AI startups in France

This is fairly standard etiquette everywhere I've been in Central and Northern Europe.

The general idea is that it would be rude to have a one on one _next_ to you in a language that you might not understand.

Also in general I think people that only speak one language always assume other people are bad mouthing when usually people are just talking about random trivialities or some work/life problems. So it's always safer to keep everything in English.

It started with AdTech 15 years ago, then Google/Meta opening labs there.

It's entirely possible to run a business without exploiting your workers and trying to squeeze every red cent out of them.

I think if you ask many SMBs owners in France, we'd gripe more about the tax system (which got slightly less opaque since RSI was finally shut down, but no less onerous) or the paperwork.

Allowing people who dedicate their workweek to your business, to have social benefits, free healthcare, retirement benefits and unemployment money if they get fired seems like a fair deal to me.

Especially if you consider that even taking into account those "extra costs", total comp seems to me to still be lower than what you'd have to pay a US employee for the same job

- Candidates know they won’t be showered with praise and sign-on bonuses here and now but ignored and thrown out the back after the first review cycle. If anything happens to them (let’s say, a bouldering accident), they know they’ll be given time, care, and consideration. They know they’ll have weekends off to train bouldering, too. If you know people won’t fire you on a whim, you know they’ll hire responsibly, invest in you, and encourage lateral moves when your path isn’t leading anywhere.

- Employers might want to look very attractive, but that coffee machine, that micro-kitchen is no guarantee—not anymore after the last two years. It’s nice to promise the best private health plan: I got one through a big tech company. Never needed it. But I’ve heard from people who did that it’s nowhere near what a patient would want. After that, I remember asking a small start-up in the UK if they offered anything similar. That was stupid: they could never afford anything like it. And they were puzzled… Every resident has access to the NHS, by law. They didn’t list that as a benefit because they thought they were competing with local companies. They hired a lot of Americans, and every one of them could not stop talking about how much better the care was.

Now that I mention it, it’s suspicious that all of them needed medical care as soon as they arrived…

It goes beyond that: a society with a strong safety net is better off. Countries with strong social nets have safer streets. Many candidates might be males over-estimating their ability to get out ahead in a street fight and be indifferent to high crime rates, but some have partners that might not care for headlines like “Mugging capital of the world” and “Precinct ran out of rape kits”. I like knowing that my loved ones don’t do “active shooter drills” routinely.

Personally, I left a job that was really great for several reasons. A big one was that, during my 5-minute walking commute (in the Northern Quarter in Manchester, UK), I had to walk past 50 or so people standing unconscious, wobbling, clearly high on “spice” (a cluster of synthetic “zombie” drugs so destructive and violent, the only survivor on record testified one should never try it and do something “chill, like heroin,” instead). I’d much rather live in a country where I know the emergency psychiatry and addiction programs are publicly financed, free for patients, and well-staffed. But that’s because my partner is the one working there, so I’m biased.

Experiences like that, seeing human lives wasting on the pavement daily, might seem extreme and definitely foreign to people from, say, San Francisco. Still, if you know about human tragedy directly, you prefer to live somewhere that addresses that.