit.com and connect programmers with jobs in Zurich for a living. (I programmed for money before, so I know the market from many sites.)
Taxes are low, salaries high and things costs less than one thinks. Yet, the biggest downsite here is the lack of jobs. Zurich has only ~350.000 inhabitants and hence it can't have the same number of opportunities like London, NYC or the Bay Area. That leads to a high variance in pay. I have seen people being underpaid at 85k CHF a year as a senior developer and then going to 120k CHF just by changing companies but doing essentially the same work.
I live in Switzerland and I used to code for a living. As an external, I hire engineers for different startups in Zurich.
As I got deeper into IT-recruiting, I realised that candidate filtering at the top of the funnel is fundamentally broken.
The market for software engineers is different from the market for - let's say - actors. Especially for senior developers there is way more demand than there is supply.
This has the very important implication that as a company you can not annoy candidates too much. Asking for tedious homework, too many coding challenges or references might be already overkill. Good people do not really need to work for you; they can also work for Google Zürich (biggest engineering office outside the US), or other cool tech-companies / ETH-spinoffs.
If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.
If you are good enough, you can get hired by a SV startup to work from a place where life is cheaper than in the Bay Area. Switzerland is not that place, definitely.
Also consider that everyone is trying to move to SV and you are trying to leave. What's wrong with you? :P
> The city of Zurich is the largest technology hub with an impressive number of 100,000 registered software developers
That would be impressive indeed, given that it only has a population of 430,000.
Given that the article also mentions a "city of Vaud", I have my doubts...
Having spent several years in Silicon Valley, and moved back to my native Zürich, I find much to like in either place, I have reasons to prefer the latter, but I would NOT recommend coming to Zürich if you're looking to replicate a Silicon Valley experience.
Interesting switzerland is mentioned, there does seem to be a shortage of programmers here, our company recruits a sizeable chunk from abroad. Also, if you search in a local language, especially german, there are a lot of open positions, where fluent command of the local language is required.
Can I ask what Ljubljana is doing on that list? Every Slovene dev I met was driving 2h/day to work in Austria at a 50k/year job, so the local market must be really depressing if that's what they're willing to go through.
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