The really good IT experts prefer Zurich

The online portal GetYourGuide lets people book travel adventures. And with great success, too. The company is now expanding and is looking for the best possible IT experts. As it’s difficult to recruit enough skilled software engineers for its headquarters in Berlin, Tobias Rein and his co-founders are investing heavily in its office in Zurich, where the company’s story first began.

GetYourGuide was founded in Zurich but has grown into a more mature company in Berlin. Why are you now planning to expand the team of IT experts from 20 to 60 at your Zurich office?

Tobias Rein: It has become difficult in Berlin to get the best software engineers. And we’ve noticed that the really good IT experts prefer Zurich. If we attract experts from far and wide, then Zurich is the better argument. Proximity to the ETH is also important: Those of us who founded the company are ETH graduates, and we know that the ETH is the perfect recruitment base. Around 30 per cent of our team in Zurich comes from the ETH.

Does location still play such an important role in the remote working world? 

In my opinion, direct contact is crucial. Employees working in teams solve problems best when they work shoulder to shoulder. It’s no problem if someone works somewhere else for a month in between. But the ideal situation is when we all work as one in the office. This is also in line with our corporate philosophy.

Which tasks do you think are done best in Zurich?

We take care of everything that the customer doesn’t see directly on our portal: the backend. This includes financial flows, infrastructure on the server side, and the entire cloud management, as well as things like Google marketing. When it comes to recruiting, the ability to solve problems independently in teams is especially important to me. We don’t want lone wolves; we want people with the spirit of a small entrepreneur. Our ‘mission teams’ work almost as independently as if they were a startup.

How important is the startup and IT ecosystem in Zurich for you?

We are in constant contact. For example, we organize events with the ETH Entrepreneur Club and give workshops with the Association of Computer Science Students. The tech community in the city still has potential and it’s nice to see it growing steadily. Of course, there’s always the risk that Google in Zurich, for example, will take the best, but smaller companies also benefit from this overall momentum.

What is GetYourGuide’s biggest challenge these days on the IT side?

Fortunately, we have the technical issues resulting from our tremendous growth under control. The infrastructure is also stable with 34,000 tours offered and millions of bookings. We’re now working on organizing our processes internally to make them as efficient as possible. Meanwhile, 70 software engineers are now working for us, and soon there will be over one hundred. That’s why we have to organize things perfectly.

About:

Tobias Rein founded the startup GetYourGuide in 2009 as a spin-off of ETH Zurich together with Tao Tao, Martin Sieber and Johannes Reck. The company is now headquartered in Berlin with offices in 14 other countries worldwide. GetYourGuide is a booking platform for travel adventures. Since it was founded, travellers from more than 155 countries have booked over 15 million tours, activities and sightseeing tickets on GetYourGuide. Today, some 34,000 such adventures can be booked on the website. The company recently carried out a comprehensive rebranding campaign and will be offering its own tours in select European cities starting this summer.