Swiss Bank, Deutsche Bank, and most recently SoftBank JP, are where the criminals like to hide their money.

Maybe a decade or two ago, but these days it’s ling disappeared and sitting in Dubai…

Dubai is where the criminals get their money FROM.

Okay, but Switzerland is also insanely costly. I've little first-hand experience, but I was there on holiday a couple of years ago, and a sandwich from a street food van would cost 14€, a short bus ride 5€, a decent dinner out no less than 50€ per person but more likely 80€, you get the picture.

Exactly this.

Accommodation is very hard to find in some areas and rents very high.

Health insurance and medication costs are eye watering, the very basic essentials coverage starts CHF 500 per person per month, and then you have to pay the first CHF 3300 per annum in medical bills. A small box of aspirin is CHF 10+

Swisscom mobile charge 3 times what you’d pay in the UK.

Food shopping is double what it costs across the border in France, and they've recently halved the shopping import allowance from CHF 300 to just 150 to protect their vested interests.

Train fares are astronomical too, and these days often don’t run on time and get cancelled around the Geneva-Lausanne area.

All in a country where monopolies are also not illegal.

I worked in Switzerland for a couple of years and fully agree with AC. I was in Zurich and finding a rental property was insane as there was so much competition that you needed someone to be scanning the ads and racing to the apartment to stand a chance. In addition the prices are indeed higher than the surrounding countries. I was stunned to realise after being there a few months that I considered CHF300-400 (£250-300 at that time) to be 'walking around' money since grabbing a meal with drinks for 3-4 people could easily hit that.

There is/was a great site which showed you basic prices for things like a MaccieD Happy Meal and similar such staples for various countries and Switzerland was always towards the top of the list. Just searched and indeed Switzerland is top currently for a Combo Meal at £14.20 compared to £8.00 in the UK and at the bottom of the list is Indonesia at £2.40

This is on the right track but slightly high. Essential health insurance (the one you're legally required to have) can start at as "little" as 320 CHF month, using someone age 45-50 in the Zürich area as reference. The annual residual can be anywhere between 350 and 2500 CHF, I believe these numbers and the steps in between are legally required as well and all insurance companies have to offer them. You choose the residual yourself, the more you're willing to pay, the smaller your monthly insurance premium. So most healthy people choose the big 2500.

Swisscom is probably the single worst choice for anything (Internet or mobile), they're three to five times as expensive as the competition. A Galaxus Mobile contract will give you mobile with 3 GB/month of 5G for 12 CHF and unlimited (plus roaming in EU territories) for CHF 19. There are other, even cheaper options, especially if you're happy with 4G/LTE.

The thing about the food and medicine prices is on point.

So prices like in London.

Swiss tech workers are treated nearly the same as US workers. Fired without cause and little in the way of workers rights.

Fired without cause

I am sure the cause was a formula in the Excel sheet.

Then I saw this headline: Memorial for Swiss bar fire victims goes up in flames

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/08/memorial-for-swiss-bar-fire-victims-crans-montana-goes-up-in-flames

The irony (or something else) is big in this one

The article treats salary like the finish line. It isn’t. It’s the consolation prize for giving away the upside.

Six figures in Switzerland looks impressive until you remember what employment actually is. You produce value. The company captures it. You get a capped monthly allowance and a lanyard. The difference between what you’re paid and what you generate is not a mystery. It’s the business model.

Tech workers obsess over gross salary because it’s the only number they’re allowed to see. Revenue per employee, margins, enterprise value growth, equity appreciation, pricing power. All carefully abstracted away so people can argue about whether £65k vs CHF 107k is “fair”. It’s a magician’s flourish. Watch the left hand.

Corporations don’t pay high salaries out of generosity. They pay just enough to keep people from leaving while extracting multiples of that cost in output. If you cost £120k fully loaded and help produce £1.2m in revenue, nobody pats you on the back for the other £1.08m. That disappears into shareholders, buybacks, executive comp, and a slide deck about “value creation”.

And the security trade-off is the cruel joke. Employees accept capped upside in exchange for stability. Then mass layoffs arrive on a Tuesday morning via calendar invite. Turns out the “security” was just a narrative to make people comfortable with never owning what they build.

The reason six figures feels like winning is social comparison, not economics. You’re told to feel grateful because a teacher earns less. That framing is doing a lot of work. It turns a structural extraction problem into a morality tale about being lucky. Corporations love this. It keeps resentment horizontal instead of vertical.

Meanwhile the firms themselves compound. Equity appreciates. IP scales. One good product funds ten failures. None of that accrues to the people whose labour made it possible unless they already sit near the top or negotiated ownership early, which most didn’t because they were sold the salary myth instead.

The uncomfortable truth is that employment is designed to make you productive, compliant, and replaceable, not wealthy. Some people still do very well inside it, usually by getting equity, leverage, or control. The rest are optimising which cage has nicer wallpaper.

So yes, Switzerland pays more. Congratulations. You can rent a better life while building permanent wealth for someone else.

I am guessing that you are resentful because you were only offered wallpaper. I can't imagine why.

If pointing out where the upside goes is called “resentment”, that’s how normalised value extraction has become.

90-100k CHF/year might seem high and very tech-sector-like, but it's not unusual for other jobs either, e.g. a primary school teacher will make between 110k and 157k CHF per year depending on canton. Starting wage for a primary school teacher in Zürich is around 98k CHF.

The Googlers who used to work in Zürich before everyone got fired received more like 300-600k CHF. Even their project managers could make around 350k. That's not what a normal tech company would pay here.