Comment by SandersAK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SandersAK | Hacker News Reader

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if your plan is to just vacation in France for 6 months and hack on a prototype, do it. But that probably applies to anywhere in the world.

If you want to set a business up and live in France forreals, then don't do that, and read below.

tl;dr - france is not a culture celebrated for its high risk profile. it celebrates its past and culture, things it wishes to preserve. everything else suffers because of this.

Moving from US to France all of your costs are going to go up. It's really hard to get French people to adopt the latest trends. Historically things are very conservative with the benefit of the doubt erring on the side of the status quo.

Any legal, gov't, or bureaucratic issues you think you have in the US, you can multiply by 20 if you set up in france.

The whole taxation system in France was never designed to deal with risk-heavy entreprises. If you employ someone, you must budget for paid vacation. To employ them at all, you need to draft either a CDI (Contract Duration Indeterminée)which means basically that you're employing them for life, or CDD (Contract Duration Determiné) which means you employ them on short term contract only. So either you marry them or you can't promise them much upside.

All the things you've mentioned apply to pretty much every European nation.

The US is the outlier in the civilized world when it comes to labour protection.

Also, funny how every time people start to bitch in general terms about entrepreneurship in a European nation, it always comes down to one thing: you can't treat employees as expendable assets.

BTW, "It's really hard to get French people to adopt the latest trends." The place must be a horror for the fashion industry...

I'm not bitching about France. I lived there and had a company. And yes, I agree, most of what I'm saying extends to europe in general. But if you look at innovation centers for the tech industry (and for companies in general) it isn't France / Europe.

Also, if you don't think that companies like Orange (which has an infamously high suicide rate) doesn't treat its employees like expendable assets, you're kidding yourself.

Lastly, I dunno if you're being sarcastic, but actually France is a terrible place for new fashion trends and has been since the late 60s.

A huge part of the large French fashion brands appeal is based on tradition and capturing that lost time / place when style was timeless (ie Chanel, Hermes).

Most of the best young fashion designers leave France to London, NYC etc.

Serious questions: are not these types of contract a standard in almost any west-EU/north-EU country?

I dunno about anywhere else, but in America these are definitely not standard. In CA most tech employees are at-will.

Yeah, you have to consider in west Europe is valued very high by everyone the "stability of work" because it allows you, as a employee, to live with less stress and with more chances to make long-term investments (family, children, buying an house, etc) and so keeping the economy and welfare up and stable.

Basically US is very employey/corporation-centric, while EU puts a lot more importance on employees (that are the majority of people by the way)

Yep, I don't disagree with this. I don't know what the answer is. My dream is some mix of US risk taking coupled withe European humanism... but that got us the UK and that's not my idea of a good time either.

That's the theory behind it. The reality can be quite the opposite.

In my experience, tech workers in the US generally have fewer job stability problems and have a much easier time finding decent work in the first place.

Yes. And not limited to the EU.

In the vast majority of Western countries the notion of at will employment is considered an ancient, socially unacceptable practice.

I'll add one thing to this: good luck firing anyone, even a grossly incompetent employee.

You can fire someone without any justification for the first eight month. Isn't it enough to know if they are incompetent ?

Anyone can make an effort for eight months and then go on cigarette breaks every 15 minutes thereafter.

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