boblebricoleur

> In terms of technology, what everyone looks for is a general understanding of software (architecture, algorithms, data structure, etc)

I'm glad to read that. I focus a lot on those aspects of the job, and I think that they are very important to produce good work. These are the aspect of the job I love most. Interviewers around here (south of france) don't seem to be interested in that. They tend to ask very specific questions about languages or framework instead.

Everything you said about the work culture, I have seen. It's both reassuring (thinking I'm not the only one who feel that way) and depressing (because indeed working in an environment where 90% of the energy is put into politics to navigate to workplace is exhausting).

The second part I didn't see. A lot of colleague work without a 5+ year degree on some technical jobs.

More, I feel that the engineering spirit has been lost in the it jobs. Working as an engineer doesn't necessarly require a 5 year degree (it helps). I feel there's a lot of hype around high level tools, a lot of trends and very very few focused thinking. Most of my colleages don't seem to want to know how a computer works or how their framework is implemented. When something doesn't work as expected I see a lot of panicked faces, very few focused ones.

With a 6 year experience I'm earning 36k. For me it looks like it's a little below average for front end dev (around Marseille. Paris is different, salaries look much higher there).

A friend of mine with a 3 years experience just got a 45k salary in Aix en Provence for C++ qt gig. I reckon it's above avetage but not that much above. But he is very good at negotiating his salary.