French competitiveness in IT

It's a bit cheesy, but it's true

Summary

France is a nice place to live, but as an IT professional, it's not where the money and opportunities are.

If one can tolerate periods tainted by the painful absence of Morbier, working with teams abroad is often a net gain.

Out of the clozet

Az you may have noticed by ze way I write articlez, I'm French.

Yet, I haven't worked for a French client for quite some time.

That's because despite having created my company in my country and paying all the litany of taxes that we convert so well into quality of life and administrative burden, I explicitly market outside of our borders.

These days I work for Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Monaco, India, and of course, the US.

The reason is not mysterious, it simply pays much more.

The difference in pricing is such that even when I'm not remote, meaning I join my client on site, pay the plane, a hotel, plus the weird thing they call food in California, I'm still much better off.

Anecdotally, it seems I'm not the only one. In fact, my country may have a bit of a brain drain problem. Talents are leaving.

The white flag is a red flag

You see, if you are an employee, assuming you can tolerate the void in your soul caused by the absence of decent cheese in America, and even after paying for health care out of your pocket, the money is still better. Much better.

If you are a founder, French investors don't want to fight much, they are very risk averse. This means your original projects will get canned more often, funding is going to be super hard, and will bring less money if you succeed.

I still remember when I was 20 something, some friends and I presented a word-of-mouth-based social network in a contest. The PoC was based on a concept of social proximity: if you needed a nanny or wanted to sell your house, you could only propagate the info to people in your close circle, that would do so themself, and so on. Propagation and curation all in one.

We won second place. A VC came to us, gave us his card and said: "Once you are making money, call me".

That's... not how a funding seed works, mate.

So you bootstrap, of course. But the French-speaking market is much smaller than the English speaking one. I had a French blog before, and it took 10 years to reach the audience that this one got in 10 months. Simple maths.

Also it's hard to innovate.

Indeed, customers and workers protection is high. Laws are everywhere. As the citizen, this is often a net positive. Everybody hate on cookie banners, but I like I can force FANNGS to delete my accounts, and let me download my stuff. I love that spending a week in the hospital last year didn't register on my budget. And I'm glad that people in the gig economy has to get decent social safety net.

The other side of the coin is that Uber or AirBnB could never have been born in France. Whether you think it's a good or a bad thing, it's the elephant in the room.

I had a client that created 7 small companies, for a single business, because that let him stay under some ceiling for stronger legal obligations based on the number of workers. The logistic to make those structures act as a single entity is daunting, but the alternative is to lose the market to competitors that have no such limits.

Luck meets opportunity

Even without all those factors, there is the cruel reality of the network effect. If you live in the US, you'll be exposed to more possibilities, more skilled people, more interesting projects. Not to mention the energy, the atmosphere that the American manage to bring up that you can't quite find anywhere else. Plus those guys are so good at selling. We could have a mountain of gold, they would manage to compete with us with shiny plastic replicates, branded as lighter, shinier, and gluten free.

Finally, the administration is heavy. You get used to it, I'm exceptionally good at dealing with it compared to some of my international colleagues that seem to die when given the slightest report to write. But for universities? It's a nightmare. I have a physicist friend, he spend so much time on things that have nothing to do with the lasers he loves so much. Add on to this that they are under paid, and that private/public partnerships are hard to setup. It's a miracle we still have motivated PhD finding stuff out.

All those things mean the US is professionally highly attractive, while actively trying to get talents with the resource to pay for it and the insistence of their market pressure.

Personally I chose the middle ground. I work on the cool gigs abroad, and I give a piece of the pie to the French state so that I can enjoy the local lifestyle. It's a win-win. My carbon footprint sucks, though.

Talking about carbon footprint, I'm going to Africa for a week or two, so the next pytest article is going to be delayed a little.