France bids to reverse tech brain drain
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And this is not a single occurrence, I got told that at school they are asking for documents for the kids as well each year, the same thing with information they already have.
On the other hand, doing the taxes was not at all complicated and I got proper help. This probably changed in the last years. It might be that this is a sign of a changing system, but there is still a lot of crust.
It's rather awkward if you come from a country with heavy card use. It's just weird to carry a few hundred euros in cash in your pocket these days.
But credit Cards are coming fast to Germany. Since a few weeks even the cheapest supermarkets, including Aldi, started to accept MasterCard and Visa.
I think it has much to do with the EU capping interbank fees.
Coincidentally, I have a Sparkasse credit card without chip+pin. Regardless, there shouldn't be a choice for 2FA.
Finally, is the EC Maestro card from Sparkaasse really a debit card? A lot of online merchants would not accept it.
This is not generally true. My credit cards use PIN when the terminal supports it and only fall back to signature when used with older terminals.
I've never heard of online transactions with 1FA auth, most banks use a combination of user login and challenge-response TAN lists or mobile TANs. Special hardware devices that require you to insert your debit card, enter a PIN and have the device read a code directly from the computer monitor using photo diodes are quite common, too.
I have one of those.
But: That at least changed. They are still popular like you said, but by now you can get by without them (I for example have none), many stores do not accept them anymore. That is new.
Yes, where it exists it's rarely instantaneous across banks
Though instantaneous they are also not in Germany, can take some time to arrive.
The short version is that, apparently unlike most European countries, there are thousands and thousands of banks in the U.S., each operating under both Federal and one of 50 different state regulatory regimes.
It's also the case that the U.S. was one of the first countries to move to electronic interbank check clearing and funds transfer, and the resulting clearinghouse is a big hairy legacy system that they're not particularly inclined or motivated to mess with.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episo...
I'm talking about giving someone your bank/branch/acc number and send them a payment.
And if you're required to supply some documentation from another country, you're likely to be required to get it translated to French by an official translator (which not only takes time but can be quite expensive). In contrast, I've never had a problem handing in German documents to authorities in Sweden and Swedish documents to authorities in Austria. Documents in English have certainly been accepted everywhere outside of France.
The catch-22s are the best. Renting an apartment requires that you have a French bank account, and getting a French bank account requires that you already have somewhere to live in France...
Had the same :) But it is not really true. You can get a french bank account without living in France, got mine while living in Germany. But of course not all people working for a bank know or respect that. We got checked by my consellier very carefully before she said oui to opening the account.
Nice is the other one: To get an appartment you normally have to have an insurance, but to get that you need an appartment. Works with the landlord accepting to get the assurance attestation one week later, but is goodwill. Of course, a couple from marokko I know did not get the key from the man responsible in such a situation, while getting the appartment because it was university housing. They stood on the street after arriving here… That was pure racism, but shows that many thing here need goodwill to work despite the system.
Not specific to France - I had the same experience as a French in Berlin (though it was twenty years ago - it might have changed).
Sweden was the worst on that aspect. Most owners require that you have a company signing the lease on your behalf (supposedly to guarantee the rent, yet they generally refuse advance payments on the rent).
It's more of an issue today since so many people just use their debit cards whereas years ago people used cash and credit cards. If you wanted the convenience of not carrying cash, you had to use your credit card since ATM cards didn't have Mastercard/Visa logos and couldn't be used to pay for things in stores. That's how today you wind up with someone in their late 20s that's never had a credit card or a loan.
This was me till I was 28. I was able to skip having to use a secured credit card by getting a joint card with someone who already has great credit.
Tax collection is relentless and very efficient - they act is if it was THEIR money. France can borrow at very little interest rate because it is known that it will repay its debts, it can collect the money for it.
I guess they don't want replicants to graduate.
The tax people are generally competent, and there was a huge effort to streamline the process a few years ago. The rest of the French bureaucracy often lives somewhere in the middle ages ("of course you need to waste several hours by physically coming to our offices"). And the bastards are totally unable to communicate with each other. And that's the ones with funding. The parts which are criminally understaffed like Pôle Emploi (nominally tasked with finding work for the unemployed and distributing benefits), you really don't want to have to do anything with.
Not really! Italian here, living in France for the last ten years: France bureaucracy can occasionally be pedantic, but no French paperwork has made me miss Italy.
Many many countries are worse ...
And the level of bureaucracy is not the same everywhere in France. Education is a very conservative administration. Universities even more so, because they don't have much money (it's very different than in the US), so they stick to the process (with paper) they have.
In the private sector, this is quite different. Also many company-focused administrations (URSAAF, CIPAV) provides web site/app where you can manage your file. It is not perfect, but it's getting better every year. I think my accountant is doing 80% of her job digitally.
They all advertise "good work ethic", "good environment", "good whatever" like it justifies for you to be paid like a graduate for an experienced position. You want talent? Pay the price.
In exchange, employees get as standard :
* a top notch, virtually free healthcare system with no concept of exclusions or "pre-conditions"
* Usually no student loans to repay because their higher education was free, unless they went for a private business/engineering school but that's still an order of magnitude cheaper than a US university.
* a comfortable (unsustainable ?) state pension later on.
* unemployment insurance that covers around 70% pay for months.
* 5 weeks holiday + public holidays
If you're US-based, think about your monthly budget and what goes towards healthcare/co-pay, student loans, kids college fund, 401k, and building an emergency fund in case you get laid off / severely ill. None of that is strictly required in France (although some of it is available as extra private coverage, and a good idea)
This is why cross-border salary comparisons are pointless, it's really apples & oranges.
I'm French and living in London, and I'd personally rather have the freedom to have a higher take-home pay and contribute towards the above items myself as I see fit. But I'm not fooling myself thinking that because my take-home pay is twice as high each month, the math is as simple as that. I know that I'm so much more on my own here than at home...
Point two may be the most interesting one: for a given individual, it may make the most sense to get high-quality French education and then go out and earn high-end American wages that are keyed to U.S. education costs.
In short, France may be facing an arbitrage problem. People who are sick, old, or receiving educations have high incentives to stay. People who are young, healthy, and have already received educations have incentives to go where they can earn more today.
And short of counting on the young & healthy expats' patriotism and sense of duty (or going the US route and taxing citizens on their worldwide income) the only way out for France is to make itself slightly more attractive to net contributors / high earners again, by cutting taxes & benefits slightly, so that balance is restored.
But people and organizations on the receiving end of welfare will hear none of it and don't understand they're killing the golden goose. They'd much rather see a citizenship-based tax obligation like the US has (oddly, as it's a very socialist idea)
Euro states have most of the above, but the high taxation and labor protections strangles little shops and scares investors (would you invest in a French startup? I wouldn't). Corrupt autocracies might have some of the above, but the corruption strangles these companies as well (invest in a startup where the assets could be nationalized instantly? Or having to pay a % of profits to endless bribes?)
Corruption in the USA is typical for west Europe or NE Asia and taxes plus health care costs are slightly higher in the USA. Education levels are the same or lower than typical in Europe and NE Asia. None of that is essential in creating whatever advantage the USA has in tech entrepreneurship.
Labor 'protections' can strangle startups and a large economy with unified rules, unified payment systems, a common language, and unified distribution does help. But something about Silicon Valley in particular seems to be at the root of the difference.
America loves the new and shiny. In particular, the culture in CA is more than open to new ideas, often actively seeking newness. And I think that is at the root of the difference.
French companies and administrations deplore the lack of tech engineers, but at the same time, they don't bother to reduce the overwhelming amount of bureaucratie needed for foreigners (out of the EU) to come work in France. Sounds like the definition of hypocrisy to me.
Actually someone (very brilliant) in my team is leaving next month to found a start up.
That being said, I also have the feeling that if you have some initial traction, it will be harder compared to US to get some early funding.
PS: I know that trying to compare to SV is a pretty futile exercise, since globally this is a big outlier.
Two years actually, provided you have the right contract termination.
Some of us started working on the project while getting unemployment benefits (huge boost).
We get (very) affordable office spaces from the city and various incubators (we are located in Paris).
We are able to live on first customers + 0% loans from the state + hundreds of thousands of euros in various grants for innovation (http://www.bpifrance.fr/), so we don't need to dilute our shares by raising funds too early.
We get no income taxes for the first years.
Employees have social security. Healthcare is cheap and very good.
Why would we want to start run company anywhere else?
Because I see this: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/01/blablacar-raises-a-massive-...
And this: http://1000startups.fr/?lang=en
And I see Paris being startup-heaven in a couple of years. And things are already pretty nice!
In my opinion, it would have be extremely difficult to bootstrap our company anywhere else. As everyone knows, getting out of cash is what kills early stage companies. We go access to "free cash" (0% loans and more than 100k€ in grants) and some of our employees got paid on unemployment benefits .. I mean, how much further could you go? We survived thank to this benefits.
Rent? And living expenses in general. It's going to be you largest expense bootstrapping, especially since it's post tax. It also gets harder to invite people you know to come work with you and getting a larger/better suited apartment in general (location, contract terns, layout, furnished etc).
Not that this is that different from other big cities and I personally think Paris is one of the few that lives up to the hype. Still not preferred for early startups.
Frankly, if you are an early stage startup with young people Paris is not the cheapest, but you have access to everything: public transportation is free if you are officially unemployed and living with roommates can make everything much cheaper!
- 250€ for the rent in a shared flat, everything included (winter time, so more 200€ the rest of the year) 10min by feet from the city center, in the most vibrant district.
- Free public transportation (but Tallinn being a human-sized city, it doesn't really matter).
- I incorporated and activated my bank account from my couch.
- Bureaucracy is close to non-existent here. When there is some, it's online (I was advised to register our trademark online by the councelor I was having a meeting with, we were in his office. His words: "it's simpler online").
- Offices are extremely affordable, the tech scene is small but really active and friendly (much like the rest of Estonia, you end up knowing everyone here: think Kevin Bacon degrees on steroids).
Estonia has drawbacks of course, just like every other country but far less than France in my book.
Don't get me wrong, I love France, but being a lucky european citizen, I decided to move abroad as I don't want to have to go physically somewhere to get a stamp, or send out 10 documents everytime I need to apply / get something (be it ID, passport, transportation card, renting a new flat, etc): I already have a work! :)
If you want more informations regarding the tax system: http://www.investinestonia.com/en/investment-guide/tax-syste...
I may still come back to France, but this page is not encouraging.
I see a lot of French people convinced that France is worse than anywhere else in the world. Everything that is done in France is seen as "not good enough" by many French. It's an attitude problem and might be the reason why so many of us move away, convinced that "things are better out there".
Maybe the biggest problem with having the state do so much for us is that it makes many people act like spoiled kids: they see things as not-perfect-enough and are easily discouraged.
You need to find your team of talented people who will be ready to use their own money to reduce costs. It's almost impossible to recruit someone you don't personnaly know without a large amount of cash. Splitting equity seems to be not attractive enough with french tech engineers...
The one and only advantage in France is that you can restart your life because you can easily avoid indebtedness in case of failure.
And the difficulty of finding an engineer willing to be paid in equity only, in a market where they can get both equity AND a good salary, is nothing special to France believe me.
So yesterday I posted this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10220487
which spawned more than 300 comments and apparently seems to be something people care about.
My primary claim was that it wasn't as such the typical things like culture, language etc that created the issues but also the way the EU is harmonizing the markets and forcing change through the political system rather than the civil society which is unfriendly to entrepreneurs unless they do very predictable businesses.
But today i have seen several posts all related to Europes issues with startups that is talking about things in this vein.
To a twenty-something however, pension & healthcare don't seem like very compelling arguments compared with just being paid 80% more for the same job. The only thing that has kept me in Paris until now is that all my friends live here, but the London salaries attraction is getting stronger every month.
- no pension for your retirement (you have to save)
- prohibitive health care costs even with insurance
- prohibitive higher education costs, and even for younger kids if you don't go the public school route
- vacation policies up to the employer (can be ok as a software engineer though, but definitely not up to what you'd get in France)
- maternity leaves up to the employer
All in all, sure I have more money than when I was in France, but my quality of life is not significantly better. I can afford more stuff, but that's about it, and I'm not sure it's still true once you have a family.
And in general no safety nets, you have to build your own. You can be fired at will in a lot of states.
My biggest gripes with France are:
- most of the interesting tech jobs are in Paris. I don't like Paris (it's personal, I just hated living in Paris).
- absurd tech consulting companies (ssii, 90% of them exist solely to make up for how hard it is to [hf]ire in France)
- management vs engineering: engineers are under compensated compared to managers, a brilliant engineer has to become a manager at some point to evolve in their careers. Companies like to pretend that they have a management and a tech track, but you're almost always better off taking the management track. This can be somewhat true in some industries in the US, but it's not as prevalent as it is in France.
When I moved the the UK, my first salary was 44000 GBP/y, so that was bringing me around 2500 GBP a month, /post taxes/ (PAYE).
I could not believe my EYES when I saw my payslip... These 12000FF were the equivalent of around 7000FF (post tax) so by crossing the channel, I multiplied my pay by easily 3.5. And I had a great time at that company, despite my pretty accented english. Of course life was generally more expensive, but /nowhere/ near 3.5 times more expensive.
Of course, income might have levelled up since, but since then, I've had 15 years of working for the best companies in the industry (ie, worldwide names), increased my experience and income, and all of that with minimum red tape. I created my own LTD company with just 240 GBP almost zero bureaucracy; you can pretty much calculate your tax bills in your head too.
I love it. I'd never go back, I'd never had dreamed of the stuff I have achieved here during that time, when I was still living in france.
Of course, there are downsides, it's a lot closer to the US in the fact you need to handle your own pension strategy, healthcare etc, but for people who have a drive and will to do stuff, it's a LOT easier to get things done here.
Besides, I noticed that many (most?) French students from the top engineering schools go to work in the financial industry (abroad but also in France). I often wonder if this should be qualified as brain drain too.
From what I've read France is also in the business of destroying productivity - if they want people back they need to start reconsidering overuse of red tape.
Some french work really hard, I think their effectiveness at work is above EU average. But they are socialists at their core - meaning all nice social benefits on one side, but massive inefficiency on the other, on all levels of government. In theory, there is no good reason why French should earn much less compared to say Germans. In reality, the difference is HUGE and there are good reasons for it. Market says it all :)
4% of the planet. If 4% of America spoke a language, most of us wouldn't be in much of a rush to localize.
Fortunately for French, the core native speakers in France are rich, and most of the planet is still poor. As the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes more accurate over time.
If 4% of people only speak a functional programming language, does it mean that you never need to learn one? Just because the vast majority historically speak imperative doesn't mean it's the best for your business. Same for OSes.
Diversity is source of wealth.
Plus those numbers only account for speakers who can read and write. As I said in another comment, the alphabetization of Africa over the next few decades is expected to boost these numbers significantly.
So, as the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes LESS accurate over time.
By the way, I'm not french, and I find that "curiosity" term insultingly patronizing.
You're implicitly assuming that the remaining 96% of the population is speaking another language which is untrue in your analogy as the world population speaks more than one language and the largest one in terms of number of speakers goes to Mandarin with around 15% of world population.
"French is the second most widely spoken language in the European Union and the second most widely learned language in the world, but despite its strong international position, the outlook for French in Europe is not so encouraging. Over the last four years, the number of French-speakers in the continent has fallen by 8%."
It has of course been supplanted by English as the lingua franca.
French is still prominent in large parts of Africa but is facing increasing competition from English and Arabic.
The huge number of human languages is a product of a bygone era of isolation. A Darwinian process has ensued that is seeing that number constantly whittled down and outside of truly primitive cultures (there are still people in the world living effectively in the Stone Age) I imagine within 100 years you'll see a smaller number of languages spoken by a larger portion of the global population.
[1]: http://www.euractiv.com/sections/languages-culture/french-la...
And French is not a "mere curiosity". It's the official language of 29 independent countries. It's also the second most employed language in diplomacy, being a working language of countless institutions, and the second most common mother-tongue in the EU. Not to mention that with the growing alphabetization of Africa, and its potential for economic and developmental growth, it could very well know a powerful rebirth in the near future.
It's true that French is not the easiest language to learn though, but if you don't find it very pretty that's your opinion, however it's really subjective.
It doesn't matter how crappy your school english was (btw why do I keep hearing this excuse all the time?), in very few places it's stellar (neither was mine at home). We all sound a bit funny. So what? What makes difference between French and rest of the world is that any guy will try to speak English, even broken one, and will try to help anybody speaking it (ie in his own country). With English in France, story is consistently different.
Yeah, just 5 years of daily experience, only only mine and all expats I know (this is always a funny topic to talk about). Who knows, I could get it all wrong :)
It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric.
Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either.
What makes you think that English is any better?
Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at least from orthography and pronunciation standpoints and in contradiction to the prevailing belief of the opposite.
Unlike in Spanish or Italian and to some extent French which enjoy an almost uniform rules regarding pronunciation and orthography, in English you should memorize how individual words are pronounced and written and you can't deduce correctly how a certain new word to be pronounced or written based on the pronunciation because it is not 1:1 translation from official letter sounds to words.
On the other hand, when you encounter a Spanish or Italian word and you know your alphabet and letters and simple rules, you pronounce the word as is no surprises in the process. When you hear a word correctly, you could decipher how it's written even when you encounter it for the first time and the success ratio is around 99%.
Good luck trying this with the English language. Please get off your high horse and don't kid yourself, we foreigners are not learning your language that's English because of its innate "superior" qualities to other world languages. It just happens to be the global lingua franca of this age and we're adopting to this nothing more nothing less.
On the other hand, I would say that French is very error prone: it's like Spanish or Italian (in the sense that you need to know lots of conjugations and the gender of the nouns), and the spelling of the words is very complicated, for example the sound 'o' can be spelled 'o', 'au', 'eau', 'ô'. In fact the spelling is so hard that I am suspecting it has been made hard on purpose so people who are not educated could be spotted straight away when they write a letter.
Please note that I am not writing this out of content ("Look how we French people are smart for mastering such a complicated language"), but because I like the simplicity of the English language. In fact, I believe anything made hard in a language is just some incidental complexity in how we express our thoughts, and if I had to create a language I would use English as a base.
- Do you conjugate verbs?
Sure you do in English and there are also the irregular verbs problem to crack such as go went gone / read read read (As you know, the past and past participle are pronounced as the word "red" and there's no clear non-ambiguous rule governing this usage you just have to memorize it sucks big time, doesn't it?)
- IMO, gender-based languages make much more sense to me and genderless langs like English are very confusing and suffixing every noun with -o or -a is not really a huge investment to take to avoid this confusion.
- I acknowledged that French is a bit more difficult to master than other Romance languages like Spanish and Italian and it takes much more effort to write or read but it still if you get around the rules in French and get familiar with the sounds, it would be far easier to guess words pronunciation or spelling without looking up a dictionary compared to English.
By the way English still retains some of the influences of the French language as a result of the Norman Invasion of England such as the subjunctive mood where you need to pick the right tense to express doubt in your communication. It's also worth mentioning that some people would argue that the complexity and tediousness in English spelling is attributable to adopting French words into the lexicon but seriously I don't care not my problem.
So, I would disagree with you that English is a simple or an easy to learn language. On the contrary, it's a life long investment and very high maintenance not only for the most complicated parts such as idioms or poetry but for the most basic ones such as reading and writing.
I'd be compelled to add that even Arabic and despite all the negative publicity it gets for being a complicated language which in some aspects it pretty much is, it still has a more streamlined and straightforward process than in English to reading and writing once you get your head around the concept of weak and strong vowels to start reading and writing and there's no need to memorize words one by one to be able to speak properly.
Lastly, the nerve of him calling a Romance language not pretty. I might not favor French over Italian or Portuguese when it comes to the domain of musical sounds but it's definitely way way better than English in that regard.
As a native English speaker who has studied Spanish and French (though I've neglected both for far too long to do much with them now), the spelling of French compared to its pronunciation my be less regular than Italian or Spanish (going from pronunciation to spelling can be error-prone for unfamiliar words, but going from spelling to pronunciation usually isn't), but compared to English it is a model of simplicity.
I have the exacts same experience as you working at a NYC insurance company (9 to 5 then go home).
I also know at lot of companies here (in France) where people work their asses off everyday.
There are places are people don't seem to do anything. But it's hardly a France-only occurrence. There are only plenty of companies where you are expected to work hard and deliver results; again, hardly France-only.
I love it when some casual observations from a visitor become trusted source of generalisation for a whole country.
Perhaps six hours is all they need to accomplish the task?
And France is known for make it hard for people to find jobs.
Productivity, in other words, is a measure of the value produced per hour worked.
If instead we look at the most often cited measure of value produced per resident, namely, GDP per capita, France is not doing better than Germany or the UK -- in either "nominal" GDP or GDP "purchasing power parity" according to the most recent World-Bank data.