Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay to rival Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Why France is building a mega-university at Paris-Saclay to rival Silicon Valley

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25 pointsacalmon29 comments

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall

Reminds me of Jussieu/UPMC, very large university, quite an architectural and administrative clusterfuck. Too large, unfinished, constant maintenance in progress.

This entire article seems to misunderstand what Silicon Valley is, what universities are, and the difference between them. It's rather typical of the French statist approach, where change comes from top-down policy initiatives, rather than from bottom-up civic and economic activity. How bureaucrats does it take to teach a class on entrepreneurship?

French universities, in my personal experience, are deeply underfunded (i.e. we can't afford chairs in all the classrooms), and the French economy is hardly in a position to support this new, vaster agglomeration.

It would be naïve for anyone to think that recreating Silicon Valley exactly would be a French goal. Trying to achieve similar success in a more centralised, government-driven way sounds much more plausible.

Such an approach has been unsuccessful when tried elsewhere (at least by the number of places declared to be the new Silicon Valley and never heard from again), but the French do seem oddly better at achieving success in a statist fashion than many other places are.

> French universities, in my personal experience, are deeply underfunded (i.e. we can't afford chairs in all the classrooms)

I doubt ParisTech schools such as HEC or Polytechnique have chairs funding issues.

HEC and Polytechnique are not universities, they are "Grandes écoles"

Same problem as always, they are thinking of clusters in terms of spatial planning when they should be encouraging places where clusters already exist. The logic is top-down when it should be bottom-up. What has been done for the French Tech program is a good example of what should be done in the future.

I feel like Saclay won't rival Silicon Valley any time soon.

To me, part of the magic of silicon valley has little to do with Stanford (although the article references Harvard??) or the mega businesses, but the overall culture of northern california.

For example, would Apple Computer have happened if Steve Jobs had never done LSD? How about BSD? Or many other highly creative and innovative systems.

Maybe it's a coincidence but the European hewing towards authoritarianism thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So you're saying this thing would have better results if it were built in Amsterdam :)

thc aint nuff, gotta have the psychedelics

Can anyone tell me why French institutions are so inept at translating their sites into English. It must be on purpose, a big f-u to non native French speakers.

C'est exactement ce qui se passe.

For a long time French people were mostly unconcerned with learning English. Maybe it's like that in other European countries too, I don't know, but I have lots of French friends so I know its true for them. The French have a lot of pride in their own language, although most of the ones I know wish they were <<bilingue>> (speak English).

"Maybe it's like that in other European countries too"

No, it's not. In most of the nothern or eastern european countries peoples are easily learning and speaking english and other languages. The frenchs are just the french exception. :)

what about the italian, spanish, portugese exceptions?

The French are big with preserving their language. They once fined GE 600K€ for not translating some manuals into French.

Well, I'm not aware about this special case you are refering to, but this is a different problem than preserving the french language. What you are talking about is that when you are selling a product or a service in France, you must provide user manuals and support in the national language (french). So it's just a law which purpose is to guarantee that the customers will be able to have the best experience with what companies are selling them.

I guess that would not be possible in some countries like US where there's no official national language.

I don't think I exactly explained correctly. This article does a better job:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/opinion/france-gives-in-to...

Perhaps because France happens to have exactly one official language: French.

> It must be on purpose, a big f-u to non native French speakers.

I hate this stupid stereotype that French people don't want to learn/use English because they're too proud to do so. I've heard this countless times.

Truth is English isn't an easy language to master for native French speakers. It's similar for Italians or Spaniards for instance. And conversely, nobody expect americans or brits to be fluent in a foreign language.

As for institutions websites, I agree with you it's a shame they don't offer an English version more systematically. I just checked and it seems "impots.gouv.fr" (tax website) doesn't have an English translation (research and educational institutions always have one though).

I don't know why it is not the case. Maybe there's some truth in what you're saying. Some people may think it's not worth the cost since foreigners willing to live and work there should learn the language eventually. I disagree with this type of nationalistic ideology, but again, it's certainly not unique to France.

In any case, I think things are improving. For instance, more and more universities have English curricula nowadays.

I'm French. I've lived in France, the UK, Sweden and a bunch of other places in Europe.

English is dead easy to learn; people just don't care, it's in the culture. Nobody can speak English back in france. It's pathetic. Often when I go through Paris' airports, I speak english just to see how badly people still speak it, and just how much effort they'll go through to still speak french despite having someone who has shown no sign of speaking your language in front of you.

For some, it's pride. For most, it's lack of education. For all, it's a sad, sad situation. And the degree to which it happens is absolutely unique to France - I have never seen such dislike of foreign languages in any other country - and my full time job is in localization engineering.

I've been in Stockholm for about a year now and I've had trouble finding swedes that do not speak English. The turkish immigrant at the local pizzeria? Even his English is better than a majority of french people's skills in any foreign language, and he's the worst speaker I've met so far here. On top of fluent Swedish and Turkish.

Greece? Spain? Romania? Even Germany! Most people speak English, and often a third language. This is unique to France and it's not something we can be proud of.

> English is dead easy to learn

Maybe it was for you, but its not equally easy to learn for let say Swedes, French and Japanese. I noticed latin languages speakers have a harder time. English accent is very difficult to get right for French.

> Nobody can speak English back in france. It's pathetic.

It's obviously not true. Most people that went through high school at least know the basics. Usually, they lack practice and feel shy and self conscious, but I believe they can sustain a simple conversation if needed.

And all "grandes écoles" students speak at least decent English (I know for teaching in one).

> This is unique to France

Have you been to Italy? my experience is that they're not better than the French as far as english speaking is concerned. Same in Spain.

But seriously, what about Japan? Peru? Brazil? China? There are tons of countries where most people don't speak english at all.

> it's not something we can be proud of.

A lot of time is devoted to teaching English in France. Starting at primary school now. But learning a foreign language is notoriously hard. And things are getting better.

Maybe, what is unique to the French is to think they are so unique at everything :)

I'm so fed up with this. I found a gardening analogie to the way our government handles the country development :

Normal people, whenever they want to grow plants, they start by looking at a fertile soil, with good sunny weather, and good water supplies around. Then they throw thousands of seeds all around and see what grows, and take care of it over time.

Now, in france it's different. We bring in 20000 liters of water in containers, buy 3 tons of fertilizers, and put one seed in the ground.

The seeds are students or the startups, the water is billions of dollars or euros. That's what you need for Silicon Valley. Seasoned capitalists with money to burn. Government grants can not make up for the shark VCs that know what they are doing, or trying to do.

You also need a culture of entrepreneurship that bootlegs itself. The previous generation of companies helping the new generation - this is what is truly unusual about SV.

The more bureaucracy you build in to your culture to try and "facilitate entrepreneurship" the more you undermine this type of culture.

French culture is very much reliant upon the centralized government to do/provide everything. You can see it in their attempts at a government-sanctioned google competitor, now a government-sanctioned silicon valley. And it will fail over and over until they change the basic French outlook on jobs. In France it's impossible to fire. Every job requires a ton of red tape. Anything like a 1099 (hire/fire easily) employee is completely foreign to french thinking. To them, companies can only exploit, and employees must be protected by the government. They exhibit deep cynicism of capitalism, which is mutually exclusive with silicon valley. France is an old money country, new opportunities are almost impossible to find. France will never create a silicon valley under these conditions.

They also need to allow H1Bs for companies to exploit.

Maybe they should watch the PBS special on the founding of Silicon valley.

I find the title misleading and unanswered within the body of the story. Also, Silicon Valley is not a university, though there are certainly a few peppered throughout the valley.

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