"almost five times larger than France and Sweden" - the UK population is almost 7 times that of Sweden, so that's quite flattering. But what are the reasons for France's relatively small tech industry?
Cost of starting up and taxation (as you have a lot of risks, why increase them by increasing costs so early).
I don't agree with these (if everyone had rights like France it would be a non-issue) but that's what I've seen in discussions about opening offices in France, hiring in France, setting up in France.
Edit: Sigh, downvotes... but perhaps people don't realise that things like unions are essentially mandatory in France when the employer has more than 50 employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#France or that the standard corp tax is one of the highest in Europe https://taxfoundation.org/corporate-tax-rates-europe-2022/ . It's not that high tax rates alone will be a disincentive - it isn't, Germany is higher - but combine high tax rates with a lot of employee rights and now try to imagine the modern SV startup that leverages gaps in legislation thriving in this... it doesn't.
Strong labour rights being considered a culprit is a red herring, a very useful one to fuck workers with.
"Last place you'd hire in the West" I can assure there are plenty worse places.
There's a natural skew in the UK for public businesses to focus on making profits and paying dividends, both of which don't help growth.
Meanwhile, many British entrepreneurs are happy with a "lifestyle business" that let them lead an upper middle class life on their own terms.
When you look at crowdfunding platforms for tech startup you won't see any ambitions to aggressively take over the world like you do in American pitches.
Most people here don't trust or invest in the stock market at all and instead the moderately well off seem to prefer investing in property, which produces income in retirement.
An issue (if you see it that way) in France is that the right to strike is written in the constitution and extremely liberal. Basically if you have a work-related problem and you find just one colleague to agree with you then you have a constitutional right to strike.
On the other hand, in the UK a strike is only legal is organised by a trade union after a formal ballot.
Beyond that the UK is much more business-friendly with much less red tape... The French administration is kafkaesque.
Edit: interesting that the person I'm replying to wrote "considered glorified blue collar", which I interpret as status, and that those who are replying to me focus on pay. In the UK a plumber (blue collar) or train driver can make more than a software engineer who is university educated and enjoys a higher status, for instance.
Salaries in tech/software are not that different in UK and France. Perhaps London salaries in hot startups are outliers.
I don't think there is a difference in the way devs/programmers are considered on either side of the channel. The key is not that but rather the company/industry. A tech company will consider them a key resource, an old industrial company maybe not...
I switched to not working for french companies for that very reason. Engineer, loads of experience, low salary compared to the UK or US.
I know you could put a price on the "french social privilege", but I didn't benefit from it the least bit (no kids, working) so I was better off without it.
Very few people come from the Grandes Écoles, that's the point of them. There are far more engineering schools than that. And even then they don't necessarily have exceedingly high status and pay. In France status means being management/exec. You're technical ? Well, get fucked, you're from a lower caste.
You seem to conflate your experience and generally the pecking order in a company with something specifically French whereas it's not.
That was my impression as well, working as an engineer in France. Is it different in the UK or other European countries?
So my guess is that this is because London is both a major financial centre and a fintech hub.
The reasons are a never ending debate, everyone(including me) likes to explain it from their own world view. If you are libertarian you will probably say because it's the big government, high taxes, workers rights, unions etc. but I personally don't like these explanations because they fail to explain why the distribution is not homogeneous within those legislative regions. So in reality, it's not that US and UK dominate the "tech" but it's SV and London. For whatever reason it is, you cannot do some tricks and have SV in Detroit and London in the Balkans.
I'd posit that the BBC Computer Literacy Project, Acorn and Sinclair were central to seeding the right skills base in enough of the population to build a sustainable industry.
Europe does have a lot of tech companies and startups, especially EU is a rich place with a lot of innovation and high tech business happening. What EU lacks is unicorns.