I didn't leave France, I moved to the US
denoyel.com
denoyel.com
This is not to say that there aren't good reasons for having these contributions or that workers in one place or the other are necessarily better "value", but I have never heard anybody argue that labor in Europe is significantly cheaper.
I'm not a Euroresident but I'll guess that while minimum wage (or whatever you can haggle) employees are indeed more expensive in Europe, software developers might be less accustomized to six figure salaries that Valley is known for. Therefore, you get them for less base money, plus tax breaks. Plus life might be cheaper in Europe than in the Valley while still maintaining better quality.
This in total gives EU GINI americans die for (some even literally).
Base salary for fresh out of school engineer is about 40 kEUR. You need to add 75% of social contributions, so that totals around 70 kEUR.
If you are a "young innovative company" though, you can have exoneration of these social contributions and only pay ~40 kEUR for the first few years.
Are you talking about France?
If you have a stage/intership contract it can be also less then 12-15kEUR (taxes included)
[1] I'm not sure it's a hard-coded limit in the labour law or if it is something more related to the fact that if the wage is "excessive" you could have problems with the tax authority.
However, there is a ton of friction in the hiring and firing process (from an anecdotal point of view), and it intuitively seems like the kind of friction that is more easily handled by a larger company rather than a startup.
Some European countries have higher wages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that employers end up paying more than they would have in Silicon Valley - partly because US employers often pay for health care / dental (not always the case in Europe), and partly because high living costs in Silicon Valley have pushed wages up.
Not trying to be an ass by saying that, but if you go to Europe claiming to be Canadian :-) and speaking English, you will not have a hard time pretty much anywhere, at least in Western EU.
And of course if I think about my country (Italy) I can think of plenty of people that are unable to say a word in English, and another huge amount of people that can't go over few words. But I can concede that things are probably getting better as new generations are more exposed to English and they're doing better, but there's still a long way to go...
This is probably especially true versus NYC or SF.
I think that we've got a lot of talents in France, but they are sometimes underestimated or simply ignored. They are basically too often off the grid. But really, they are here, in France.
(hint: have a look at mozilla employees here in Paris)
Also in France we don't have programming classes in high school (at least not when I was there in the nineties), which I think is/was a waste.
(The reason is that I'm tired of the political crap going on here, it would be refreshing to see different political crap :-). Plus I absolutely love Europe. Would like to live there till I'm sick of it)
There are so many things coming into play in the decision to move to another country - most of the time it's in no way a rejection of one's own.
In the last paragraph the author stated that France had it's share of problems, but then it states that their developers are "better." Really? Who has had a huge respectable dominance in the IT world in the last few decades? How much have the French contributed to that?
Lastly the article goes to claim that "the us is in a downfall and France will lead the way."
Next they'll tell me that they're going to take over the startup scene in Berlin.
Umm, Google does? This fact doesn't help you the slightest when you're competing with them hiring developers for your itsy bitsy startup.
In France perhaps developers have less Googles, Facebooks and Dropboxes to choose from so you can indeed access better developers. Or maybe it isn't so. Still worth considering.
Could not find the downfall thing.
And if u take europe as a whole (equivalent population more or less) and compare it to the states u would probably get equal if not more innovation in europe in the last 50 years.
Lol at huge respectable dominance...
I think the author meant to use a ;)
France, and the EU in general, have some of the best social safety nets in the developed world. What exactly does moving to the USA accomplish in 2014? The EU has no shortage of educated engineers or professionals. Is the potential tax savings of incorporating in the US worth the visa and immigration hurdles, lack of consistent healthcare, lack of social safety net and much lower quality of life (vicious judicial systems, abnormal incarceration rates, high crime rates, militarized police, draconian drug laws, etc.)?
It is always better to assess a situation rationally, rather than impulsively pack everything in a suitcase after reading a Paul Graham essay. Unlike most of his readers, PG is a Harvard grad and a US citizen.
I haven't experienced the "lack of consistent healthcare, lack of social safety net and much lower quality of life". Those probably all exist, but they have no real influence on my everyday life.
Some of the things that I enjoy over here:
- Everything is exciting and I'm learning a lot. Just the act of getting bank accounts, how to buy gas, ... Everything is new. That'll probably wear off.
- Everything is convenient. Companies seem to care more about my general being happy than they do in Germany. All of the promotions are a bit annoying, but at the same time, processes seem a bit more streamlined.
- Things happen sooner over here. Stripe, the iPhone, Netflix/Hulu, Amazon Prime, ... All of them show up in the US first. At some point they might show up in other countries. This keeps being the epicenter for technology innovation.
- I can buy groceries on a Saturday (or on Sunday at 2 am for that matter)
- There is a lot more self reliance. I'm not forced to pay into a state retirement fund, I can handle that stuff myself.
- There are a LOT of smart people bunched up in a relatively small area. Wherever you go, there is usually somebody with something interesting to say.
The social climate is probably worse, apartments on the east-coast (especially Boston) are more expensive and usually not in a good shape, I can't find a proper bathtub, I can't drink a beer in public, lots of other parts of the country are inhabited by people with incompatible views on life and the political system is horrible.
All in all, I am not living in "the US", I'm living in a nice little bubble in a very affluent part of the east-coast and I very much enjoy it. I could have probably also moved to Berlin, but for somebody that is more into Science/Engineering, this place seems pretty nice.
There are always interesting talks and meetups happening, from regular events like SpilBar (http://english.dadiu.dk/invitation-spilbar-14-0-surprise) or Science & Cocktails (http://www.scienceandcocktails.org) to active hackerspaces (https://labitat.dk and http://www.illutron.dk), a whole building hosting an indie-game community (http://www.dfi.dk/nyheder/filmupdate/2010/velkommen-til-spil...), etc. Events at universities also feel more "open to the public": if I want to hear a bunch of internationally famous visitors talk about biotech or experimental mathematics, I can go to something like http://danstem.ku.dk/events/seminar_series_2014/ or http://www.math.ku.dk/english/research/xm/seminar/ respectively. Whereas apart from a handful of advertised public talks, the large amount of stuff undoubtedly happening at Stanford or UC Berkeley didn't feel like part of "my" neighborhood, something I'd hear about or go to as a non-Stanford, non-Berkeley person (or necessarily even be allowed into).
There was certainly interesting stuff in SF as well, but it felt less like it was always happening, and more like I had to seek it out and drive anywhere from San Jose to Oakland to get to it, more like a "trip" to an event (like SuperHappyDevHouse, which is great) than a feeling that stuff is always happening all around me. The videogame-dev scene in particular was very scattered, with a good number of studios generally in the area, but that meant anywhere from Marin County to Santa Cruz, so you didn't really end up at the same events on a regular basis.
Big things can happen in the US in a short amount of time, which is the dream young entrepreneurs are chasing. If things don't work out they can always head back to their safety net. So, spending your risk-taking years here makes perfect sense.
Whether there are tax savings at all also depends on your specific situation. If you're an employee, income taxes are almost certainly lower in the U.S. than most of the rich countries in Europe. But if you're starting a company or working for yourself, it depends a lot more on which U.S. states and/or European countries you're considering, and what kind of business you're planning to do (sector, number of employees, etc.).
Two places Europe can sometimes end up cheaper:
1. If you're a one-person sole proprietor. American income taxes are relatively high here, and the need to cover your own health insurance, disability insurance, etc. adds some extra expense and paperwork. Here are some numbers I estimated a few months ago for Silicon Valley vs. Copenhagen tax rates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6192339
2. If corporate income taxes are relevant to your business. There are ways to minimize their impact (especially if you're willing to pay for good tax consultants), but the headline rates are generally higher in the U.S. than in Europe, though rates vary widely in Europe so it depends on where you're considering in particular. Ireland generally has the lowest rates; in the U.S., NYC has particularly high rates (and some complex rules for registering businesses).
3. If you want to do your taxes yourself. American business taxation is nearly impossible to figure out correctly without professional assistance, and there are myriads of pitfalls and penalties.
One that varies a lot is "flexibility". My impression is that the French labor market is rather inflexible, and in general the American one is the most flexible. However on specific issues the American one is somewhat inflexible. There is a particularly big difference between "full-time" and "part-time" employment in the U.S., because the employer is expected to provide "benefits" (at least health insurance, often many other things) to full-time employees. In some of Europe the employer doesn't need to worry about these kinds of things at all (which also cuts down on the amount of HR you need to do). In Denmark it's relatively common, at least in tech startups, for people to work part-time schedules, e.g. 2 or 3 days a week.
The thing is, social safety nets aren't especially relevant to that kind of risk. Those of us with the luxury of education aren't going to end up starving on the streets if our startups fail, we'll just go get jobs. The people who really need social safety nets aren't in a position to start startups.
So the more tangible risk is how others in your profession will perceive failure. This is an area where America shines.
> lack of consistent healthcare, lack of social safety net and much lower quality of life (vicious judicial systems, abnormal incarceration rates, high crime rates, militarized police, draconian drug laws, etc.)
Those are all serious issues, but you're misunderstanding them if you think they apply to typical startup founders.
America is very unequal. Those problems persist precisely because the relatively wealthy can easily stay insulated from them. And any educated European coming here to start a technology company falls comfortably into that class. He or she would be living in one of the nice cities, surrounded by people with similar values and education, enjoying quality-of-life metrics that are significantly higher than the broader American averages.
Where would that be, though? I've lived in a few cities (Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, L.A. area, S.F. area), and even though I lived in relatively nice areas of those cities, I wouldn't say any of them are nice cities full-stop. For one thing none of the urbanized areas are actually particularly safe, unless you are very careful where you walk (and if you drive, careful where you park your car). I lived in Midtown Atlanta for years, and it certainly wasn't; you had to only take one street a few blocks in the wrong direction to go from $1m houses and $2k/mo lofts to "I wouldn't walk there alone after dark".
You can run into those issues in Europe as well, but mostly in "poorer" cities. The amount of care you have to take walking around Chicago or Atlanta, taking note of which streets and neighborhoods are safe and which aren't, feels more the kind of caution you need to exercise in Istanbul, Sofia, or Athens, rather than Copenhagen, Frankfurt, or Brussels.
In practice I find most upper-middle-class-and-wealthier Americans just don't walk anywhere, especially not after dark. That is a way of mitigating the issue, but leads to a different lifestyle. In my opinion, a lower-quality-of-life one, though many Americans genuinely seem to like the car-centric lifestyle, so that may not be others' opinion. One place America does excel is if you like suburban living. But I don't think it does cities nearly as well as it does suburbs.
We're actually in the midst of an urban renaissance. Being able to walk everywhere is one of the perks of being wealthy in America. Especially among people under 40. This is why there's so much angst over "gentrification": walkable neighborhoods are being rapidly bought up by the relatively wealthy. And because America is saddled with so much terrible sprawl, there are only so many walkable neighborhoods to go around -- hence skyrocketing real estate prices.
Along with gentrification comes lower crime. In fact there's no longer any overall correlation between crime and density in America. Crime in the cities (taken in aggregate) has fallen to the point where there's no longer any statistical difference between urban and suburan/rural crime rates.
Lots of people don't believe that, but that's just because they hold out-of-date beliefs, which they maintain through confirmation bias.
I could be looking in the wrong places, I'll admit. I spend most of my time in the U.S. in Houston and Atlanta, where I have friends and relatives, secondarily in L.A. and S.F. Maybe those are bad choices, despite being some of the most economically booming cities in the country? I could imagine much of Manhattan is safe these days, so that's one possibility. Is there anywhere else? Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco certainly don't lend themselves to random walks at night; people tend to carefully delineate which areas they'll walk in at night, if at all. Much of NYC is still sketchy; parts of Brooklyn are safe but you have to be knowledgeable about which ones. My brother lives in the Mission in S.F., and while it is sort of safe nowadays, past midnight walking safely really depends on what street you're on, and you don't exactly just take the shortest path on Google Maps to get somewhere else in S.F., especially not if it takes you through the Tenderloin.
I mean actually safe, fwiw, not just relatively safe: as in, you will definitely not be mugged, even walking solo at night. That's to me what it means to live in a safe city. A large proportion of the people I know who walk in an American city have been mugged at least once (off the top of my head, one person in Brooklyn, one in Atlanta, one in San Francisco, three in Los Angeles, one in Houston, I lost track of how many in Chicago). Whereas if you're mugged in Copenhagen, it's so rare that you'll make the newspapers— especially if you're mugged by someone carrying a gun, which will produce front-page headlines and a multi-week police investigation trying to figure out how this person could've gotten a gun. Overall, I just feel much safer here, despite being born and raised in the U.S. and feeling more "at home" in the U.S.
If you mean that there exist small upper-class walkable neighborhoods in the U.S., sure: that's also true of Istanbul. But are there walkable cities?
Basically, you save up, sell what you don't need, pack the essentials, buy a plane ticket, and get on the plane. Pretty straightforward, really. Depending on where you go, you may also need to apply for a visa ahead of time.
"... written recently about French entrepreneurs leaving France because it was a terrible place to start and grow a business but ...... if your users, partners and possible future investors are here, you have to consider having at least a foot here."
And why do you think that is the case Einstein? The reason your users, partners and future investors are not in France is that France is no longer competitive.
The fact of the matter is, bright young French people are leaving their country behind. I see many of them in London, and most of them are very successful here. France is no longer an enterprise centre where cool things happen and innovation is celebrated. Hopefully that will one day change.