Looking for a .NET developer? Nearshore development from Croatia for Swiss companies

The job ad for a senior .NET developer has been online for three months. Two people applied. One wasn’t a fit; the other took a better offer from a bank after the second interview.

Meanwhile the roadmap waits, the existing team works overtime, and the application the business runs on is being kept alive rather than developed.

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone.

Switzerland is short of ICT specialists, and the gap is growing

According to the latest forecast by ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz, Switzerland will need around 128,600 additional ICT specialists by 2033. Training and immigration cover only part of that. What remains is a gap of around 54,000 specialists.

For a small or mid-sized company, that means competing for the same senior developers as banks, insurers and large corporations, in one of the most expensive labour markets in Europe.

Local, offshore or nearshore?

When a local developer can’t be found, companies usually look at two alternatives: an offshore team far away, or nearshore development from within Europe. The difference is less about price than about everyday work.

	Hire locally	Offshore, far away	Nearshore from Croatia
Time zone	same	4 to 9 hours apart	same
Language	German	English	English
Availability	often months of searching	fast	fast
Cost	highest	lowest	well below local
Contract and data	Switzerland	outside Europe	EU
Day-to-day coordination	easy	difficult	easy

The same time zone sounds like a detail, but it is the biggest difference. A question asked in the morning is answered in the morning, not the next day. A production bug is fixed while your team is still at work, not overnight in another time zone.

What about the data? It can stay in Switzerland

For Swiss companies this is often the first question, and rightly so.

The revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), in force since September 2023, allows personal data to be disclosed to countries with adequate data protection. EU member states, including Croatia, are on that list. Working with a developer in Croatia is therefore possible in principle.

Many companies still prefer that their data never leaves Switzerland. That works too:

• Everything stays in your environment. The code lives in your repository, the application in your Azure subscription, and the data in the Azure Switzerland North region in Zurich or Switzerland West in Geneva.
• Access through your accounts. Access runs through an account in your Entra ID, with the permissions you grant and can revoke at any time.
• No copies on outside machines. Production data is not downloaded; development is done with test data.
• AI in Switzerland too. Azure OpenAI is available in the Switzerland North region. With a regional deployment, requests and responses are processed there. Not every latest model is available in that region, so we check that for your use case.

This isn’t legal advice. Which requirements apply to your data is a question for your data protection adviser. But the technology leaves you the choice.

What remote work looks like day to day

Remote doesn’t mean far away. The working hours are the same as yours, and coordination is as easy as with someone working from home:

• Same working hours, Monday to Friday, Central European Time.
• Your tools. Teams or Slack, Azure DevOps or GitHub, your ticketing system. No extra tool, no new platform.
• A short daily check-in with your team, or as often as suits you.
• In English. Coordination, tickets and documentation are in English. German-language screens in your application are no problem; we agree the wording with you.
• Code reviews and pull requests in your repository, so the knowledge stays with you.

Practical things to know

• VAT. For services from abroad, your company usually accounts for the Swiss acquisition tax (Bezugsteuer) itself. The invoice comes without Swiss or Croatian VAT. Your accountant can confirm how it works in your case in five minutes.
• Invoices in euros, monthly, based on days or hours worked.
• A clear written contract in English, covering scope, deliverables, price, confidentiality and rights to the code. It is a service from one business to another.

How working together starts

1. Introduction30 minutes, free
2. TrialOne real task, one to two weeks
3. Fixed blockAgreed days per month
4. Long termOngoing development

The trial matters most. Instead of a long selection process, there is a real task from your backlog. After one to two weeks you see how the work gets done, how communication works and what the code looks like. Only then do you decide whether to continue.

How we work

This is exactly what we do: ProCoding is a .NET studio from Split, Croatia. We work fully remotely, in English, in your time zone, with ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Entity Framework, SQL Server and Azure, and we also bring AI into existing business processes. How nearshore development from Croatia works in general is covered in the article on nearshore .NET development. The first step is a free 30-minute call.

Sources

• ICT skills shortage forecast to 2033, ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz, via IT-Markt, September 2025 (in German)
• Acquisition tax (Bezugsteuer) for VAT, Swiss Federal Tax Administration (in German)