Concerning mindset, I think there's an even bigger cultural trait that's holding back French entrepreneurship: a complete absence of a "culture of failure".
By and large, French culture is one of fixed mindset. Mistakes/errors/failures reveal one's limitations or flaws, and aren't perceived as an opportunity to learn and grow. This starts very early and is very much baked in to the structure of schooling.
On the flip-side, this seems to be slowly changing. At the very least, people are aware that the US does this differently, and there seems to be some interest in effecting change.
Agreed. At this point, I usually like to point out that hierarchical societies have their advantages. A huge asset for France is it's elite schools -- the "Grandes Écoles".
These schools are outstanding in a way that few Americans can even fathom, and their students are educated to a point that I didn't think possible until moving to Paris.
If you want the best engineers in the world, hire out of those schools. As a bonus, they aren't the sort to hop between jobs.
But I tink that’s really what it is. The best engineers I have seen didn’t care for ‘burning’ years of their life in half military schools or old institutions, they went directly to CS courses to get a diploma faster and go abroad or start their own project.
Put another way, people who don’t care about prestige and having a super broad education don’t go there, and in our field I tink a ton of super talented people fit that description.
To be fair, so do I, and I think you make a good point. The profile you can expect from a GE is:
- Extremely well-learned. They know a lot of stuff.
- Solutions implemented by GE engineeres will be principled, rather than ad-hoc.
- Not self-starters. They very much have an employee mindset.
And to be faire, there are plenty of outstanding employees (not to mention freelancers or entrepreneurs) who haven't gone through a Grande École.
Let me put it another way: you may not need a GE-graduate to build the next iPod, but you certainly need them for the next EuroTunnel.
But just like Americans go to ranked universities, as a student you learn how to play the game and go to the best (fit) one you can enter.
Because French engineers are also more educated on average than US engineers, and French school ratings more predictive of the IQ of their incoming crop than of their "leadership" or whatever the current US proxy for socioeconomic status is, having a minority of French engineers in a team to point out obvious points of failures can be a definite advantage.
Personally I prefer American managers though, I feel the can-do culture is just better for management. Plus French people tend to have a lot of respect for older people or people further up in the hierarchy so in a mixed hierarchy (with the Americans at the top) usually your French guys will move towards becoming self-starters in their bosses' images, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true and American underlings tend to perceive a French boss's nitpicking or challenging of their strategy as micromanagement and undermining.
I think this last part is one of the great remaining challenges of France as a nation of great enterprise. It is very, very difficult for non-French people to feel comfortable in a company born of French senior management and culture. They just don't get some of the tone and French management can be very backwards compared to the commonly accepted leadership forms today. Hopefully, French children today are seeing a very different picture of what it means to be in charge thanks to exchange programs, higher education and a greater involvement from the EU, and they will grow to be leaders who are not afraid of hiring whole teams from other countries and letting them have autonomy and who do not make their teams afraid of them.
Here's an article from a French engineer that is currently on the front page of HN: https://web.archive.org/web/20180925150228/https://florentcr...
tldr; he moved to SF because salaries are much, much higher than in France, even considering the social benefits that you get in France.
Other threads on HN have French engineers saying that they love living in France while working remotely for American companies.
I've lived in Paris, Berlin, NYC and California. I'll never understand how European founders can keep saying that 40k euro salaries for engineers is a benefit while they watch so many great engineers leave to American companies.
This. I have tasted the fruit and I'm never going back. The social benefits feel largely like gimmicks compared to the standard of living + social recognition you get working as an engineer in the US or even Canada.
In general I just think it is a lot easier in, at least some, European countries to set yourself up for a good life. Day to day, year to year, to not endure a long commute or stressful work environment. Having time to spend with your kids while they are young, your parents before they get too old and your friends so you don't lose touch. Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.
Once you start wanting to do things that aren't universal or the default in any country, and especially with other people in your life, you can end up paying a large premium to do so.
That's also common in the United States or at least in the Upper Midwest. Just here in Minnesota there are around 124,000 seasonal properties and the average household income for the owners of these properties is $58,000 which is not rich in the United States. It's also a similar story in Wisconsin next door and other Upper Midwest states like Michigan.
[1]: https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2017/05/29/good-question-cabi...
Every SF salary range I see is significantly below what I made last year. I'm not even taking cost of living into consideration here. Just absolute terms. I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago when they were doing some game design stuff and didn't make the cut. I learned that I'm not ambitious enough to make less.
Because midwest tech, I have no debt. In fact, I can crunch for a month, take the money and go buy a few acres to shoot my .50 caliber anti material rifle. Few SF residents will know how expensive it is to buy match 750 grain ammo, or know the pain and suffering of putting a clean hole through an engine block you tore out of a mercury tracer from 1000m away on a tuesday at 11am. It's terrible.
The central limit theorem corroborates the fact that the 500,000 people in KC basically don't exist and it's just one big cornfield. The 800,000 people in San Francisco are burdened with the knowledge that everything east of them til' the coast is flyover country. I feel for them.
If you're in tech move west, definitely.
Making major capital investments in the property is actually something I would consider a reason to purchase rather than renting. Can you say more about your thought process there?
> If you're in tech move west, definitely.
...west? Did you mean east?
How does this encourage anything but complacency? Who wants to start anything when everything is a utopia with no consequences? I’m not even being facetious because that is basically what you’re describing. This is why Europe barely innovates: extreme comfort and security. These aren’t bad things. But it’s odd to me that people look for more complicated answers when this is plain as day.
Until they or their wives become pregnant. Then suddenly those immigrants feel the need to come back for some years.
Get back to us the first time you have a medical emergency putting you on the hook for 5 or 6 figures (after insurance); at least you're lucky enough to be able to flee the jurisdiction back to a home country.
Is that a thing? Obviously there are lots of people in the USA who don't have any good health insurance options. But as an engineer in San Francisco all the companies I've worked at or interviewed with have had gold-plated health insurance plans with maximum out-of-pocket expenses in the low 4 figures. And of course, most people won't hit those maximums most years, that's just an upper bound.
This is of course limited to my personal experience, but my impression is that good health insurance is table stakes for highly-paid engineering roles.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/08/27/6408918...
HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859897
> but my impression is that good health insurance is table stakes for highly-paid engineering roles.
Hit or miss. Definitely depends on the company.
However, I don't think we can learn much about the health insurance typically provided to engineers in San Francisco from the poor insurance plan available to a teacher in Houston. Those jobs have very different compensation profiles.
My firm is in financial services. Very nice plan. Even with my "nice plan", we've had the insurer renege on their coverage of services (thousands of dollars in services) after receiving approval and having it in writing prior to obtaining services. YMMV.
Ever notice how many companies change their health care provider every year?
Company health care premiums are going up at 20% to 30% per year, thus doubling every 3 to 4 years.
What do you think is going to happen to your co-pay in a couple of years?
The whole point of low salaries, for smart companies, is to be the one increasing them! Obviously that makes it a temporary advantage, as salaries start to increase... But all great advantages are temporary.
The people you are talking to, who like low salaries because they want to enjoy lower costs in perpetuity... that’s just mediocre thinking by mediocre companies.
You forgot to mention that you can‘t fire them at will either... It‘s such laws and excessive taxation that makes many european countries unattractive for startups.
It's possible to fire people without justification and the company will be brought to court. There is a new law from Macron that caps the damages the employee can get to pretty much nothing when he only has a few years of tenure or less. You could provision for a few months of salary.
(I’ve hired and run large engineering offices in France and in the US).
(I blame the switch from scheme to Python)
So articles that say "you should go west" just applies to their authors, everybody has their own set of parameters to evaluate, and the answer isn't so obvious. I personally have kids and a wife that earns a lot of money. I've done the maths, it's a no brainer for me financially to stay in Europe...
That said, salaries are still much better in SV... Up until the point where you have kids.
In Europe, why would an entrepreneur work hard? There is strong safety net provided by the Welfare state, it's simply not worth the risk.
No risk of going homeless if you fail. It's easier to give up.
Remove safety net, remove free healthcare, increase wages, remove payroll taxes, remove immigration restriction, add property rights so that foreigners can buy land and see the startups blossom.
It is as simple as that.
But pretty sure, most European will not be voting for this.
What’s missing in France right now is an ecosystem of fast-growing mid-stage startups - series B and above. I think that’s caused by a combination of:
1) mindset (thinking globally from say one is easier said than done when nobody around you has done it before)
2) lack of late-stage funding. The seed money scene is not as bad as it used to be, and is in a virtuous cycle of early exits / successful entrepreneurs who want to give back. That is looking very good. However, the VCs still suck, with a few exceptions. They’re mostlt bankers, they’re risk-averse, ownership-greedy, and intrusive. Good luck growing a world-class business with them on your board and in your cap table.
3) The EU market is just weak conpared to US and China. So every european startup has to start outside their confort zone and attack foreign markets from day one... Which creates friction compared to growing at home for the first few years.
Here are factors that in my opinion are NOT to blame: taxes (comparable to California), salaries (yes they’re lower than in SV; that’s a good thing for startups), bureaucratic red tape (that’s what lawyers and accountabts are for, it’s not rocket science), lack of work ethic (in my experience French employees work very hard and are very loyal - although they do complain a lot), brain drain (sure French people leave the country. Plenty stay, or come back. It’s nothing like what third world countries have to deal with).
What I’m seeing more and more is French founders moving to SV, raising money there and keeping their engineers in France. Other international founders are doing the same. I think it’s the best available move at the moment.