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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.