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France bids to reverse tech brain drain

bbc.co.uk

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Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#81

Post by denzil_correa »

germanier wrote: post #59
onli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need cash in Germany, but not a lot of it – everything big takes a debit card. That does not help strangers with their credit cards though, so they get the wrong impression.

I pay cash at the bakery, to get a coffee, to load my canteen card at work, and to buy bus tickets in small cities at the driver, that's it. Buying used cars is usually done by cash (even 10k and more). Almost everywhere else you can pay with a German debit card (Girocard). But credit Cards are coming fast to Germany. Since a few weeks even the cheapest supermarkets, including Aldi, started to accept MasterCard and V…

The problem with credit cards in Germany is that they don't use 2FA. It's the same old signature system. Even online transactions don't require 2FA.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#82

Post by jazzyk »

renaudg wrote: post #56
zamalek wrote: post #10

Something that I've noticed about South African brain drain is that it's mostly motivated by people simply wanting a system that works for them - at least in tech. If I'm working my ass off on a product that I believe in; I don't want to be, frankly, babysitting the government. From what I've read France is also in the business of destroying productivity - if they want people back they need to start reconsidering ove…

France has one of the highest per-worker productivity in the world, well ahead of the US. You may want to read more

Yes, they are productive - just not when filling out all these government forms.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#83

Post by germanier »

denzil_correa wrote: post #81
germanier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay cash at the bakery, to get a coffee, to load my canteen card at work, and to buy bus tickets in small cities at the driver, that's it. Buying used cars is usually done by cash (even 10k and more). Almost everywhere else you can pay with a German debit card (Girocard). But credit Cards are coming fast to Germany. Since a few weeks even the cheapest supermarkets, including Aldi, started to accept MasterCard and V…

The problem with credit cards in Germany is that they don't use 2FA. It's the same old signature system. Even online transactions don't require 2FA.

It depends on where you get it. Some banks (most notoriously almost all Sparkasse) only give out chip+signature cards. But chip+PIN cards are common as well, just like "Verified by Visa" and such systems.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#84

Post by pif »

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…

> It is still the most bureaucratic country on earth.

Not really! Italian here, living in France for the last ten years: France bureaucracy can occasionally be pedantic, but no French paperwork has made me miss Italy.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#85

Post by j_jochem »

germanier wrote: post #59
onli wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need cash in Germany, but not a lot of it – everything big takes a debit card. That does not help strangers with their credit cards though, so they get the wrong impression.

I pay cash at the bakery, to get a coffee, to load my canteen card at work, and to buy bus tickets in small cities at the driver, that's it. Buying used cars is usually done by cash (even 10k and more). Almost everywhere else you can pay with a German debit card (Girocard). But credit Cards are coming fast to Germany. Since a few weeks even the cheapest supermarkets, including Aldi, started to accept MasterCard and V…

>The problem with credit cards in Germany is that they don't use 2FA. It's the same old signature system. Even online transactions don't require 2FA.

This is not generally true. My credit cards use PIN when the terminal supports it and only fall back to signature when used with older terminals.

I've never heard of online transactions with 1FA auth, most banks use a combination of user login and challenge-response TAN lists or mobile TANs. Special hardware devices that require you to insert your debit card, enter a PIN and have the device read a code directly from the computer monitor using photo diodes are quite common, too.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#86

Post by denzil_correa »

germanier wrote: post #83
denzil_correa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with credit cards in Germany is that they don't use 2FA. It's the same old signature system. Even online transactions don't require 2FA.

It depends on where you get it. Some banks (most notoriously almost all Sparkasse) only give out chip+signature cards. But chip+PIN cards are common as well, just like "Verified by Visa" and such systems.

> Some banks (most notoriously almost all Sparkasse)

Coincidentally, I have a Sparkasse credit card without chip+pin. Regardless, there shouldn't be a choice for 2FA.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#87

Post by jseliger »

renaudg wrote: post #55
Mimu wrote: post #14

I'm french, while it's true a lot of startup / opportunities in tech appeared in the last few years, most of them don't pay anything. They all advertise "good work ethic", "good environment", "good whatever" like it justifies for you to be paid like a graduate for an experienced position. You want talent? Pay the price.

With a few exceptions, French employers are not the problem, they do pay the same price for you as in other European countries, more or less ! The difference is that your average engineer in France costs them around 1.5-2.5 times the total take home pay, because of high, compulsory labor taxes. In exchange, employees get as standard : * a top notch, virtually free healthcare system with no concept of exclusions or "p…

Interesting post. That being said, point one isn't that important for most young healthy people. Point three is in the distant future: I'd rather have a dollar today than one forty years from now. Point four is not very important for highly paid engineers.

Point two may be the most interesting one: for a given individual, it may make the most sense to get high-quality French education and then go out and earn high-end American wages that are keyed to U.S. education costs.

In short, France may be facing an arbitrage problem. People who are sick, old, or receiving educations have high incentives to stay. People who are young, healthy, and have already received educations have incentives to go where they can earn more today.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#88

Post by harperlee »

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.

So, in HN terms, I think it is a very poor business decision to leave out 1 in 20 clients that are so easily self-selected for segmentation (just by asking them their language). Mostly if you admit that it is a wealthy segment.

By the way, I'm not french, and I find that "curiosity" term insultingly patronizing.

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#89

Post by saiya-jin »

bolaft wrote: post #65
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…

I'm getting tired of hearing always the same uninformed comments about the French language and how the French perceive it. We're not very good with English because of the terribly inefficient way it's taught in school, not because of any kind of "phobia". A Frenchman speaks on average 1.8 languages, which is slightly less than Germans (and much less than Swedes and Norwegians), but still more than Spaniards and Brito…

Yeah dude, I live in Geneva for last 5 years, which is probably more full of french people rather than native Swiss. And let me tell you, I see this phobia daily, by people speaking often moderately well english, but having extremely hard time convincing to speak in it, in any possible way. If I go to France, same effect becomes 5x more obvious (of course this is anecdotal measurement). Every single person I've spoken to says same. I mean, every single person. Also those who spent years living/studying in France (Paris, Lyon).

It doesn't matter how crappy your school english was (btw why do I keep hearing this excuse all the time?), in very few places it's stellar (neither was mine at home). We all sound a bit funny. So what? What makes difference between French and rest of the world is that any guy will try to speak English, even broken one, and will try to help anybody speaking it (ie in his own country). With English in France, story is consistently different.

Yeah, just 5 years of daily experience, only only mine and all expats I know (this is always a funny topic to talk about). Who knows, I could get it all wrong :)

Re: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

#90

Post by notNow »

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…

What's with the bashing of languages excluding English & countries that are not part of the English speaking world as of late on HN?

It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric.

Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either.

What makes you think that English is any better?

Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at least from orthography and pronunciation standpoints and in contradiction to the prevailing belief of the opposite.

Unlike in Spanish or Italian and to some extent French which enjoy an almost uniform rules regarding pronunciation and orthography, in English you should memorize how individual words are pronounced and written and you can't deduce correctly how a certain new word to be pronounced or written based on the pronunciation because it is not 1:1 translation from official letter sounds to words.

On the other hand, when you encounter a Spanish or Italian word and you know your alphabet and letters and simple rules, you pronounce the word as is no surprises in the process. When you hear a word correctly, you could decipher how it's written even when you encounter it for the first time and the success ratio is around 99%.

Good luck trying this with the English language. Please get off your high horse and don't kid yourself, we foreigners are not learning your language that's English because of its innate "superior" qualities to other world languages. It just happens to be the global lingua franca of this age and we're adopting to this nothing more nothing less.

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