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.
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.