What’s your take on it?
- It will get worse: less jobs due to AI advancement, tariffs, ongoing war(s) or other reasons
- It will get better: more jobs due to the clarity on/maturity of AI advancement, geopolitical certainty or other reasons
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voters
Reason(s): boomers retiring.
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Exactly now? =) I did not think about it
3 years forecast! my weekend pastime! 
please set up the ranges and distribution profiles for the variables and I will run the Montecarlo analyses!
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Reasons(s): not competitive “manufacturing” cost (salaries) with CHF constantly gaining against USD/EUR
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The problem is that Swiss industry is almost extinct and the Swiss Finance considers software a required nuisance that can be purchased like another disposable consumption product. So except for system administration there is basically no future here. Oh yes, the big tech companies do business here for one main reason, which is Swiss banking!
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Not necessarily, the tier 1 are hiring here exactly because it’s a country where salaries are high with low taxes, so the top talent looks at jobs at Zurich. But yeah, G is doing layoffs, other giants will soon follow
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Actually I’m curious why have you chose 3 years. If we’re following the same news, it’s well aligned 
For anyone else, the story is about upcoming transformation of software development. Traditional agile team can be organized as one architect or team leader responsible for chunking work to fast coders and reviewing the output. It’s expected that within 2-3 years AI agents would be good enough in churning out the chunks of work. My golden cage have already chosen “random” people for the leader title, with no reason at all, so it won’t take me by surprise if in a year or two it’ll say goodbye to anyone without leader title.
I couldn’t care less, can’t stop it
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The choice of 3 years was intuitional but if I think about it I could probably explain it as a combo of (as I am writing it I realize it’s all a bit of BS/my mind games),
- if we believe in ~10y economic cycles and if the bottom was in early 202x then it’s going to be about in the middle of it
- IMHO a sudden tech hype is normally lasting this much (blockchain, front-end, mobile etc.)
- either Ukraine or Russia will collapse (of course I hope it’s the latter to collapse but economically it’s probably the same short or long term relief)
- AI is advancing so fast so I feel by then we should have some answers, most forecasts are short term like 2026, 2027 etc.
- on the one hand Swiss companies are said to leave for EU due to tariffs on the other hand CH is said to become an IT hub due it’s non-membership
It didn’t cross my mind with regards to IT sector, if a Swiss software house have a significant customer base in the US, they already have a branch there, maybe even switched to accounting total company finances and forecasts in USD
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i’m a boomer. i’m retiring in the near future. i have 20 years experience of IT Switzerland (plus 10 in the UK). my job was relocated to madrid (I should say, with my ‘agreement’ and to my benefit). so.. maybe not that.
but.. i’d be more optimistic about the future. this is an english speaking forum. most IT people here are in multinationals. IT isn’t going away. there’ll be plenty of growth from the small to medium firms, even if a lot of it is ‘interpreting’ what the AI said
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Out of interest, do you plan to retire in Switzerland or move elsewhere (where?)?
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Staying… married one of 'em 
and she’s not ready to retire anytime soon.
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To sum up the current job market in Pharma, people are using Ai to generate their applications and HR are using Ai to screen them.. and nobody is getting hired.
I’ve never seen so many ex colleagues with “open for work” tags on their LinkedIn profiles.
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There’s a relevant statistic to look at: office space vacancy rate. 5% as Swiss average, 3% in Zurich Kreis 1, 9.2% in Basel city center. Geneva before UN crisis 3.9%, what’s is happening right now is unknown yet. So, perception may be influenced by regional conditions.
I remembered another reason for optimism. Long time ago I heard a story about sensitive data of company X being hosted in Switzerland. Workers from company X around the world connected to data center in Switzerland to work everyday, but data was gone from local machines at the end of day. The legal environment provides an advantage to CH as a data vault.
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In what functions?
I’m seeing new office spaces being opened all the time and they seem to be filling up reasonably quickly. Maybe partly companies are relocating to newer premises, but I think new firms are being attracted inwards too.
Of course in Basel we had a lot of layoffs by big pharma in recent years.
Congrats. So you’ve been condemned to a lifetime of expensive meat and rösti!
Mainly commercial, marketing etc.. Even in my own area of R&D I am seeing long term unemployed from the many waves of layoffs. It’s probably worth noting that these are mainly director and above levels and those I am seeing are in their 50s.
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