Emmanuel Macron presidency prompts French startup boom
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
We could argue that startup salaries aren't the highest anyways, so if salary isn't too big of an issue if French startup can provide equity easily. It seems that when you exercise stock options in France, you don't need to pay tax on it until the options are actually sold[1][2], so that's a good thing for employee, no need to scratch your head with 83b elections and whatnot.
Regarding the lack of tech talent, there's still a lot to be done. France has incredible engineers, but those engineering schools are not focused enough on Computer Science, instead they excel in "old-school" engineering like Aerospace, Civil, Nuclear, ... . On the other hand, Free universities have Computer Science degrees, but they don't prepare the future graduates as much as the Engineering "Grandes Écoles" would in regard to core engineering knowledge. There are some attempts at schools focused more on Software Engineering, but I feel that they're more similar to longer bootcamps with a focus on projects, I think those who graduate such schools are trained to be good "monkey coders" (pardon the expression) but lack a growth-mindset.
[1] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/questions/jai...
[2] (in French) https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/lactionnariat...
The mindset comes from opportunity and belief that you can own what you build. Schooling is almost irrelevant, especially today.
However I come from a private "engineering" school focused on computer sciences (named Supinfo) and there's some others (Epitech / Epita ) that though they don't deliver a engineer diploma (as per the law-regulated definition of engineer) but rather a master diploma (but that you can name "engineer in computer science" or somekind of trick like that and the schools play on that to attract student), actually have to my opinion, provide a decent education.
I learned assembly, C, logical gates and how to build a 1 bits processor.
I then learned HTML, and SQL, and then PHP, and some basic of algorithm (though no data structure courses, I learned only years after being graduated what was a quick-sort/merge-sort)
But I also learned management (how to hold a meeting, how to manage conflict) and project management (Gantt-diagram, Agile and Scrum) and some basis of ITIL
And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
However I have to admit 10 years ago, I wanted to be a monkey-coder and thought the management and finance lessons were bullshit for people who were not good enough to code and still needed a job.
So I have to say the school totally prepared me for the "startup world" (and with 30 campuses in France and ~5000 graduated student a year, quite some others were prepared, though they were maybe with the same mindset as me).
> And even more related to the entrepreneur-ship world I had lessons about copyrights law, labor laws, patent laws , as well as finance course (what is an asset active/passive, what is the difference between giving yourself a salary and giving you shares etc.)
Oh interesting, I thought this was specific to the "Grandes Écoles". For entrepreneurship, this is good. Accounting basics also comes in handy.
But yeah, I make a difference between learning C, SQL, PHP and let's say taking a compiler class, OS class , programming language design, distributed systems, and a database class where you learn the intrinsic of a database.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when such school 'teach you SQL', they teach you about how to operate a SQL database, and do efficient indexing/joins. That itself is very important, but the school makes no effort to demystify a database. Similar to how you demystified processor by building it from scratch (Electrical Engineering is another "old-school" discipline one I think French engineers are good at), I feel learning to demystify many key computer science concepts makes you a better software engineer. And while learning a new language is something you can do on your own time easily, going deep into a compiler creation isn't something easy to do on your own, especially after being out of school.
Some people would argue that lot of this is useless, but to me: Like a civil engineer, where doing matrices operations and second order derivatives by hand at school is never going to be useful later on the job, having the core skills gives you a better intuition on the job.
Have you done enough linear algebra to work on image processing, or with neural networks , and understand the various parameters to tweak the libraries ?
Done enough logic (the math branch) to understand the deep nature , or at least feel the taste of the type systems to come ( scala, haskell and now more and more swift kotlin and rust), or use formal program proofs toolings ?
Enough statistics, physics and algebra to get a hint of what's under the hood of Quantum computers, should they come one day ?
For example, in my school (ENSIIE). I've studied Operational Research, Graph Theory, Logic, Probability, Statistic, Formal Program Proof, and other subjects I don't remember (oups...).
No Quantum Computing in my school however.
But it might be present in better schools like ENSIMAG or Supelec.
The side effect is that these schools tend to be old school in their purely technical teachings. No learning of <fancy JS framework released a weak ago> or how to configure <enterprise stuff> or <fancy cloud provider>, only basic programming skills in C, Java or CPP, SQL, a little assembly, OCaml and some Unix administration skills. By themselves, these schools will not produce code monkeys.
About neural network, also we didn't learned it, but we learned prolog and lips. And prolog itself was a "mind blowing" moment that I would not have exchanged against quantum physics or more maths.
I'm learning rust right now, so I think it's more about the mindset, the school being here mostly to open up your mind about subjects.
Having done a bachelor at an HBO and a masters at a research university (and now doing a PhD at a university in Japan) I can say Computer Science at an HBO is excellent preparation to work as a programmer at a consultancy firm or at a firm doing grunt development work (business app developers, web development, etc.). Like another commenter mentioned, you probably won't easily be able to write code for startups which are doing stuff like robotics and deep learning. However in due time libraries will make it easier for you to work in that area.
Even at the PhD level I sometimes suffer because of not having a very strong background in the mathematics needed to build/use cutting edge technologies. I think most students coming from an HBO would have some problems working at a startup working on some novel tech.
That said, I have met many excellent HBO students who either joined a company and did very novel technical work or went on to be successful in academia. In the end, I guess it depends on your mindset.
Despite a not-as-good-as-the-best-US-schools CS education, they managed to make it to Google.
Similarly, assuming each country has the same distribution of talent, and that the US is able to brain-drain from the top of the stack, the foreigners coming from smaller countries will look even more competent. I know very few Danish and Finnish programmers in the US, apart from Bjarne Stroustrup, Linus Torvalds, so I'm under the impression from that sample that Danish and Finnish are amazing programmers :)
Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
If you get audited and are not in conformity, you get a 7500 euro fine and 60 days to correct your situation.
But what if you are serving foreign clients, and use foreign software to produce invoices that fulfill local regulation? Or if you developed in house software to meet your very particular needs? Heh, sucks to be you, go give money to Ciel.
That being said, the law says that if you do your accounting without software, you don't fall under the regulation. So can you just do your accounting in Excel, copy it by hand, and show that when you get inspected? Who knows.
There are many, many cases like this of useless bureaucracy and regulation in France that make it a nightmare for anyone to start and run their own business. My friends who have been "auto entrepreneur" in the past have hated every minute of it, and most of them have moved to other countries. I'm French, likely to start a company in the next 5 years, and would never go back to France to do it.
The government doesn't really want to create an environment where small businesses can flourish - no one has the proper background to really get what factors contribute to that. What they want is to get the big bucks from venture capital flowing into the country so that they can boast about having a French Google or Airbnb or whatever, which is purely a vanity metric and not particularly constructive for the economy.
[0]: http://www.codial.fr/wp-content/uploads/BOI-TVA-DECLA-30-10-...
> Is a tool like Excel, which the vast majority of small companies are currently using, certified? Of course not! You have to pay for special software like Ciel Devis (9 euros/month) or Ciel Compta (9 euros/month). The keen observer will notice that they're produced by the same company, whose former CEO had a stint at Intuit - another software company that is very good at manipulating legislation to push its own interests.
Fucking "socialists". Macron need to struct down this law, this is straight out corruption, there is no other way to say it.
Macron has been elected in 2017. Given this article is about how he is sparking a tech boom in the country, I hardly see how that's his fault, or even related.
If there is to be a tech boom in France, it will be the result of years and years of judicious, thoughtful, policy that makes life easy for small businesses (tech or not); not one time acts of symbolic VC cash investment.
The purpose of my message is to show that French lawmakers are still very far from understanding this. I don't know where in my post you find me blaming Macron for this.
I'd say you should be able to use pen and paper with a traditional ledger. I would sooner do this (having already done it before) than be required to buy certain software, just out of principle.
Anyway, at least in the U.S. I've never heard of this. Manhattan has ludicrous layers of taxes that a huge PITA for a small business to learn about let alone comply with if you do it yourself. But there's no software mandate. You just have to be able to show your work if asked.
Additionally, the law says that any software has to be certified again for any new major version. But in the world of web software and continuous deployment, how does that work? It's kind of a software equivalent of the ship of Theseus - if my software ends up being completely refactored and rewritten over the years but doesn't change major version, do I need to get it re-certified or not?
It's just nonsensical lawmaking done by people who don't understand tech at a fundamental level.
Source: http://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/france/bercy-renonce-au-logicie...
It's bringing back memories of our dismal global perception around 2006-2008. (Although this wasn't for "America is unwelcoming" reasons)
So far, none of those has happened and it remains to be seen if they will. If they don't, I don't expect a market decline, but just a smaller total cumulative growth since November that has nothing to do with Trump's election or the general agenda I outlined above.
Although this is a popular theory, mostly promoted by the people who don't want to pay taxes.
Those of us even in Australia are wary now of travelling to the US because of (a) fear they maybe mistakenly detained, (b) having to turn over social media information and (c) visa problems at the arrival gate.
Places like Berlin, Amsterdam etc are looking far more interesting for startups because of the access to the European market and the sensible policies that seem to be enacted e.g. roaming.
I intended to visit China in the near future -- but I've booked a trip to Taiwan instead, almost entirely because Taiwan doesn't require me to get a visa.
Likewise, I can't see myself ever living in the US as long as I have access to free movement in Europe.
You still get a visa to enter Taiwan. It's just a "visa on arrival" as opposed to needing to obtain a visa prior to travel. Visa policies are reciprocal between countries. China and the US both charge citizens from each other's countries to visit for tourist purposes and that must be paid prior to travel. Tourist visa policies and immigrations polices have very little if anything to do with each other.
I think you might be short changing yourself if your only reason for not visiting mainland China is solely because they require a visa. It's less than a hundred bucks, it's basically a tourist tax. You likely won't regret it.
Sure -- 'doesn't require me to get a visa' as in I don't have to make a trip to an embassy or pay a fee.
I'm sure I'll visit China eventually, but for the sort of low-budget travelling I'm doing, an entry visa represents a not-insignificant amount of the total cost. It also makes things less flexible: as I understand, authorities must be notified of exact travel plans before you depart.
This isn't true. You are free to travel wherever and whenever you want in China provided you have a visa. Tibet might require a special approval but nowhere else. The visa is also good for 10 years. Also if you are a Westerner, hotels and taxis are a really good value in China. Lastly there are much better flight options into Beijing than there are into Taipei and so would more than offset the cost of the visa.
You cite the dismal perception from 2006-2008, but what changed? In 2008 Obama was elected and everything is new again and he won the Nobel. Did the country completely change in 2 years? Has it changed that much in 8?
Not really, that's why getting so riled up over singular negative events isn't worth your time. Things change fast, and countries have long histories. Germany and Japan were ruled by jingoist elites for centuries and just 80 years ago they were culling populations. Today they are examples of doing it right. Do we really believe 4 years of a bad leader is gonna flip centuries of progress?
It's an issue, yeah, but let's not overstate it because that' s not being honest with ourselves.
And you're right, in the grand scheme of things, it may not matter. But four years is a pretty long time in tech-timelines for other countries to start catching up to Silicon Valley's vibrancy.
Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover. For entrepreneurs and talents, Canada, Germany or France just can't compete, especially France with a bureaucracy that will crush one's bones.
George W. Bush was in office for 8 years, Trump has been in office for 6 months. How can you realistically compare the two? I also don't understand the past tense. Trump is still a sitting President.
Has it? I'm pretty sure most of the country's (and let's be real, many other nations) currents problems are directly related to actions undertaken by Dubya and his despicable administration.
If we ignore illegal wars, Bush comes out ahead.
If we ignore the majority of what Trump says or Tweets, Trump comes out ahead.
I wish there were a metric for ignoramus, I suspect Trump would be fully one or two orders magnitude a bigger moron than Bush except when it comes to how to handle fellow con artists. He was apparently adept at handling the mob.
So far as I know, tweeting dumb shit is not yet a criminal offense.
I've suspected from the outset that four years of Trump would effectively amount to four years of stasis, with perhaps a chance of getting a conservative majority in the supreme court for the foreseeable future.
Sadly I doubt this will be dependent on what he actually does vs other politicians. It's entirely about perception.
This Russia congressional hearing is getting 10x the amount of coverage than the CIA torture hearing - if that's any indication of perception vs national priorities.
The blatant criminality and anti-American behaviour by the CIA and the executive branch was far more obvious in that case going into the hearing. They openly destroyed 92 videos tapes of interrogations at a black site which would have provided direct evidence of abuse [1] which not a single person got punished for.
Yet Jeff Session refusing to answer a few questions about private conversations with Trump got more scrutiny than the CIA did when they refused to release a 10,000 page report on their torture practices, using the same legal basis as Sessions did citing executive privilege during Obama's administration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_tapes_d...
No laws have been broken by Trump. Hillary Clinton & co. on the other hand have broken _many_ at an egregious level. Lynch and Mueller should similarly be under investigation for covering up crimes as well.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/87570147199986483...
Indeed, almost nothing authoritarian has emerged; he uses executive orders to implement policies because he doesn't have the votes to legislate it.
As for the lack of zeal for investigating the CIA, the reason should be obvious: very few Americans were the direct victims of it. That scandal would only be zealously pursued if there were no other noteworthy events happening.
It is "whataboutism" for me to point out the lack of Republican interest in the CIA case is similar to the lack of Republican interest in the Russian election interference investigation. I only make that point to underscore the lack of lawmaker interest in pursuing a mostly "suspicious foreigner" set of victims, not to claim some difference of virtue between the two political parties.
I agree with you that the CIA scandal is shocking and unacceptable. It is 1) morally wrong; 2) directly results in terrorist organization recruitment; 3) disrupts trade and political cooperation with other countries.
The things he wanted to do during his campaign that may have seemed credible: 1) Muslim ban, 2) Libel law strengthening, 3) Increased law enforcement action, "stop and frisk" policies. None of these lead to an authoritarian state, they just erode the Democratic norms of the Republic.
Trump just openly bashes everyone, like a complete moron.
Thus, no matter how progressive or good-neighborly future administration policies are, allies now have to build in the risk that every 4 years there will be a 50:50 chance that those policies will be reversed and any agreements voided.
And with Trump's open imbecilic statements, it's like a switch went off in people's heads - "hey, they US is really not the benevolent/welcoming/whatever democracy it said it was!"
It will reduce it's importance a bit for the next decade. Leave it to Trump's successors to strike the final blows.
I don't know why the fuck you guys are talking about the US and Trump in this thread, btw.
Having visited the Paris startup scene recently, I got the feeling that the bureaucracy is much less taxing these days.
French companies won't take risks. Banks fund only very classical projects. And it's very hard to get money or when you do get it, it's a small amount. Everybody ask for rock star programmers and put them on boring tasks and don't pay them well. Eventually they quit or never come so they can work for non french companies.
And it's not a problem of skills. The french society produce plenty of skilled managers, devs or innovators.
We just make just those skills will always be underused. We had barriers everywhere to protect the old, avoid uncertainty and fit.
Here is a reputable source in French: https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/030386245787-en...
Still, we have in france a strong anti market thinking that is well reflected in how our government keeps piling laws and regulations. This news is indeed a PR stunt nothing more
All small business owners around me, or whom I ever knew, are fraudsters. At the moment, the one right left of my house is a fraudster (he's been caught several times but doesn't care). The one 50 meters forward is a fraudster (he's not been caught yet). The friends of mine who own bars and restaurants are fraudsters, they generally don't get caught, or they only get caught for minor stuff, unrelated to their main fraud. The guy the wedding of whom I last attended got a several millions euros fine (so, same for not so small business!), he didn't blink. The bosses I worked for broke many work rules and that's just considered standard behaviour.
Cheating is a religion is this country.