France bids to reverse tech brain drain • Hacker News Board

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#71

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #46

bryanlarsen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current startup has a 9-5 culture, and we get a lot more done than any other startup I've worked for. No ping-pong, no long lunch breaks, no watercooler discussions, much less surfing on company time. I get more done in 8 hours than I used to get done in 12, and I get an extra 4 hours with my family.

I find that ping-pong and watercooler discussions are necessary as breaks. Otherwise you burn out and you only get, say, 4 hours of real work done in an 8-hour day.

Breaks are still necessary, but they're a lot less frequent and a lot shorter.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#72

Post by sailfast » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:52 PM UTC

_of wrote: post #44

fdej wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression living in France for the last year is very similar to yours. It's the mecca of paperwork (but doing taxes was relatively easy). And if you're required to supply some documentation from another country, you're likely to be required to get it translated to French by an official translator (which not only takes time but can be quite expensive). In contrast, I've never had a problem handing in German docume…

The catch-22 applies to U.S. as well. Renting an apartment requires a credit score, which you get from having a credit card, which you can only get by having a credit score.

Typically it's very easy to get a credit card from an institution with which you have a checking or savings account. I wouldn't be surprised if you had to "opt out" at this point in order to NOT receive one based on how aggressively companies target people new to the credit market. (This is especially true for college students who routinely get cards thrown at them with insane limits)

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#73

Post by hollerith » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:52 PM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #39

you_eeeeeediot wrote: post #15

The problem is work ethic. I've been to France on business on 2-week stints about a dozen times, and I can tell you from my experience they do not want to work hard -- at anything. 6hr workdays, and at LEAST 1hr for lunch and worst of all they look at you like you are the crazy one for wanting to get more done each day.

On an individual scale, statistics show that French private-sector workers are more productive than Germans and far ahead of the British. Perhaps six hours is all they need to accomplish the task?

The more difficult it is for the people living in a country to find work, the higher the productivity of the work force. For example, if only people able to obtain degrees from prestigious schools or able to succeed in low-paying internships that last for years because they have family to help them survive are able to get jobs, productivity will be high.

And France is known for make it hard for people to find jobs.

Productivity, in other words, is a measure of the value produced per hour worked.

If instead we look at the most often cited measure of value produced per resident, namely, GDP per capita, France is not doing better than Germany or the UK -- in either "nominal" GDP or GDP "purchasing power parity" according to the most recent World-Bank data.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#74

Post by realusername » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:53 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #52

France is lucrative mostly to french native speakers, who have quite a massive phobia when they have to speak any other language rather than their own. It looks ridiculous and shameful, especially when noone cares about speaking it outside french bubble. The language had it's prime time long time ago and now it's a mere curiosity. Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either. Then there is amazing countryside, b…

The language has nothing to do with it. Japan has a good economy while speaking in average even worse English than Spain. When the right conditions are there, the business is growing regardless of the spoken language.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#75

Post by twoodfin » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #38

onli wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And virements (bank transfer) are really strange, at least with my bank (wait 24 hours to send money, I never saw that before). For me, that fits well into the image of a country that is not at all modern. But: That at least changed. They are still popular like you said, but by now you can get by without them (I for example have none), many stores do not accept them anymore. That is new.

What to say about the US (and Canada) where cheap transfers between bank accounts don't exist (at least from individual to individual) Yes, where it exists it's rarely instantaneous across banks

There was a good Planet Money episode on this phenomenon[1].

The short version is that, apparently unlike most European countries, there are thousands and thousands of banks in the U.S., each operating under both Federal and one of 50 different state regulatory regimes.

It's also the case that the U.S. was one of the first countries to move to electronic interbank check clearing and funds transfer, and the resulting clearinghouse is a big hairy legacy system that they're not particularly inclined or motivated to mess with.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episo...

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#76

Post by onli » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #68

onli wrote: post #6

Maybe France really changed a lot. But be not mistaken: It is still the most bureaucratic country on earth. Anecdote: I'm doing a PhD in France. Each year, one has to do a re-inscription. In Germany, that means sending money to the university. In France, that means sending in – let me count, I have them on my desk – 17 documents, and to pay as well of course (preferred way: with a check. Like it is 50 years ago). The…

Spain is exactly the same. Pointless paperwork again and again, asking for things they already know, asking for multiple copies of documents, etc. In fact, when I finished my PhD, in order to graduate they asked me for a birth certificate. A birth certificate! I guess they don't want replicants to graduate.

They ask for a birth certificate here as well, already when starting. If you are foreigner, each year again. I guess they think the place of birth could've changed…

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#77

Post by pythondz » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

I grew up in France; gradutated from University (so not from French Ivy League known as "Les Grandes Ecoles"). I'm currently in a consulting position and tried to launch several startups-ideas at the end of my MS degree with the "Auto-Entrepreneur" status and it was very difficult to find investors because french people are very pessimistic by nature and the atmosphere created by the state and the media is really oppresive. It means that if you fail (and I failed), people around you will break your mood down (very hard to handle that).

You need to find your team of talented people who will be ready to use their own money to reduce costs. It's almost impossible to recruit someone you don't personnaly know without a large amount of cash. Splitting equity seems to be not attractive enough with french tech engineers...

The one and only advantage in France is that you can restart your life because you can easily avoid indebtedness in case of failure.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#78

Post by mercurial » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:57 PM UTC

onli wrote: post #6

Maybe France really changed a lot. But be not mistaken: It is still the most bureaucratic country on earth. Anecdote: I'm doing a PhD in France. Each year, one has to do a re-inscription. In Germany, that means sending money to the university. In France, that means sending in – let me count, I have them on my desk – 17 documents, and to pay as well of course (preferred way: with a check. Like it is 50 years ago). The…

(French expat here, so impressions are from a few years ago and reading the press)

The tax people are generally competent, and there was a huge effort to streamline the process a few years ago. The rest of the French bureaucracy often lives somewhere in the middle ages ("of course you need to waste several hours by physically coming to our offices"). And the bastards are totally unable to communicate with each other. And that's the ones with funding. The parts which are criminally understaffed like Pôle Emploi (nominally tasked with finding work for the unemployed and distributing benefits), you really don't want to have to do anything with.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#79

Post by JohnTHaller » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 2:57 PM UTC

rifung wrote: post #49

_of wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The catch-22 applies to U.S. as well. Renting an apartment requires a credit score, which you get from having a credit card, which you can only get by having a credit score.

Well, that's not entirely true. I went through the process somewhat recently, and you can get a credit card by depositing some money first and using that as your max credit. That way the bank doesn't take any risk but you can build up your credit.

It's called a secured credit card... as in it's secured by your balance with the bank. Using it helps build your credit score and history so you can get a standard credit card. I have a friend doing this now who's just never used credit before.

It's more of an issue today since so many people just use their debit cards whereas years ago people used cash and credit cards. If you wanted the convenience of not carrying cash, you had to use your credit card since ATM cards didn't have Mastercard/Visa logos and couldn't be used to pay for things in stores. That's how today you wind up with someone in their late 20s that's never had a credit card or a loan.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#80

Post by realusername » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 3:01 PM UTC

colinplamondon wrote: post #58

maelito wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the introduction of this article about this "mere curiosity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language

290,000,000 speakers (including secondary speakers.) out of 7,000,000 people on the planet. 4% of the planet. If 4% of America spoke a language, most of us wouldn't be in much of a rush to localize. Fortunately for French, the core native speakers in France are rich, and most of the planet is still poor. As the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes more accurate over time.

Except that the curve of language distribution is not proportional at all. If you sum up the top 15 languages, you maybe only have like 40% of the population. So a language with 4% speakers is actually really important in regard of the language distribution. Having 290M speakers is actually really rare for a language, most of the languages spoken in the world actually have very few speakers. This makes French (and all the other 15 top languages) disproportionately important with a such skewed distribution.