Five bad incentives recruiters have and what job seekers can do about it

When there is big money involved and little chance of getting caught, people do immoral things. As a recruiter, you are often faced with such a dilemma. In over five years in this business, I wasn’t honest or ethical all the time. When I use the term “recruiter” I refer to a so-called recruitment agent […]

As a web developer, should you switch to a more niche field?

Taken from mixpanel In my day job in technical recruitment I talk to dozens of tech firms and hundreds of software engineers every week. Some developers think the web domain is crowded with too many developers and that salaries will go down because of it. I was asked by a reader if it makes sense to […]

Why software engineers don’t get jobs: Four horror stories

tl;dr; Recruiting is messier than you think. I tell three stories where great engineers were rejected for reasons that had nothing to do with their engineering performance or cultural-fit. Read this story with nicer formatting on medium.com. I run a technical recruitment agency based in Zurich. I will help you skip boring calls with non-technical […]

Five years after moving to Switzerland. Why I am still here.

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When I came to Zurich in 2014 to work as a Python and Javascript developer I believed to only stay 2–3 years maximum and then leave to the US. After I wrote “Nine reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech” people started mailing me their CVs, I connected them with jobs and […]

Switzerland: How buying real-estate can kill you financially and two reasons to go for stocks instead

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tl;dr Houses are bad investments due to foreign millionaires inflating real-estate for the rest of us. Stocks are better: There is zero tax on capital gain and an interesting estate tax treaty with the US, so one can buy cheap ETFs. Almost three years passed since I wrote “8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to […]

Compassion — An efficient alternative to rigid Code of Conducts

tl:dr; I suggest “compassion” and recurse.com’s “Social User’s Manual” as a viable alternative to rigid “code of conducts”. “Modern” code of conducts (CoCs) are based on so called “speech codes” at Stanford ~30 years ago. These set of rules (CoCs or “code of conducts”) became a de facto standard at meetups and tech conferences. In […]

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