In Zurich there are certainly American multinationals focused on Software Development like Google, Facebook (Oculus), IBM, Microsoft, Amazon.
I can offer my own experience as I’m currently a software engineer at one of the above who transferred here just over one year ago from the SF Bay Area. I can’t compare with London as I’ve never lived or worked there, but I can with California generally since I’ve worked in Southern California in addition to Silicon Valley.
My company’s office branch here has a very similar work culture as the headquarters over in the US, which is where I was based prior to transferring. That is to say, it’s very casual and it doesn’t feel like people work any more or less hard here vs. there. I would estimate ~40 hrs average a week in both places, but it depends on the individual. Business is conducted 100% in English across the company and engineering practices and processes are standardized such that you’d be hard pressed to really find any differences in what you’d be doing in any other office around the world. Because we work closely with the west coast of the US, late meetings are not uncommon and the office starts the workday on average a bit later than probably your average Swiss office. We are hiring and expanding aggressively here, and to my knowledge, so are the other tech multinationals.
Obviously there’s a much more limited tech scene/industry in CH than the Bay Area/Silicon Valley. And that is actually a very good thing for me. A big part of the reason I left the Bay Area is the overwhelming “tech monoculture” as its called there. The environment has really become sort of a warped bubble where anything and everything is hyper-focused on ‘hustling’ the next big tech startup unicorn and “disruption.” It’s given rise to a sort of dysfunctional political and social echo chamber while all sorts of societal ills growing out of control (overcrowding, homelessness, traffic, a city full of multimillion dollar homes but with human feces smeared all over the streets, stratospheric cost of living). I spent 25 years of my life in the Bay Area, having grown up there. My family still lives there but for now, I have no desire to go back due to the lifestyle. People complain about the cost of living in Zurich but SF is on a whole different level when you factor in real estate costs/rent.
That being said, if your goal is to be at the epicenter of tech, there’s nothing that comes close from my experience. In the Bay Area, I’d get recruiters incessantly contacting me on LinkedIn on a daily basis, begging for a 5 minute phone call to pitch their gigs. I had friends coming straight out of college securing multimillion dollar investments from VCs to launch startups. It was rare to find people with more than 2 years tenure at any given company simply because you can’t take two steps as a mildly competent engineer without having jobs and big dollar figures thrown at you.
While I’m in tech myself, I can’t live and breathe it like that. Perhaps I’m less ambitious than others but I figure I only need one job. I didn’t care too much for being at the center of it all once I found a good company/team. For example, I was happier in Southern California where there was a thriving tech scene (Silicon Beach as they call it, with big companies and startups like Snapchat) but far more diversity of cultures and professions. The lifestyle simply suit me much better there.
As a foreign national, non-German speaker, the tech scene accessible to me in Switzerland seems very small even in comparison to Southern California. Anecdotally, I still do get 2-3 LinkedIn inquiries a month, sometimes from Swiss recruiters, but more often from other global hubs like London or Hong Kong. I still do get recruiters contacting me from across the pond, but more so from NYC/Chicago FinTech firms rather than California tech companies.
Finally, compensation. At least at my company, it’s in the same ballpark range as the US. There are some differences in how retirement deductions/benefits work (e.g. you pay for your own medical insurance in CH) but they aren’t really big factors IMO. Tech compensation for engineers has really risen dramatically in the last half decade or so. As a reference, I turned 30 years old this year and started working right out of college in the summer of 2011, so I have exactly 7 years of experience at this point. I am at an average and non-remarkable level of seniority for my age/experience within the company. My total compensation was 370k-410k CHF (gross) for each of the last three years. This year I expect to come in around the high end again at 410k+ CHF.
The reason for the big numbers is due to equity compensation and appreciation, which almost certainly amounts to as much, if not more than base salary for engineers at the big tech companies. The companies often give a large initial grant that vests over the first several years, during which your total compensation will be somewhat inflated. For 2019 my compensation will likely drop to the 300k CHF range, unless I do well and get the equity refreshed to a higher amount. As someone with 1 year of experience, my guess is that you would probably start somewhere in the 160k-185k CHF range at the above mentioned companies (maybe with the exception with IBM), which is in line with what you’d be getting in the US, possibly more if you have competing offers. From what I have heard, Switzerland is probably the only place outside the US to commonly get US-level compensation for software engineers.