As a former startup CTO, I confirm that "we" (== the start-ups) love interns, for all the bad reasons.

They are dirt cheap, they often don't have enough experience to say no when they are handed the crap tasks, and if we decide to hire them, we can offer very low wages, because they often don't take the time to check out the competition. Oh, and they can be blamed for just about anything wrong that happens, too.

Sorry about this, interns, that wasn't my call.

I remember my days as intern. So true! It's a dirty game, but it is played dirty (most of the time) by both sides. The (presumably) naïve intern only stays until he wakes up, then having now the luxury of time on his side and the leverage of already being employed, just bids himself to better offers.

1. That's only half if you compare with Silicon Valley, not the US average

2. For the employer: there's more taxes to pay than in US, so the cost is not half

3. For the employee: you a lot of "social benefits" like health care, free education for your kids, etc. so a lower salary in France doesn't necessarily mean lower life standard

There is however a problem in French startup is that most of them pay much lower than the average job an engineer can get (i.e. B2B service industry). That's a consequence of not being able to raise as much as in Silicon Valley.

1. Right, but both the Valley and Paris are tremendously expensive places to be - arguably Paris has more justification for being expensive, being more desirable in non-tech ways. The fair way to look at it is by comparing salary relative to cost of living, and I'm not sure if Paris is competitive even then.

2 + 3. I'm a Canadian, I'm used to social benefits, but Canadian taxes also aren't that much higher than US taxes. In fact, when I was in California the taxes were for all intents and purposes identical to the equivalent income in Canada. From the sounds of other posts, the tax revenue is primarily coming out of personal income taxes, not corporate taxes - which means a lower salary is extra-painful.

I've heard this argument from Canadians, that the 50%-off-engineers situation in Canada compared to the US is somehow a good thing. It's not, there is a tremendous brain drain to the extent that of all the capable devs I've met in school, I only know 3 who remain in Canada.

True. But good French startups pay good compensations for good interns. Believe me.

Good by Silicon Valley standards or good by European standards? Because as a software engineer moving from Minneapolis to Palo Alto to London, I have to say salaries in Europe are a fucking joke (although it's improving).

Don't know about London, but the ration [salary]/[cost of life] in Paris is way better than in SF for a good software engineer.

Don't know about that.

According to Glassdor the average salary is about €39k[1]. In my experience a "good" salary for a french engineer is between €42-50k. Housing isn't cheap in Paris - count about 12k-18k for 430-650 sqft. Going out isn't cheap either.

I've lived a year in SF and had definitely a better [salary]/[cost of life]. It was 5 years ago though.

1. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/france-engineer-salary-SRC...

That's meaningless since costs vary along different axes. I just mean objectively software engineers have not traditionally been valued the same in Europe as they have been in the US.

Good by french intern standards, so... if you're getting more than minimum wage (1400) you're _very_ (very) lucky. And I'm still wondering which french startups offer an OK compensation. Had interviews at two of them 5 months ago, one is going very big (and was part of Le Camping incubator), the other one has more than 1 million users as of today. Both offered 600e/month.