Ask HN: What technologies should I focus on to enhance my carreer?

It would be helpful if the community here could comment about the state of salaries in France (depending on companies/technologies/roles/years of experience), as I noticed it is very different from the US.

I’m living in Paris and having the same concern as the OP, wondering which technologies one could invest in to have a better pay.

I heard the best way is to do contracting, but I wonder what prerequisites/technologies one needs to start contracting at a high rate.

With a 6 year experience I'm earning 36k. For me it looks like it's a little below average for front end dev (around Marseille. Paris is different, salaries look much higher there).

A friend of mine with a 3 years experience just got a 45k salary in Aix en Provence for C++ qt gig. I reckon it's above avetage but not that much above. But he is very good at negotiating his salary.

France is a lost cause when it comes to software engineering or even creative jobs like design.

Salaries are low (I made the same money in London as a junior that I would in Paris as a senior), bureaucracy and bullshit jobs are rampant - in fact, engineers aren’t really a prestigious position and some paper-pushing idiot delivering zero net value (besides creating work for other paper-pushers) will end up getting more money and recognition - the entire working culture is based on bullshit jobs, much more so than other countries and there’s always this mindset of “us versus them” and being at odds with management, something that ultimately leads to disaster especially in IT (I can’t imagine working if I had to be in conflict with my line manager who’s also a senior developer and gives me invaluable advice). Finally IT is considered as some kind of rocket science or black magic where they require 5+ years of higher education for anything even remotely related to IT (tech support, etc) which means getting into the industry is very hard unless you are ready for 5 years of misery before being able to get your dream job.

Everything you said about the work culture, I have seen. It's both reassuring (thinking I'm not the only one who feel that way) and depressing (because indeed working in an environment where 90% of the energy is put into politics to navigate to workplace is exhausting).

The second part I didn't see. A lot of colleague work without a 5+ year degree on some technical jobs.

More, I feel that the engineering spirit has been lost in the it jobs. Working as an engineer doesn't necessarly require a 5 year degree (it helps). I feel there's a lot of hype around high level tools, a lot of trends and very very few focused thinking. Most of my colleages don't seem to want to know how a computer works or how their framework is implemented. When something doesn't work as expected I see a lot of panicked faces, very few focused ones.

This is kinda cynical, but get older, no one pays 25 year olds in France a wage that will support an apt in Paris because they reserve it for people with families.

THOUGH, I have heard some good things about the usual big names (Google, Facebook, whatever) and you can get some sweet work conditions in the public (or very near to public) sector.

In contracting the big differentiator seems to be working for yourself vs being sold by a company, so go to more meetups, try getting freelance jobs on your own. I don't know anything about the regulatory environment for such but it's supposed to have gotten easier in recent years.

> In contracting the big differentiator seems to be working for yourself vs being sold by a company, so go to more meetups, try getting freelance jobs on your own. I don't know anything about the regulatory environment for such but it's supposed to have gotten easier in recent years.

The biggest differentiator really is - be in demand. Companies prefer to hire employees and get contractors only if they must, i.e. if no one wants to join as a perm at the wage they offer. So, to contract, you need to be at the high end of the market. Luckily, due to craziness of the tech threadmill, all it takes is getting some experience in the newest/hottest tech in a given area (such as frontend/backend/mobile/bigdata etc.)

React, Vue, and Angular are the big front-end frameworks right now. React is on top currently, but I think Vue will take over the industry within the next couple years. Angular seems to be going away. Most developers I talk to say they want to like it, but it's just too hard to work with in comparison to Vue or React.

A good place to start would be to learn GatsbyJS. It's a "static" site generator using React. It's super fast and easy to get started. Gridsome is the Vue alternative, but it's not quite as polished as Gatsby.

Focus on your communication skills. I've worked at three start ups in the states and I can tell you that those who get promotions or more salary almost always are good communicators. Not always is it your hard skills that advance your career

I hear that advice a lot. Seems to be consistent with what I see happening around me.

What kind of skills in particular would you recommend to work on and how does one go about improving said skills ?

In would recommend two things 1) learn to negotiate 2) take an improv acting class. These classes help you learn to connect with others and read them better

Money goes where it's treated best. Why don't you go where you're treated best. You obviously have a good command of the English language. So you're not limited to France, Quebec, ...

He mentioned that he has a mortgage, so moving is probably not an option for him at this time.

Why not? He can still move while putting up his mortgaged property on rent.

The best advice I can give you is to start learning Salesforce. There is a high demand for Salesforce developers right know in France.

In Paris, you can easily get a job with 55K€ as a Salesforce developer after 2 years of experience. A confirmed developer (4 to 5 years) can earn 65K€ without any problem.

Salesforce provides a lot of content and training to be a Salesforce developer: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/for...

PS: I am the CEO of a small company and we are looking for people who want to learn Salesforce and to be a Salesforce developer. If you’re interested, send me an email at hello@bluefactory.io

Background: I am French from a small town, came to college in the US after high school and now working as a back-end dev.

As some others mentioned, France is not the best when it comes to tech salaries. That being said, if you want to make more money, you will either have to prove that you can bring more value or build something of your own. If you feel limited by the market in France, then a few US companies will be interested in hiring you as a contractor. You will then have to pay a bunch of taxes you didn't know about in France but your cash inflow will increase if you price yourself right.

In terms of technology, what everyone looks for is a general understanding of software (architecture, algorithms, data structure, etc) and then mastery in one or more languages. I'd recommend looking into a functional language (Scala, Elixir etc) to broaden your thinking as well.

As a young Frenchman living in a small town myself, I would be definitely interested in hearing more. How did you transition to a US college? In what context did it happen? Did you experience any difficulties?

I started the process early senior year of HS(fr: début de terminal) with standard tests. I was a soccer player back home so I was looking for a combo of strong academics and decent soccer program. I had an agent sending videos of my games to different coaches, I received a few offers, then picked the best soccer / academics / scholarship.

This process is both very exciting and stressing. It is very different once you actually get on campus for the first time and realize that despite being a western country, the culture in the US is very different. Adapting to that is important. Then after a few years, the most challening part of your adaption imo is to resolve your adopted culture with the culture you grew up with.

Very interesting, and timely as I must apply for higher education. If that's OK, I would like to learn more about your experience. My email address is in my profile.

> In terms of technology, what everyone looks for is a general understanding of software (architecture, algorithms, data structure, etc)

I'm glad to read that. I focus a lot on those aspects of the job, and I think that they are very important to produce good work. These are the aspect of the job I love most. Interviewers around here (south of france) don't seem to be interested in that. They tend to ask very specific questions about languages or framework instead.

I interviewed with a few French companies over a year ago in the case that I might have to move back home. I believe it is starting to change. Your experience is pretty reflective of what I heard from others as well.

As others have said, React is absolutely littered across tech positions right now.. Moreover, full stack development is huge right now - become familiar with RESTful API's, both creating them and interfacing with them in some popular language (python, nodejs, plain javascript, golang, etc).

For the next 2 or 3 years on frontend? Definitely React. Without a doubt.

I am from Brazil and I am looking for a job right now in the US or remote. The sheer quantity of React positions everywhere makes it a certainty that the best time investment right now is React. Not a single doubt in my mind that this is true for the next 2-3 years.

But don't neglect some fundamentals that count a lot for the best paying jobs. Back-end knowledge is one. It will be valuable for employers to know about at least one back-end for web tech (Rails, Django...), good SQL skills, some basic devops knowledge like continuous integration configuration, strong Javascript, etc.

I hear it's hot to make Alexa, etc apps. It's a free dev service, it only takes a background in node.js (lots of courses on that) and an idea (who knows, maybe a calendar app?)

To make money on it you can make a pro plan.

Berlin is a nice city, with still more disposable income for devs than the rest of Europe.

just saying

Tallinn is better in that regard.

Salaries range from 1500 to 5000€ netto per month (or « super net » for french HNers reading this comment) for an average rent of 600€.

Berlin rent is a little bit higher, but so is salary.

I would say PHP. When everyboby is learning Go or React or k8s and when millions of websites are still running with PHP, it may be a very rare skill in the future :)

React, Vue, Angular are a good fit with your current frontend experience.