Because it's been on position 1 of best standard of living in the world pretty consistently, and Switzerland is geographically central, well interconnected, business-friendly, and not part of the EU?
Sure it's expensive, but if you live there your salary is indexed to that cost (especially if you work for google), so it's not like it's a problem in practice.
And that's US salaries (the website only offers a free preview.. yada yada).
I think Google generally thinks the cost of a talented enigineer is justified, and switching locations will of course represent a cost, but probably not such a big one in the great scheme of things.
It's quite possible there will be a relative loss of status. You might go from being -- say -- in the top decile or oven top few percentiles of income/wealth in Russia, to being in a middle decile in Zurich, even if you are quite comfortable or your absolute income or disposable income ends up being larger.
The #1 best standard of living metrics are highly flawed. Vienna ranks quite high, but ask people where they want to live and it's not Vienna or Zurich, it's larger cities like Paris/London/New York/Boston/Los Angeles/San Francisco/Tokyo/Hong Kong or it's smaller rural towns. The factors they focus on don't really reflect well on quality of life.
Those surveys are incredibly subjective and will vary person to person. There's not such thing as a "best" city for standard of living.
When comparing cities I think it's best to use hard data and then compare them based on what's important to you personally. I usually use http://www.numbeo.com as a starting point for this.
These rankings are really odd. They feel like they are only aimed at international business people who work around the world and take their families with them.
Your intuition is spot on - Mercer is one of the biggest HR/benefits consulting firms, and primary use cases of their surveys are to inform execs and provide a reference to HR when calculating cost of living comp adjustments when execs are relocating
Simpler tax laws and more employer friendly labor laws would be a guess. Perhaps it's also easier for Google to get residency permits for its workers in Switzerland.
As one of the world's most neutral countries, Switzerland has historically been a pretty good place to establish an autonomous, neutral, predictably-regulated business when governments are going crazy (which, frankly, they have been lately). If the rest of the world goes nuts, they'll be able to pull out and move base to Zurich, which is not likely to be subject to a war or other major political upsets.
Switzerland is historically infamous for having these qualities, it's why even the Nazis used them to deposit money. They also don't have things like DMCA laws. War aside, let's say the corporate lobby gets them to push the screws on DMCA to make it worse. Hello new Youtube HQ.
London is too. They are planning to build a huge office in Kings Cross to replace the current offices, although it has been delayed apparently to make it bigger[1]. This is much larger than Zurich and almost the size of Mountain View it seems.
I would guess ETH Zurich and, to a lesser degree, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has something to do with it. That's basically Europe's leading engineering and software universities right there.
