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Comment by madsbuch | Hacker News Reader

French employees are generelle low paid in cash. however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer.

currently, France had a serious issue with brain drain. software developers move to Germany or the UK to get higher salaries.

This gives a situation where all advanced jobs move out while simpler job stay back with really expensive labor protections.

IMHO, France need to assimilate more with the countries they live among, or other countries need to adopt better labor protection systems - this is solely a comparative thing. as an employee myself, I would hope for the latter.

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How are social protections for say, losing a job, health emergencies, and retirement?

90% of my drive for more and more money is the fear of long term unemployment and knowing there's nobody to come save me. If that fear didn't exist, I'd probably work for half the price to be honest.

Then move to France or Scandinavia. I'd suggest Norway since they have a huge oil reserve so the country can sustain its current population.

But if you build a successful startup, you have to give up your ownership as having wealth/assets gets heavily taxed. If your startup have a bad financial year, its really frustrating to be forced to take a 2% dividend of your networth, tax 40% of that amount as dividend tax and then pay the remaining 1.1% as wealth tax. That is why everyone with some wealth is now moving to Switzerland.

It may be frustrating, but that's the flipside of wealth inequality being much lower in Scandinavia and thereby society being more equal. Which makes it much more pleasant to live in, even for relatively rich people.

(Disclosure: I'm one of those relatively rich people in Scandinavia and I pay lots of taxes but I also enjoy that wealth inequality isn't so extreme over here.)

You're thinking of income inequality.

wealth tax would apply to wealth inequality.

I don't know for Norway, but Denmark is one of the most wealth inequal countries in the world, while also being one of the most income equal.

These two are highly correlated. My background is lower middle class, but high income for a few years made me into high wealth. With lower income tax, that would have been even more extreme. But with the high income tax I'm paying, lots of benefits go to low income families and make it less likely that their kids end up poor when they will be adults.

A proper taxation of inheritance would make income and wealth even stronger correlated, but that's hard to do as long as you can take your extreme wealth abroad. Family dynasties do exist even here and it's still an issue society needs to solve.

> health emergencies

We have socialized health care, and even private care is like 1% the cost of american healthcare. I got elective surgery without insurance which included full anethesia in a private clinic and they were very sorry because the total would be 600 euros.

> retirement

Public retirement is ~50% of your average lifetime salary though the age was recently raised from 62 to 64 (in the face of massive protests).

> losing a job

Firing is harder to do in the first case, they have to have cause, or the company has to be facing bankruptcy, there's a long notice period. Unemployment is also a decent percentage of your salary and can go on for months.

Frankly on 60k a year, you live well even in a city like Paris, you're not living a life of luxury but that's comfortable upper middle class levels (in Paris).

> We have socialized health care, and even private care is like 1% the cost of american healthcare. I got elective surgery without insurance which included full anethesia in a private clinic and they were very sorry because the total would be 600 euros.

Socialized healthcare is pretty much a given in other similar countries in the EU though, it's the US which is an outlier.

Most French people believe they still live in the France of the 1990s: a country of abundance with excellent ROI for the amount of taxes paid.

But as you pointed out, other european countries have since caught up and provide the same benefits.

60k per year is around 3200€ per month after taxes. It could be comfortable upper class level life only if you own the place you live and have a small family without special needs. If you rent and have few children - you screwed.

> It could be comfortable upper class level life

I think we might have a different understanding of what "upper class" means. Upper class is the likes of Trump/Bezos/Musk/.

3200 Euros/month will not let you live even remotely near that. It's a decent middle class and that's it.

Upper class is definitely not Trump/Bezos/Musk. They exist beyond the upper class. Upper class are the kind of people to own holiday houses in nice coastal cities, "work" by running a business their parents left them and travel first class once a year.

Rich and famous isn't really part of the class system.

> I got elective surgery without insurance which included full anethesia in a private clinic and they were very sorry because the total would be 600 euros.

600 Euros for elective surgery with full anesthesia is insanely cheap. Even by EU standards. There must be some subsidies involved from the public health sector for that surgery or something to knock that price down. In Austria a surgery is thousands.

Doctors at a private clinic won't even get out of bed for 600 Euros let alone pay for the whole staff and clinic.

Austria might be an outlier.

In the UK, Sweden and Estonia (the only places I have data for) it would be within this ballpark, never more than €1k (in their respective currencies).

Maybe, but because of outliers you can't then claim EU elective surgery is cheap when it obviously doesn't apply across the entire block. I'm sure it's cheap in some countries yes.

It is in 100% of the places I know about.

I think making any broad EU statement even if it applies to many/most is fine.

There will always be some outliers in the data.

There is a similar argument about generalisations on behaviour, ie: statistically average behaviours of people.

You have to be able to talk in broad strokes with the knowledge that it doesn't apply to everyone.

>It is in 100% of the places I know about.

It's also in 100% of the countries I know about. What does that mean?

how many EU countries do you know about?

Would you like me to investigate the propensity of this EU wide, or are you being glib about knowing only a single country and that technically is 100% of your knowledge?

>how many EU countries do you know about?

How many are your 100% of the countries?

2, plus one former as indicated.

I could probably speak a little to the surrounding nordic countries to be honest, it is fair to assume they have similar systems because they are very similar in many areas.

The you are no software developer. As a software developer you have no fear of unemployment.

As in most other European countries social security, health and retirement is provided on a subsistence level.

I think this is what differs from EU to the US. EU is great for subsistence seekers while the US is much better for aspirational people.

The issue is just that you need both to have a good country. An aspirational person also need to be able to shop, eat, etc. And subsistence people also want access to the newest comforts such as being able to access newest medical treatments.

As an aspirational person myself, I tend to be negative around the subsistence arguments thinking people need a notch to work. Just like subsistence people tend to take for granted the amount of effort is takes to safely make accessible a new treatment and feel entitlement around social security, health, and retirement services.

> EU is great for subsistence seekers

The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule. That's just propaganda and a narrative spun by the rich to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Not backed by any data.

If I'm not mistaken, your statement is also not backed by any data and is a propaganda in itself

Sure, as long as we can agree that the original statement is, that's fine by me.

You completely misrepresent me in your comments and you have really bad attitude.

> The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule.

You insinuate that I was talking about people living of welfare which is absolutely not within the "subsistence" definition. That would be more akin to a rent-seeker.

Also, I did not make any political statement. I merely setup a taxonomy: That of subsistence people vs. aspirational people and proposed that EU is better suited for subsistence people while the US is better suited for aspiration people.

That is not at all controversial.

Either you are naive or disingenious. "Great for subsistence seekers" is a dog whistle for a neoliberal political agenda.

Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.

> That is not at all controversial.

It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I don't see subsistence seekers as people living of social welfare? subsistence seekers usually will have a job?

> however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer

Maybe that was true in previous years, but I have found it very comforting to know that I'm almost unfirable (specially compared to my US peers), and even if I do get laid off I still have a ~12 month runway provided by the government.

The problem of software developers in France is not that French salaries are lower than other countries overall, but software development salaries in France compared to other professions. In North America and Northern Europe countries software development is a high paying job, in France not as much.

But things are changing. Yes a lot of software dev jobs are crap (typically IT Services companies) but you also have Big Tech and other high paying tech companies in France. While it's still a bit less than other countries, as a senior you can easily get a TC above 130k euros even as an individual contributor.

it would seems that striking is detrimental to the goal of attracting more Big Tech?

it makes sense that a lot. of people are hired by It service companies, as these are not easily moved out.

usually it is easier to get talent to move to another country, than to setup a subsidiary.

> French employees are generelle low paid in cash. however, a big part of the compensation is through labor protection - something that is not worth a lot to a software developer.

If the public services were much better than everywhere else the high taxation system might hold up but they clearly aren't, I would not put France in the European top 10 at this metric.

France need either to make people feel they are actually paying for something or reduce the taxation level.

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