Software Engineer interview questions, derived from Swiss adverts

The order below is the order of your preparation. Each point needs a situation from your own work — not the claim that you can do it, but an occasion when you did.

For Software Engineer: Professional experience in 12% of adverts, Customer contact in 9%, Resilience / flexibility in 9%. That is what gets asked, usually without the question sounding like it.

For Software Engineer roles English is the more common requirement: 64% of adverts name it against 36% naming German. Among the occupations measured that is the exception — and it means the interview itself can reasonably happen in English.

The roles are advertised above all in Zurich (25%), Zug (5%), Geneva (4%), Bern (3%).

The only occupation measured here where English is demanded more often than German: 64% of adverts against 36%. That changes the preparation fundamentally — you can expect an interview in English, and in Zurich and Zug that is the rule rather than the exception.

The Swiss tech interview usually runs three rounds, and the middle one is the surprise: a technical conversation or a small task, often with no whiteboard algorithms. You are more likely to be asked how you would debug an existing system than whether you can invert a tree. Preparing on Leetcode and being asked about architecture decisions means the wrong week was invested.

A quarter of the roles are in Zurich, 5% in Zug. The Zug cluster is small but it is crypto and fintech — product understanding gets probed there more often than language detail, and the companies are smaller than their names suggest.

Two things catch people relocating in. Salary is quoted as an annual gross figure, sometimes across 13 monthly payments, so clarify which before you name a number. And notice periods here are long — three months is standard — which means the process is rarely as urgent as the advert makes it sound.

The adverts are not spread evenly across Switzerland. For Software Engineer, Zurich leads with 25% of adverts, followed by Zug (5%) and Geneva (4%).

That means two things for the interview. First, anyone willing to commute into one of the stronger cantons negotiates from a better position. Second, the question about your journey to work is not small talk in Switzerland but a real test — a commute over an hour is read as a resignation risk, and raising it yourself takes the sting out of the subject.

Currently advertising are YO IT Consulting, onrunning, vontobel, among others. Looking into the company before the interview pays off more than another list of questions — the choice in this occupation is wider than most people assume.

Practically all Software Engineer roles are advertised as full-time. Anyone looking for part-time should raise it early: in this occupation it is the exception, and a no later in the process costs both sides time.

A last point often missed for Software Engineer: Professional experience appears in 12% of adverts, while Leadership appears in only 6%. That ranking is also the order in which your examples should be ready — the most frequent requirement is near certain to come up, the rarest may not come up at all.