> an AI engineer in the US at 146,000 to 189,000, a median of 70,000 euros in Germany, 111,000 francs in Zurich.
Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?
I'm German and it'd say it's plausible for median.
Switzerland basically still has a middle class, that's why their wages are where they're.
While my wage has significant improved over the last years, statistics show that wages have been stagnating for 20 years and inequality keeps rising.
Obviously a lot less pronounced then in the USA, but still significantly more then in eg Switzerland.
The difference is even bigger if you look at current valuation of chf, it's almost $140k or 120k€
Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
Yeah I hit this feeling with Claude one too many times and switched from Anthropic Pro to OpenAI Pro. GPT-5.6 so far has been a significantly better technical writer in my opinion, and it's much faster in conversations. My guess is that Claude's fantasy-jargon is a symptom of training failure, not a sneaky intelligence edge (I could be wrong).
Tangential but I use OpenCode with GPT-5.6 rather than Codex because I could not figure out how to require Codex to ask me before editing files. OpenCode UX is still imperfect though.
> I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.
At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.
Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?