4 ms·

My opinion : the low salaries of engineers, high taxes and bureaucracy hold back the startup scene. Also, the mentality toward technical positions, in France if

• a008t 8y ago
  Low salaries should help the startup scene, not hurt it. Where would you rather create your startup - somewhere where it would cost more to hire or less?
  • jgforbes 8y ago
    That's only true if you don't lose capable talent due to the low salaries. If most of the talented French engineers move to Germany to get higher pay, then the low pay will hinder the startup scene.
  • EZ-E 8y ago
    Lots of talented people end up working in another country, especially top talent. Would you rather have a glass ceiling at 40k or start at 100+k in SF? Not to mention, low salaries garantees that not much international talent will relocate in France
    • eloisant 8y ago
      France is full of "service" jobs, those are crap and lower the average. Just ignore those and look at the jobs that matter, if you're the kind of developer who would have the skills to relocate to SF. If you're senior, in France, you can get a fairly good salary as a developer. There is definitely no glass ceiling at 40k; you can get more than 50k easily, and above 70k if you have can find the right company with a good fit. Comparison with SF is hard because it's such a weird place in terms of housing, US healthcare etc. So if you compare to Germany or UK, you still make less in France, but the gap is much smaller than 10 years ago and it's still contracting. That started before Macron actually. You can find jobs in well-funded startups (instead of the starving startups of 10 years ago happy to raise a million), and more and more international companies (US and others) are now recruiting engineers in France.
      • user5994461 8y ago
        Your numbers are about right for Paris. Note that if you cross the sea to the UK, London. The salary is double and it's in British pound.
        • roel_v 8y ago
          I don't know about that... Salaries in the UK are crap, much lower than in the EU; and I have the impression that London is only up in the stats because of the quant jobs, which while technically 'software development' jobs, are out of reach for most people that would consider themselves 'software developers'. Now I don't keep quite as close an eye on the UK job market as I used to, but even the job opening and contracts I see on mailing lists I'm on, don't make me want to jump ship...
• flr03 8y ago
  I understand what you mean about making the move to manager. As a french dev now living and working in UK I don't feel this social/professional pressure any more. It's also a shame that salaries are kept so low, but it kind of reflects the lack of consideration companies there have for devs. That being said, I know a lot of very good software engineers that will never make the move from France to a foreign country because they are happy at what they are doing and the salary is not their first priority, very good for them and for french companies who'd like to hire them.
• etiennemarcel 8y ago
  Bureaucracy is not an issue in my opinion. I've ran a successful business in France and if you have a good accountant (and lawyer for some particular issues), it's not anymore difficult than in the US. As an individual, compare how hard it is to make your tax return in the US and in France...
• zwp 8y ago
  That's an interesting picture. I took those numbers and compared them to Wikipedia's purchasing-power adjusted average wage figures for 2017 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w.... Here are the results sorted by ratio of average developer salary to average salary in each country. You get the best bang for your buck in .il and .fr doesn't (quite) get the wooden spoon. Country Ratio dev:avg Netherlands 0.851031639465174 France 0.891326705519369 Canada 0.944941413632355 Finland 1.00083791080905 Australia 1.01779098644302 Germany 1.05075128717033 New Zealand 1.07384561596284 UK 1.18906064209275 Sweden 1.29738400207581 Norway 1.3082871202062 Switzerland 1.31657113498065 Denmark 1.34069094159251 USA 1.48617853958189 Israel 1.85359454758035
  • chrstphrhrt 8y ago
    Quite informative, thanks.
  • jkaplowitz 8y ago
    I'd be interested to see the Canada numbers broken down more locally. I'm quite sure that my current home city of Montreal would look a lot healthier than Vancouver, for example.
  • roel_v 8y ago
    What does this table say? I'm not convinced you can just divide real salaries by PP adjusted numbers and get a meaningful result of the kind you are claiming. Isn't this table just sorted by the PP adjustment factor, i.e. an inverse ranking of the highest PP?
    • zwp 8y ago
      "Isn't this table just sorted by the PP adjustment factor" No, it isn't, but I do think you're right in that I should have used the nominal wages. I found the original article and that does not appear to be purchasing-power adjusted: https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-trends-2018 https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-... Using the nominal wages gives the below, with France now in the middle of the list: Country Ratio dev:avg Australia 0.81 Netherlands 0.85 Canada 0.90 New Zealand 0.92 Finland 0.92 France 0.92 Switzerland 0.93 Norway 1.02 Denmark 1.05 Germany 1.12 UK 1.15 Sweden 1.15 USA 1.49 Israel 1.53 Whether or not this is a "meaningful result" is still debatable but I'd like to think it gives us something approaching a "developer appreciation metric".
• nraynaud 8y ago
  And it is perfectly illustrated by the fact that they interviewed people form a management school about innovation in the article instead of someone from a technical background.
• Nokinside 8y ago
  As a Nordic entrepreneur. None of the reasons sounds right reasons to me. https://econ.arizona.edu/sites/econ/files/econ-wp-10-07.pdf https://econ.arizona.edu/sites/econ/files/econ-wp-10-07.pdf The real problem for startups is the lack of American style VC funding. European startups need to get profitable much earlier than US startups. Early funding for startups is OKish. You can grow from 0 to 10-50 million, but after that it's better to sell the business to some big international firm, because you really struggle getting smart money that the ability to take the big risk. Apple has been very good at buying out European startups. They got bargain prices for sleep monitoring, eye tracking, and computer vision startups in the last year.
  • poulsbohemian 8y ago
    >The real problem for startups is the lack of American style VC funding. European startups need to get profitable much earlier than US startups. This is a common refrain, but the reality is that VC is both out of reach and not the right fit for the vast majority of US ventures. Likewise, knowing the number of firms that get VC but will collapse anyway, I often wonder if it is a benefit that in other countries there is a slower, more profit-driven path that would seem to build legitimate companies for the long run rather than vehicles that border on financial engineering in the name of short-term potential success.
    • Nokinside 8y ago
      > ight fit for the vast majority of US ventures. It absolutely should not be. It makes no sense to provide high-risk big dollars to majority of anything. The name "startup" means different things for different people. Paul Graham definition for startup means salable hyper-growth. Platform economies like Google, Amazon, FB, Twitter, grow trough network effects. The reason why US leads in this new economy is because they have their eye in winning big. One big hit justifies losing lots of money in 100 mediocre startups or low growth enterprises.
• beerlord 8y ago
  Its all about money and taxes. Let's start with a labour budget of $300,000 to hire a lead programmer or other critical person. France: 41.35% of the gross salary is paid to the Government in payroll taxes, leaving $175,938 paid as income to the employee. After income taxes, $90,167 is left for the employee to spend. That employee then wants to spend their entire salary on flat-screen TVs? They have an effective spending power of $75,139 after 20% VAT. Government taxes account for about 75% of this labour budget! As you can imagine, this creates a huge incentive for tax evasion. The US, for the same original budget: 4.09% is paid as payroll taxes, leaving $287,717 as income. After (Californian) income taxes, $178,773 is left for the employee to spend. 7.25% sales tax then gives $166,300 finally. So, an extra $91,161 ends up with the American worker (much more if they are married to a zero-income spouse and move out of California). Sure, you have to pay things like property taxes, 401K contributions, health insurance in the US - but would those account for $91,161? Europe needs to completely scrap its payroll taxes and replace them with income taxes. Employees should not have to pay anything merely for hiring an employee, as it places a disincentive on using labour. On a global level, it also makes France uncompetitive - American companies hiring globally will be much more attractive. Sources: http://www.uhy.com/employers-now-pay-average-employment-costs-worth-nearly-25-of-employees-salaries/ http://www.uhy.com/employers-now-pay-average-employment-cost... https://www.francetaxcalculator.com/?salary=149508 https://www.francetaxcalculator.com/?salary=149508
  • beerlord 8y ago
    Why the downvotes? Are my calculations or sources inaccurate?
  • vmarsy 8y ago
    > much more if they are married to a zero-income spouse In France it's the same, but here's a major difference once you add kids to the equation: Each kid of a couple counts the same as "0.5 zero-income spouse", up to 3 kids. After the 3rd kid (or if the kid has handicap), they count the same as "1 full zero-income spouse" So for a couple with one spouse with a salary of X , one spouse without job, and 2 kids, the taxes would be calculated as if there was 3 persons making X/3 each, instead of 2 people making X/2 in the US. Given that the tax brackets are even more progressive than in the US, the impact seem huge.
• petre 8y ago
  Is this before or after tax? Because it it's before tax and you take the avg salary and substract taxes you'll end up with a quite different picture with the USA, Israel and Switzerland ending up on top and France at the bottom.
  • s3nnyy 8y ago
    That is true. In Zurich a mid level engineer with 3 years of experience can earn 6600 EUR after taxes. See my blogpost that I wrote after moving here "Nine reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" (https://bit.ly/2GNlJcA https://bit.ly/2GNlJcA)