> A company will at least pay 50 to 60k euros per year in total for a junior developer. It depends on the company, as a junior I'm only getting 36k/year, before income taxes.
36K was my starting salary to when I started working about 8 years ago. In the Paris area it's a standard salary for a junior developer fresh out of engineering school. It can be higher if you are coming from a top school like Centrale or Supelec (~38/40k). It can also be higher if you work in banks/finance. I'm not 100% sure, but 30K could be a medium salary for students fresh out of IUTs (2 years professional forma…
Thank you for your informations, they are in line with what I've seen so far.
> But keep in mind that 36k a year before YOUR income taxes ("salaire brut"). Before that, the employer has to pay his side of the taxes/social security ("charges patronales"). In the end, he has to pay around 4 for 5k per month if I recall correctly (sorry, I don't have the exact figures), which means roughly 50k to 60k a year. You can take a look at your payslips for the exact figures.
I've recently checked and, for my salary of 36k, my employer has paid 54K.
Ireland - Eurozone, English speaking, light touch regulation, strong IT and customer support culture. However the high cost of accommodation in the cities, particularly Dublin, is starting to make recruitment difficult. I've anecdotal evidence of several 20-30 year olds looking to emigrate because they can't resolve the high cost of accommodation with their after-tax salary.
Good luck hiring fast against the large IT companies over there.
There are a lot of good potential employees who don't want to be a part of the "burn 'em and churn 'em" practices employed by some of the larger IT companies. But, I agree, it's always a struggle in any country for small businesses to compete in the recruitment process with large corporations.
It's much more difficult to justify making someone redundant (licenciement économique) or to fire someone who has become an asshole or isn't performing. In other jurisdictions where I've worked, the employee gets their notice period. In France, the employer is often under implicit threat of an inspecteur du travail, a government work inspector, who will wrap the company up in shitload of bureaucratic audits.
The likelihood of an employer firing people abusively is much greater than an employee being an asshole. It can indeed hinder start-ups a little because of uncertainty in any new ventures. But keep in mind that the vast majority of workers are not working in a startup environment. Relaxing a law to fit the legitimate needs of a small number of start-ups with an even smaller proportion of the work force at the detrime…
>>The likelihood of an employer firing people abusively is much greater than an employee being an asshole.Not my experience in the jurisdictions where I've worked, but certainly a widespread belief among many French people.
>>Relaxing a law to fit the legitimate needs of a small number of start-ups..I think the French labour laws need to be relaxed for the good of the French economy, not just for start-ups. The current system benefits those already in employment by entrenching their positions, but to the detriment of younger people seeking work.
I doubt that France will be able to do this - they have many disadvantages comparing to USA: - high taxes - a lot of buerocracy - language burden to attract high qualified foreign employees - lower salaries - fragmented political system in the EU - much lower population in France comparing to USA and if you want to cover the entire EU, you have to support many different languages, currencies, etc...
As a French, it saddens me a bit to say that but you also missed one point: culture. My background includes some grad school experience at a top French university and then at a top US university. One big difference, which became even more obvious to me after I crossed the Atlantic, is that there is (almost) no hustle culture in France. Make fun of the stupid apps and the copycats but so many undergrads at my American…
You specifically refer to Undergrads as an example of hustle culture in the US, this is true as it's mostly bred into them by the all-achieving american mindset of making a name for oneself ("I'm not a millionaire...yet!"). As a post-prepa engineering school graduate myself, that can hardly be compared with the undergraduate culture we have here for top talent. We have a far stronger culture of learning theoretical sciences in depth (Prépa) and French engineers/quants are well-known worlwide for having a strong academic background in math/physics. We specialize later in school for most people, while early "tinkerers" or programmers may have chosen other paths (IUT/Epitech/...) instead. Not to say one is better than the otheer, but you'd better build a strong academic track before you're 23 (Prepa -> Top school = right signal for employers) or risk experiencing a glass ceiling regardless or your actual skills. The culture is there among students but the corporate hierarchy is still stratified at the top. Regarding the expensive top business schools, a cushy CDI remains the best way to pay off your student debt if you took out loans in the first place. Overall as a young educated graduate in France you'll be bound to expect some struggles as you try to swim against the current. As I remember the words of a dual-degree graduate from Stanford/polytechnique (Antoine D.), "«En France, j’ai appris à apprendre. Aux Etats-Unis, j’ai appris à rêver». There's room for both here but it won't be easy
For the company it doesn’t matter. If they give you a VW Golf or Volvo V40 they are out €800 per month, if they reimburse your travel expense they are also out €800 per month. For the employee it is cheaper to have a company car than to buy one yourself if you want a brand new car. If you don’t care about driving an old car it could be cheaper to buy your own car and get the travel reimbursement of €800 pre-tax. The…
While is it always EUR800? There's no option to simply reimburse their mileage (kilometerage?) ? I.e. "You submitted your mileage report to the payroll department and it said you drove 214km on company business since last pay period, so your paycheck will have an extra 214 * 0.29 = 62EUR in it." Actually, in the US it need not even be that complicated. If you are using your car for work purposes, you can simply claim…
We call it a mobility budget. Lets say the amount is €800. You can get a company car such as a Volvo V40 or a VW Golf. If you only drive for business purposes you don't pay tax, so you pretty much drive a car with pre-tax money. If you drive for private purposes you need to add 22% of the MSRP of the car to your yearly income. So for a Golf you need to add about €8000 a year to your taxable income resulting in paying about €3300 per year in extra income tax.
Or you can have the company just pay you the money. If you do 2000 kilometers per month of business travel, you can have 2000*0,19=€380 paid out tax free and you need to pay taxes over the remaining €800-€380 = €420. Worst case you are in the 52% bracket and you post-tax "mobility budget" is €600.
Also with a company car the company pays for everything, including parking and gas.
My experience is not as painful as yours, but I do not know the Delaware process. I incorporated a "SAS" in France with the help of an online accounting service. It cost 500€ in fees, required a few hours of paperwork and the company was ready 2 weeks afterwards (KBis, bank account…). Now I pay 90€ / mo for the accounting service, and 10€ / mo for the (online-only) bank account. That's it. Note that you do business a…
May I ask what is that online accounting service?
Here it is: https://www.dougs.fr/
(there may be referal bonuses if you want to subscribe, we can PM each other)
> there is simply not enough supply of senior engineers in France to meet the demand. This argument is ridiculous, the problem is that you are not willing to pay enough. (I am working in Paris)
I'm curious: What is "enough" for someone with eq of an MSc in CS and a couple of years work experience with big data and distributed systems? I realize Glassdoor and similar sites aren't the best source of information but 60K EUR per year seems to be "normal" pay for such a profile and offering above that hasn't helped us. We're having trouble even finding relevant people to open up the conversation with. I am inter…
I'm earning a lot more than that in Berlin, which is a lot cheaper than Paris from what I've heard. I had a year of software engineering experience when I started, and an MSc in CS in an unrelated specialisation.
Good luck hiring fast against the large IT companies over there.
There are a lot of good potential employees who don't want to be a part of the "burn 'em and churn 'em" practices employed by some of the larger IT companies. But, I agree, it's always a struggle in any country for small businesses to compete in the recruitment process with large corporations.
Ireland is an entirely different matter: it’s hard to find people on LinkedIn for example, since many of them are only in Ireland due to being hired by corpos with huge offices over there.
That’s not the case for London as people don’t generally move to London purely for a better salary as companies don’t get a tax discount over there.
>As a contractor you can earn near 20k per month pre-tax (around 7k per month post-tax). Does that mean that taxes are (20 - 7) / 20 * 100 = 65% in NL? I knew that taxes in some EU countries (west, north) were high, but didn't know it was that high in NL. (I am aware that you get many benefits in return for the high taxes, but thought it was in the range of 40 to 50%, in some of those countries - per what I read.)
First of you have 21% VAT. You have to put this on your customers’s invoices and then transfer the tax directly to the tax office. From whats left, we have an income tax bracket system. From 67k you pay 52%. So in this case the total tax rate is roughly 40% because a big portion of your income is in the 52% bracket. It’s a lot but life is good here. Wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
I actually looked into this with the local France Business startup organization. At the time, I was young (30, I am now 31) and started learning French with hopes of trying out a alternative to Anglo culture. But reality hits hard. I don't know how I would be able to adjust from living in a multicultural and laws where minorities are protected and enforced to a republic where it is not. Once you are in France, you ar…
This is just outrageous. The republic tries to protect everybody. If you expect us to drop our wit and our views on a proper lifestyle to be more inclusive, indeed please move along. Globally we still despise politically correct as a poison to our freedom. And most of us are fine with that. Little anectode here: in IT I've worked with people of all backgrounds and never saw any issue. Young people's pride can turn th…
Young people vote with their feet and the brain drain in France is very much real according to a co-worker.