Ahah, what I have observed here (I have been in 3 start-ups and interviewed quite a few people) is that people work much longer hours. It's a pretty well-known thing among french expats: if you come back to France, you are more likely to work longer hours.

Again, this is just my view of the industry, with a few data points here and there.

From personal experience, I prefer to work for US companies. I worked for a few US based and for one French.

The gig in France didn't end well - I had to build an MVP of a video streaming service. It wasn't even a full-time job - it was part-time work - 4 hours per day. It ended after around 4 months.

It turned out that: - my everyday reports that I've sent wasn't read - they didn't test platform at any stage while I was developing it - they thought that if I received an HTML+CSS design from them it will be super easy to add missing features - they thought that HTML+CSS is like 80% of the work done :) - they were super not satisfied with result that they had after 4 months

And of course, it was just my fault :)

Doesn't sound like a France vs US issue but more like a really shitty experience at a shitty company.

Yes, of course. Over the years I had a mostly positive experience with North American companies - I may be super biased here, but I prefer to work for these companies.

That's valid point. Just wanted to mention that it isn't necessarily fair to French companies to judge them by one bad apple.

Another side not, which probably doesn't apply here, but in general: Work culture is different everywhere. Not better or worse, but just different and coming into a company with the wrong expectations and behavior is probably a recipe for disaster.