Yes, compared to what it was before, it's booming. But it was ridiculously bad before.
However compared to what's happening in the US, it's still lagging.
Innovation is alright, however investment and risk taking are nowhere close to the American standard. It's still very meh.
The culture of flexibility is starting to sink in, but again, you will face the french "lutte des classes" legacy, with old style hierarchies and management structures.
And of course, even including social benefits, the salary is 2 to 3 times less than in the valley. But they will publish crazy requirements in job offers.
On the other hand, working in France is sweet. Paris is great city, and the life style is super nice. And while French people can have a pretty negative attitude, they won't tell you everything is ok or doable before even checking they can, or be artificially friendly to the point it's weird. All in all, it's a lot less pressure.
Best bet is to actually live in France, but remotely work for an American company.
Plus you can buy actual tomatoes and not red plastic balls.
Yea... no.
Especially if you factor in the cost of life.
Edit: Average salary in SF for tech workers is $142k vs $56k in Paris [1].
Once adjusted for cost of living, Paris is roughly 86k$ [1].
Now, you add all the social benefits, like free health care, retirements etc. And if you have/plan on having children, you can add free education as well.
All in all it's very far from 2-3 times lower.
You can also add, among the benefits, the good network of public transport (even if some lines are overloaded).
Well, no. That's the point of having an average.
Would be good to have stats for median salary as well
Freelancing is also a good option, with daily rates ~400-700€ depending on experience, you can make a much better living than a regular employee.
The ballpark for your actual cash in hand, assuming no other costs for the company, would be whatever you charge divided by two (social security isn't actually free).
Of course, some things can be expensed, which is a huge advantage, for example a company car or motorbike, a laptop, etc). But it's not entirely free if you use them on your personal time, theoretically you have to pay income tax on some of the object's value.
So the numbers are, considering 220 working days a year (which is probably optimistic, because you have to budget some days to find and develop new leads, plus vacation, sick days, etc):
400 € / day = 88 000 / year => 44-45 000 after tax
Another thing to bear in mind is landlords and banks have a strong preference to rent / lend to people with a stable, long-term contract (CDI). As a freelancer, especially in the beginning, you'll probably encounter quite a few of them who won't want to do business with you. Plus, being a foreigner won't help.
Source: I'm doing the freelance thing.
My friend is diabetic and in poor health, he would go broke if he lived in America and not Europe.
American salaries are 2 to 3 times higher.
The cost of life is NOT twice higher.
Do the math.
Also remember we are talking about tech. Not all salaries.
You need to include benefits such as company car, extra holidays (europe starts with 20 + unlimited sick days), 13th month (get paid twice on december), food stamps (around 8€ / working day), ...
And stock options can be part of the package on both side of the ocean. You should value them similarly.
> The cost of life is NOT twice higher. Rent is around twice higher in SF, and contributes for a significant portion of your total expense. Other expenses (leisure, culture, ...) is indeed more slightly more expensive in SF but not by a factor x2.
Health care is also free for most tech workers or if not free, a blip on the radar. I think I pay $40 a month for amazing healthcare (and I'm in SoCal not in the Bay).
That's an important perk.
This was true in the nineties, but due to dropping revenues (especially in Germany) has been corrected by Dutch farmers since then.
Dutch tomatoes are of the highest quality now.
Salaries are on part with major tech hubs (NYC OR SF are WAY MORE EXPENSIVE than paris and salaries match at the end)
Paris is the 15th most polluted city in europe and not the 2nd...
"People are rude" - is a generalization and racism toward parisians. plus if you feel like everyone is rude start asking yourself some questions man....
Plus in terms of dirty you never lived in SF or NEW York or any part of China I guess.
It's not racism, it's just social expectations clashing.
But yeah, try to live in Manhattan...
How can one find something like this?
You will have a way higher fail rate than usual. But they really, really need good devs, and they are getting more rare and expensive, so some agree.
so it’s negative?
But you will stay less hours at the office as well.
And you'll get way more time off.
Also you get to go to the Fontainebleau forest, eat to the "Pates vivantes" in the 9e, and can just walk to buy stuff most of the time. Or roller skate.
They read "2 to 3 times less" as "-200% to -300%" instead of "33%-50%".
French salaries for dev are in the 30k to 70k depending of your level. 70k is rare. You need to be good. To be able to negotiate or have a rare skill.
However 120K USD is not rare in the US. I had proposals for 220k.
Same job in France would be 65k if I negotiate REALLY well.
The scene is very active, any new company these days will always brand themselves as a "startup" no matter how they function behind the scenes. So alot of "false advertising" when you postulate, "we're cool and all, we SOMETIMES allow a day of remote work a week" and typical bs like that.
Your french will need to be good, because it has been proven time and time again that we are bad as flip at learning languages and if you watch statistics online you'll see we're worst ranked in the entirety of Europe in languages.
Used to be that there were some "startup heavy" districts inside Paris, still is the case, but now we also have the brand new "Station F" that sells itself (or rather Macron sells as) the next Silicon Valley of Europe.... Never heard that anywhere...
My SO is currently in internship at station F and she told me the turnover is pretty crazy, it's more of an incubator that helps new startups get on their feet, so they'll probably stay around 6 months and then move far away to get cheap offices. Also apparently their selection process is run by old investors that have no idea what they are doing and if you simply sell your sh#t product/service well enough you'll get in. From what my SO told me about 50% of the startups over there are your typical "marketing" based "services" that sell you vaporware and invest 99% of their revenue in better "packaging" and what not, if you know what type of "company" I'm talking about...
Last thing, you'll probably get a good pay since your resume mentions the words "worked at Silicon Valley", but from my experience, every single HR will try to f#ck you over when you are being hired, so you better be a tough negotiator. For reference I currently earn 30k eur (about 21k after tax) a year as a junior (2 year xp) full-stack dev (mainly node, php and alot of sysops)
I'd resume by saying that overall, startups in Paris are more akin to those in SF than the Silicon Valley if you know what I mean. That might be your sort of thing, but I'm more of a "I want to build the future with my new js framework" type of guy... So have been considering moving out of France.
Regarding the French language: you don't need to be good at it. Just learn enough of it so you can show the locals you tried, and soon they'll be ok speaking to you in English. All coding languages are English-based so everybody knows enough to work efficiently with non French-speaking people.
Like the other users said, Station F is the flagship startup trend in Paris but there are many startups that don't go there and just operate in Paris itself, it's up to you to find them using meetups (there are plenty) to network.
Coding language wise, it's difficult to say but from my experience a lot of people are into Node.js and Ruby.
Hope this can help, enjoy your time there
It's true that everyone here must know some English, but the average level is bad to atrocious (even among people in their early 20s), and like others in this thread have said, many people hate being forced to switch to English for a colleague who can't be bothered to learn French. You may get by professionally (assuming a company is even willing to hire you if they know all your colleagues will hate you; think "culture fit" for a Silicon Valley way of putting this), but you will not be treated in a welcoming way and will de facto be excluded from conversations at lunch, in breaks, and at social events. I've seen this happen to expat colleagues. All this gets much better if you show that you are putting in the effort and learning, even if your current level is poor.
Really, if you settle anywhere, learn the language. Especially in France. French is neither super easy nor particularly beautiful IMHO, but it's not rocket science either. Not putting in the effort will harm you both professionally and socially.
I understand that that would be annoying. In your shoes, I'd be annoyed if they didn't even try to learn French.
I find that when I meet French speakers and want to practice, their first instinct is to switch to English. That's very kind, but it doesn't help me. If I was in a workplace in France, I would want people to speak French first, but slow down a little and tell me when I mess something up.
How would that go over in a workplace? Or is it the kind of situation where you speak English because it's the least annoying choice? :)
FYI I’m native English speaker who speaks French and German. I’ve lived in both countries and my current work brings me to both countries still. I’ve found this experience try for both German and French speaking friends/colleagues.
So it is just a matter of perspective. I wonder how the chinese see that picture.
I critizied that the people in France are known for their hostility against English. So I just wish they would embrace the international nature of English a bit more.
“What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual
What do you call someone who’s speaks one language? American”
I’d be willing to bet that a greater percentage of French population have basic communication skills in a foreign language than Americans.
FYI until relatively recently, French was the Lingua Franca of the world, not English. In fact that was one reason I wanted to learn French, to help me in travels around the world. Yes English is more prevalent now, yet I’ve found French to be more helpful than English in some non native French speaking countries.
One thing I'll tell you is that in my experience, every culture has its own way of expressing annoyance. When those ways clash, it can make people seem way more hostile than they mean.
As an example, if I start a sentence with "Sorry, but..." I'm pretty annoyed, but in some parts of the world, that would be endearing. In other parts, it would be so polite as to be annoying.
One thing I'll tell you is that my country isn't particularly patient with people who don't try to learn English, or with people whose English is poor. We have a reputation for being very polite and welcoming, but I think that's more a function of people just not picking up on cues that we're annoyed.
What? You've never been to Europe have you? Try travelling here and speaking English in any country other than the obvious champions like Norway / Sweden / Danemark and you'll come to the crazy realization that people like speaking their own language.
But hey, on the positive side of things I have a feeling that the younger generations depend less on their own language and have better English skills.
There's not that many Spanish, Chinese or even French speaking countries you'd want to move to, as someone from a developed country.
Imho: French start-up ecosystem is booming. Still immature in some aspects. Really good tech companies, less aggressive in sales than german for example. Cash is coming really hard from french VCs but also UK and some US.
I consider France a tax heaven for start-up with multiple leverage: - JEI (Jeune Entreprise Innovante) status: basically you pay low employer's contribution - CIR (Crédit Impot Recherche): you have 30% of you Research and Development (if it's really R&D) refunded as tax break or cash. - BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement): basically some free money, loans and cash for equity investement; Really easy if VCs are already onboard. - Unemployment law. If you've worked enough you get paid for a period of time to find another job and creating a company qualify as finding another job.
Other cool stuff: culture, low salary, top tier math/engineer schools, good business school/MBA, great community but a bit too nice.
Bad stuff: weather in Paris, English is pretty bad (with some progress), French market too small for most businesses, a lot of uneducated BAs, VCs and Entrepreneurs. Europe fragmented market, administration is slow and heavy, overcrowd of start-up recently.
It’s not really about attracting talent, that’s really not an issue. Cost of life is lower but also salary includes social security and all.
Too nice? Care to elaborate?
I have noticed that OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) is far less popular here than in US. I think that IOS and linux are also slightly less popular than in US.
This reminds me of the a story an American friend told me while visiting France. She was at this stand buying something, when the American tourist in front of her, asked the shopkeeper something in English, and the just responded back in French. Frustrated, the tourist left. When it was her turn, she tried to stammer something out in whatever French she could remember from high school. The shopkeep smiled, and then immediately switched into English to complete the transaction. ;)
> I have noticed that OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) is far less popular here than in US. I think that IOS and linux are also slightly less popular than in US.
I don't think OpenOffice is popular at all in the US. I don't think I've anyone that used it. Linux used to be popular with developers, but it seems like almost everyone has switched to macs. iOS is popular though.
The tech scene is definitely very active, lots of events and meetups to join and some very active companies with good products around as well as active VC's in the city. Add Station F and The Family and you got a nice place to start a company.
Salary wise, I guess you are looking at 40-70k range, depending on experience and role.
The part where Paris is not that great is moving into the city. Speaking from personal experience, my gf moved in with me and tried finding a job outside tech w/o speaking French and it's basically a nightmare, she moved back. Getting any paperwork done or renting an apartment in Paris is a nightmare as well.
So overall, Paris is nice, but you need to be French or speak French to enjoy it, otherwise it might take some time and in my opinion, it's the only thing that makes Paris fall short of being a good place to move to.
There are even apartment complex chains that specialize in this sort of thing. Oakwood was one, last time I checked, and has buildings in most major cities.
As noted by my Austrian friends, you can do anything you want in America as long as you have the money up front.
Not sure that’s necessarily proof Paris has “made it” as far as incubating successful cos, though. AFAIK the most high profile European tech companies are out of London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
The start-up scene is currently definitely at an interesting point: really young and active (people already shared links to Startup studios, you should have a look at them). The meetup scene is great too.
The salary is still a pity though (compared to the States, Switzerland or Baltic countries). For a middle developer position, you may be around 40K euros, which is "nice in France", but not a lot, especially after paying your taxes.
> How good does my French need to be?
To work, English is fine, to live, it's another problem. French people are usually really kind to people trying to learn French as it's a hard language. If you don't care about french, people won't care about you.
> Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County
There's a bit of everything, but the Web and Robotics are especially important.
I won't get into details here but 40k€ before taxes ("brut") for a developer between junior and senior is not considered that good in Paris anymore. It would have been decent 8 years ago but wages went up with the increase in demand. Of course it depends on skills, position, stack, etc...
That being said, you will almost always make more money working as a freelancer, and you will definitely make more working remotely for a California-based startup (which may be difficult because of French employment laws but is still definitely possible).
I loved it there and would advise anyone to do it (I'm thinking of doing it again!) - but if money is your goal... I traded an awful lot of "opportunity dollars" for "opportunity experiences".
There is a lively scene, at least for someone with my interests (data science, aka. applied statistics and machine learning), with lots of 'incubators' and related places where startups seem to congregate.
I have been to many events organised or sponsored by the Big Ones (Apple, Microsoft, Google), plus a myriad of smaller meetups and events sponsored by all sorts of companies and public sector organisations.
> How good does my French need to be?
Okay (B-) spoken French is enough to interact with most people, but you will need to understand spoken French much better (A, A+) than you speak it -- it will make your day _much_ less tiresome.
Note that I would say the same about, say, German if you were to move to Germany or Austria. There are only few countries in Europe where English is spoken by such a large fraction of the population that you can almost do without the local language.
> Are there any languages/platforms/etc. […]
I do not know.
Re: other posts ---
Re: wages, it depends on how much you decide to spend on rent. If both you and your wife are working, you will be fine, and will be able to afford a well-above-median lifestyle, assuming that you are not currently in debt and that the IRS won't strip you of all your assets if you return home.
Re: pollution, again, it depends on where you will settle. I would never, ever raise a child in Paris. As for myself, I tend to worry more about noise than pollution, and noise can be awful depending on your street + windows.
(The other significant environmental issue is urban density and parks, or lack thereof.)
Re: food, I was in the USA earlier this year (near Phillie), spending $40 on every trip to the organic food supermarket nearby. The cheapest grocery store in my street has better stuff for at least 4 times less.
Bio note -- I live and work in Paris as well as in Lille (Northern France, near Belgium). I work in a French/English bilingual environment, which is rather exceptional in my sector (higher ed).
Meta-note -- Some comments in this thread speak with comically high confidence of a country that their authors have very obviously not visited, except perhaps for the few square miles in central Paris that exist almost only for Chinese and US/UK tourists.
Having French language skills is a HUGE benefit and was not too long ago an absolutely necessity. It's getting better now and you can more or less get by speaking only English, at least in a professional context. Socially it won't be that great, although if you're motivated I'm sure you'll learn enough for everyday conversations rather quickly.
A good website to check out job offers is https://welcometothejungle.co (in French only unfortunately). LinkedIn is big (how I got my previous job). Also, Hired I've heared (no personal experience).
https://stationf.co/ - startup campus
https://vivatechnology.com/ - annual conference main topic is startups
> What's the startup scene in Paris like?
Booming. A bit too much, if you ask me.
The ecosystem started growing fast when I arrived, basically. In 2011, the first real startup accelerator (Le Camping) opened. At that time, there was a very interesting meetup for the Parisian HN community called Paris Hackers, with very interesting people including founders of Docker (then dotCloud), Capitaine Train (acquired by Trainline), etc.
Today I would say there are at least 10x more startups and 20x more people working in them, which resulted in the average level of people in the ecosystem going down. There are accelerators and incubators everywhere, as well as very interesting things like eFounders (https://www.efounders.com). Meeetups have grown unwieldy large (e.g. the machine learning meetup is often having a hard time finding rooms large enough to fit its 200 - 300 people per session).
As for companies, some startups have become large (Criteo, LeBonCoin, BlaBlaCar, ...); some are obviously growing fast (Algolia, Aircall, Platform.sh, ...); some (like Moodstocks where I used to work) have been acquired by US companies which have set up offices in Paris, among other things to tap into the well known talent at French research labs in CS and AI (Google and Facebook in particular). To accompany all this, more VC funds are opening and rounds become larger and larger.
There is a lot of good to all this, but personally I feel like this is kind of a bubble and I miss the time, not so long ago, when we were all a bit more reasonable.
> How good does my French need to be?
It depends on the company. I would say most tech startups do most of their written work (including chat etc) in English. People might still speak French, but will switch to English when non-French speakers are around if they want to.
> Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County (the places I'm used to working)?
I would say the obvious one is Python for Web backend. The French (and European in general) tech community has adopted Python a lot more while the US was going with Ruby. Some of the larger and older startups use a lot of Scala as well. Newer companies tend to use Go.
There are interesting startups using less popular stacks, especially functional programming. What is propably the largest French startup, Vente Privée, is using some Haskell, and so is https://www.fretlink.com (whose CTO is a former Capitaine Train CTO). https://margo.com is building a bank from scratch with Elixir and Scala (the CEO is the former CEO of Capitaine Train). There are a lot of Erlang people around too.
As you may see I mentioned Capitaine Train a lot because this is how the ecosystem is growing: thanks to disaporas of people from acquired startups (à la Paypal mafia). A few years earlier it was Exalead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead).
If you need more information feel free to get in touch. My email address is on my home page, which is linked in my HN profile.