Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

I can see those cuts in corporate tax being good to increase startup competition. Some of the other big remaining issues to see highly successful startups are salaries and lack of tech talent.

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...

I agree with you on most parts.

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).

> 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.)

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.

Imho , schools like those don't do enough "hard" science, like math, to prepare you for the future.

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 ?

There are CS Engineering schools in France that have a large part of their teaching in "hard" science.

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.

Generally I think you're right, but tbh you don't need to be a MIT class A mathematician physician master to become a great systems engineer. Scala, Rust, Kotlin etc has (to me) the same learning curve as Java and I think most system devs will be able to adopt the languages if they wish to do so.

I had some course about linear algebra, though I agree only the very basics (matrix multiplication etc. but nothing fancy about convolution etc. so I would need to follow a course to be able to implement a raytracer for example)

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.

Sounds like an HBO (higher professional education) in The Netherlands.

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.

I am about to start a software startup in Toulouse, where would you recommend hiring people from?

You mean in term of "where are they graduated from " (which school/uni) ?

Tax cuts and being able to fire people is far more important to startup formation than government directed investment.

The mindset comes from opportunity and belief that you can own what you build. Schooling is almost irrelevant, especially today.

I disagree about the comment on French computer science education; I am continually blown away by the technical depth and effectiveness of my French colleagues (here at Google). Though maybe the problem is that a lot of the best ones moved here :)

Our comments are not incompatible, I'd say, given Google's and other companies recruiting standards, the difficulty of the immigration process, there must be a huge foreign engineers survivorship bias.

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 :)

France is a pretty big country, and their talent seems way over represented compared to that of some of France's neighbors.

CS classes B.S. seems to be everywhere. I would say that we in france produce a lot of good engineers but we are going abroad and not all staying in our native country :-)

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