How far has he gotten with labor law changes? I some HR folks complain at a company I worked for a while back. They complained that if someone in France was going to be fired there were three different government departments that may choose to get involved and sometimes each had a different idea on how the situation should be handled.
Do you mean fired for cause or redundancies over a certain size - the USA has that procedure as well (WARN Act) you know.
Holy excluded middle, Batman :-).
Most of the US[1] are in "at will" employment states, in which individuals can be fired without cause. This is probably what the grandparent was comparing France's law to. The WARN act probably doesn't bear a great deal on the US's place as a "startup nation"...
1: by area, population or state count, including California but excluding New York
A nation where you can abuse your workers and exploit them by promising financial gain, work them to the bone with low pay and benefits, and actually deliver nothing for them. AKA America.
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I run a machine learning company in France. Call it a startup or not, doesn't matter. Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...). For companies acting within the science or innovative space, France is a haven. CIR is a tax return that covers 30% of R&D personnel, JEI is a status that halves the taxes on personnel for 8 years, and nullifies gov tax…
> Most of what I read in the comments here is not exactly true nor relies on statistics (sound like my story is...).
No change then years ago I interviewed with a uk subsidiary of a French company traveling 3-4 hours down to the south coast to do that. When they found I had not been to university - they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on the floor.
No change - if anything, it's even worse, as the education requirement now means everyone has a degree (even though they might not have the passion nor the actual skill for it), and since the requirement no longer works as a filter for good candidates (I'd argue it never really worked, but now it's even worse) they are now requiring education and experience (for the same pay an intern would get in the UK). Even assum…
What does the start-up scene in France look like in comparison, in regards to requiring the right university background? Do investors react similarly or do they care less about that?
I understand why a small percentage of startups could benefit from being in San Francisco and similar and want to enjoy the ecosystem, hire people, etc. However, I have no idea why any early-stage startup would go to France and last 3 months, while with the same money they could go to Poland and enjoy the same level of support from the government, availability of highly-skilled tech people, and twice-4 times the buyi…
The risk of going to Poland is that the government of Poland is currently expressing views that are extremely hostile to the EU, and therefore you must take into account the political risk that Poland might try to pull a stunt like Brexit -- at which point you find that you have been building a business on the assumption that you are inside of the EU, and now you suddenly find yourself outside of the EU. I have thoug…
> The risk of going to Poland is that the government of Poland is currently expressing views that are extremely hostile to the EU
Are they? Or are they simply not bowing to the will of Germany?
I think the political risk to the EU is coming from Italy and Germany at the moment.
I see less risk of political problems in Poland than with
Yep you've highlighted the main issues here. Kidnapping a CEO because the company isn't making any money and shutting its doors is the culmination of an ultra-unionised population. Don't get me wrong, unions were vital in the 40-70's as there was a clear abuse of the workforce. But today, the workforce can't wrap their heads around how a balance sheet works. And all those social laws make hiring and firing very hard,…
Abuse of the workforce didn't start in 1940 and end in 1979. Some labor innovations you may enjoy: - Weekends (40 hour week) - Minimum wage - No child labor - Workers compensation - Not being massacred by your employer¹ Don't be so glib about the necessity of unions -- the Fair Labor Standards Act was written with blood. ¹ See, e.g. , the Ludlow Massacre, the Thibodaux Massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain.
I'm not anti-union per se, but I am familiar with the economics literature, and the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, and lack of child labor are artifacts of economic development. People don't want their kids to have to work, so when societies become wealthy enough that they don't have to, they stop sending their kids to work, and around that time manage to also ban child labor (which has little effect at this point in the development of societies, and some of the effect it has is negative). Same with the 40-hour work week (and again, some of the effects of enshrining this in law are negative). Similar with the minimum wage, with some variation by country (and yet again, to the extent the minimum wage is above the market clearing wage, you end up with negative effects, as locales that have drastically increased theirs have seen).
Seconded. In French culture the “boss” is traditionally considered as an asshole. While I’m not saying there aren’t bad bosses out there, this kind of hostile culture towards management doesn’t really help anything. Taxes are awful as well, and filing them is a pain, even for a sole trader.
The social ladder is also broken. If you don't have the right diploma, no matter what your skills are you will never make it to the top. There is a real mindset of "Us vs Them" where "Them" is your boss or manager and you should despise them no matter what. I have left France 5 years ago due to those issues, I am now much happier in a country where your skills come first and nobody cares what you did before so long a…
The same happened to me. The French megacorp I was working for told me that my diploma level had a wage ceiling that they couldn't break. They offered to pay for training so I could get the required diploma in parallel of my work over a year or two. That was actually a very decent offer, but I was fed up with studying at the time so I just left.
Now I'm working in the USA where nobody cares. I don't consider myself a rocket scientist, but it's still quite sad for France to see all the comments about other French people that were similarly pushed out.
Last time I went to a meetup in SF about tech work in France, one of the French employers advertising there answered a question about the FR/US wage gap with "we aren't looking for mercenaries", essentially trying to fault workers' character for daring to ask for more. If I ever go back to France, it will be with solid plans on how to work remotely for a foreign company if the situation hasn't changed.
No change then years ago I interviewed with a uk subsidiary of a French company traveling 3-4 hours down to the south coast to do that. When they found I had not been to university - they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on the floor.
No change - if anything, it's even worse, as the education requirement now means everyone has a degree (even though they might not have the passion nor the actual skill for it), and since the requirement no longer works as a filter for good candidates (I'd argue it never really worked, but now it's even worse) they are now requiring education and experience (for the same pay an intern would get in the UK). Even assum…
So how do new people get in? Vitamin F, for family and relations. If you can go through a company and alot of people have the same name, you strt to grasp how such systems work.
It really limits how far and where you can go to whoever your parents and family had connections to.
No change then years ago I interviewed with a uk subsidiary of a French company traveling 3-4 hours down to the south coast to do that. When they found I had not been to university - they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on the floor.
No change - if anything, it's even worse, as the education requirement now means everyone has a degree (even though they might not have the passion nor the actual skill for it), and since the requirement no longer works as a filter for good candidates (I'd argue it never really worked, but now it's even worse) they are now requiring education and experience (for the same pay an intern would get in the UK). Even assum…
It can be an issue everywhere, not just in France.