I have to say there are some extremely talented, creative and productive "software artists" or ICs coming out of France. Not sure if that's a French thing (the Ecoles or whatever) or something else, but it's noticable.
French tech used to have a reputation for Renault old car quality, but I did not see it. Even in Renault and Citroen I came to admire them. On the other hand working with German SE is hard because they are incredibly set on not invented here. My generalisation for whatever it is worth.
In general the issue of Europe tech scene is simple: we suck at selling and optimise for resource efficiency(competitive salary means never pay above rate no matter what). Americans optimise for growth and will risk paying for higher so they can amortise costs with growth.
On a final note, where I come from there is lots of sneer that France is a dump due to immigration. While that is a point of view, it is definitely true they have also brain drained their colonies and have very capable productive individuals coming from there. Myself I had my master’s tutor from cot-de-Ivoir and in bootlin also worked with top of the shelf engineers that have non francophone names.
Jean Ichbiah - big contributor to Ada
Alain Colmerauer - creator of Prolog
Jean-Marie Hullot - iCal, iSync, NeXTSTEP GUI builder, CTO of Applications at Apple in early 2000s
Philippe Kahn - founder of Borland, inventor of first camera-phone
Olivier Fourdan - creator of Xfce, big contributor to Wayland
Jean-Baptiste Kempf - creator of VLC
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml
Bertrand Meyer, creator of Eiffel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language...
Not to be overly snarky, but it's a good thing, since none of those people's output is comparable to FB's. The thought there might be another programmer like him was an interesting one to entertain...