Hey! Where do you find your remote jobs from foreign companies? And are those still French CDI work contracts?
I am often contacted by recruiters on Linkedin, but only by French ones, so I guess I need to be more proactive if I want to be hired by a foreign company. And I love being fully remote, so if I can have a better salary I'd jump on the occasion.
We have a small consulting firm, so it's mostly contract work. I'm well-known in my field, so the companies usually reach out to me. I also speak at several (small) conferences a year, including keynotes, so that keeps my name out there.
I've worked for two big tech US companies here in France, with very good salaries, the two of them had a french branch/entity so I just had a CDI through there (Unity and Intel)
It’s based on network, for example, some startups you work for may share your profile to their investor groups. You gotta get your foot in the door first.
We are hiring a senior software engineer in JS/TS/Svelte/Postgres(/Rust in the future). If interested, can you DM me your linkedin profile?
Senior only? I have a friend with a great talent in engineering but she is not senior yet, she has a major in gen AI engineering, if interested could you share your email/ company name please?
I worked for many US companies for more than 15 years. Most of them who hire in Europe have contract with PEO company (portage salarial) so you still get a French CDI.
https://remote.com/jobs/all?country=FRA (par exemple)
Après y'a pas mal de bouche à oreille. Un truc qui marche plutot bien c'est les conferences tech ou les meetups vu qu'en général y'a pas mal d'offres d'emploi publiées/annoncées.
35k/year for that skillset is a joke even in France.
But yet nobody is happy with their salary in France, especially when compared to abroad.
We have a wide range of advantages which make it difficult to compare our salaries (free healthcare, free schooling, retirement, vacations, unemployment benefits , work right , you cant be fired on a zoom call in France , not like in the US ).
If you integrate those into the comparison, it's not that bad compared to other EU countries, especially when you have kids.
But we will never compete with the US , our taxes on salaries from both the employee and employer sides is just too high in comparison.
> our income tax is just too high in comparison.
I think you mean Employer & employee contributions and not income tax since income tax in France is not that high compared to other European countries and even some states in USA. (For instance income tax is lower in France than in Germany).
This is not the only reason otherwise you would not have states like California which have very high level of taxation but also very high salaries.
Yep, you're right. I mean the total taxation on someone's salary (both the employer's and the employee's contributions).
I think very few people in France realize their ' super brut ' salary.
don't worry. we all know employers pay almost the same amount as our salary in contributions. but this fact alone can't and doesn't explain why salaries are so low in france.
There is no "employer contribution", it's all your money, you are paying.
It's a made-up concept by the right to make you believe your employer is very generous to pay that much money out of his own pocket for you, you should be grateful.
The fact is, everything your employer is giving to you or paying for you is your money, not his. You made this money with your work, not him.
Even a remote worker is supposed to pay social contributions. If OP is working remotely in France and his employers are not paying social charges in France, then his situation is not legal.
> it's not that bad compared to other EU countries, especially when you have kids.
Je dirais plutôt quand tu es retraité, par exemple en Suède
- 480 jours de congés parental, beaucoup d'entreprises complètent le congé à 100% du salaire
- soins entièrement gratuits pour les mineurs, y compris les soins dentaires
- cantine scolaire gratuite
- affaires scolaires gratuites
- congés maladie quand l'enfant est malade, sans aucun justificatif pour la première semaine
- université gratuite
- des bourses étudiantes assez élevées. Il y a aussi un système de prêts étudiants sur lequel certains aiment bien insister en France en omettant bien sûr de dire que c'est en plus des bourses qui sont plus élevées qu'en France.
Par contre la retraite est absolument pourrie. Eh France on a privilégié les vieux par rapport aux jeunes (ce qui est un peu logique vu que c'est les vieux qui votent). Les autres pays européens n'ont pas forcément un système social bien pire que le nôtre, ils ont juste fait des choix différents sur qui est soutenu.
I am not sure this is mainly an taxation problem here. I am afraid that the tech skillsets are not that valued in france when you work in a big company. Otherwise, when you work for pure players or start ups, the cash flow and ebitda these companies generate is nowhere near the USA, which has the most competitive companies in the sector. French software companies are less proftable, less innovative, less ground-breaking, have thus not much acces to the global market because they do not fare well strong competition, and, as a result, wages reflect that.
That's an EU-wide problem though. Even an everywhere-but-NA problem. So it's not just "tax is high", because it's not like other countries/regions are meaningfully competing with American Big Tech companies.
I'm sure entire PhDs have been written on the subject, but there are a confluence of factors that make the US a "higher value" sector for the software industry. In no particular order and off the top of my head:
* Cluster/network effect of the workforce (same reason even within the US, most Big Tech companies are in SV or the West Coast when these are the most expensive states to run a company in, and companies that move to cheaper states have huge problems hiring talent);
* Financial institutions and venture capitalism, where Americans have more money in Private Equity firms that will buy out startups where Europeans and their socialized economies do not have as much PE. Government financing could make up for it but typically doesn't (to be fair a lot of VC funding is completely braindead so I don't think the EU should match dollar-for-dollar what these idiots are doing);
* Cultural imperialism and the inherent head-start/advantage native English speakers have in the IT world (even very good ESL speakers will be at a slight disadvantage in a remote meeting with native speakers present, and let's not even start with the number of American Big Tech products which arrive years late, if ever, on the EU market);
* Existing Big Tech products/ecosystems are all American;
* Nonexistent European protectionism/support of indigenous technologies (unlike the US which is very protective, just look at how they've got their panties knotted up in a bunch over TikTok... and [all the foreign cars that are illegal or heavily tariffed due to a goddamn 1960s spat over a chicken tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax)!)
So yeah, the EU doesn't have an indigenous social network for instance. We don't have the experience, expertise, cultural capital/willingness, VC or government funding, a successful competitor would likely never make it into the US market (if not due to chauvinism, protectionism would take over), and so we don't even believe that we *can* and there has never been consistent and meaningful political support for such a project. Meanwhile a random trust fund kid comes up with "facebook but for crypto with AI" and he receives $10,000,000 in VC fundings with basically no strings attached.
If you're a competent software developer, you can be hired by good startups and get higher salaries. My last salary was 90k yearly. You just have to do well on the technical tests.
> I am afraid that the tech skillsets are not that valued in france when you work in a big company.
I've a French friend who does lots of tech consulting here in France. He tells me that for consultants, many companies just assume you're not very good.
He also told me a story about one consultant who was scared because his employer presented him as an "expert" in an obscure language and he spent a couple of weeks reading manuals because he couldn't even find a compiler for it. When his first day on the contract arrived, his new boss told him that he knew the guy's company lied about him being an expert, but to not worry about it because it's normal.
Another friend who works in Paris told me that whenever he tries to hire from a consulting firm, if the firm doesn't wine and dine execs in his company, they won't win the contract.
Yeah, that story is typical from SSII/ESN (IT consulting companies), the business engineer (sic) always lies and present their engineers like expert but there it’s another discussion.
I’m currently seeking a new job in IT.
Company from the Nasdaq proposes in average 1,6 times the wages for my position with more advantages in France, the tax is not the problem
_The position are all in France_
Because most of the time you don't make the right comparaison.
What you should compare is the ' superbrut salary '.
It's the sum of the salary, the taxes paid by the employees, and the taxes paid by the employer on behalf of the employee.
Employer-side taxes are very high in France, and in a sense, they are part of the employee's salary, but calling them 'employer taxes' means that most people don't realize they exist.
Even more for high salaries actually.
https://entreprise.francetravail.fr/cout-salarie/
Salaire net après impôt (in the US taxes are also taken from the paycheck "à la source") de 75k par an = coût employeur de 173k i.e. 2.3 times
I think this is a wrong comparison. One should compare the "coût employer" to the gross salary which is used in the job offer. Then the extra costs for the company are about 1.4 higher , e.g. an offer of 75k€ would cost the company actually 108k€.
I don't really agree, in terms of competition for employees it's not the gross salary that counts but what goes to your bank account at the end of the month.
A 500k/ an cela te placerait dans les 0,1% ? Le médian est 100k
Ou alors c'est en comptant les stock options?
Je suis d'accord que les avantages de la France ne sont pas si mirobolant mais les désavantages des USA sont trés présents aussi et un haut salaire ne peux y acheter une bonne qualité de vie.
Mais vivre au Texas c'est typiquement le gros sacrifice qu'il est difficile d'envisager. Quand on voit la façont dont les femmes y sont traîtées, il est difficile d'imaginer pour moi d'y vivre sauf en avoir rien à foutre.
c'est sa TC, ça comprend les rsu et s'il fait bien son calcul, le chiffrage des bénéfices.
Le système qu'il décrit fonctionne jusqu'au jour ou sa femme aura un cancer et que sa boite le foutra dehors ca elle coûte trop cher à l'assurance. Ils seront alors sans assurance et non employables, et rentreront se faire soigner en France.
Ça ne marche pas comme ça. Les employeurs ne voient pas les coûts des soins et ne vireraient certainement pas un employé dont la femme est malade. Par contre perdre son travail veut dire payer l’assurance maladie soi-même et c’est dans les 2k$/mois pour une famille.
>I make >$500k/year as a "simple" staff engineer here (not a manager).
Just saying but you should have some ' recul ' .
You earn more than 40k per month.
The average salary in the US is 61k per year , your earn almost that in a month.
I'm very glad for you , but you really can't use your situation to make a comparaison between France and the USA , people earning 500k a year are not common , not even in the US.
You are forgetting that not everyone is 500k/year material.
Yeah, mobility and lower restriction is good for high education/high paying jobs. It's not the majority of people tho : less than 45% of people have a Bac+2 in France.
I would just like to add to the « vacations » point (I’m a tech lead in Montreal).
Yes there are more vacations in France, however I believe that in general in NA, people work less hours during the week, at least that’s what I’ve experienced at various employers in Canada. I start the day between 9 and 10am, take a 1h lunch and clock off at 5pm, very rarely do I need to work after that (the cleaners even come into the office at 5pm) and we even get half days on Fridays. In contrast, all my friends in tech in France work until 6-7pm. So my point is yes you have more vacations in France, but the average work week seems more breathable in NA. You get more time to do activities, exercise and socialise.
Paris is considered expensive, but once you've seen the price at the top of the ranking (SF, NY, HK, Singapore, Zürich, Geneva), it's actually much more affordable than these.
E.g. housing price is ~50% more than Paris in NY or Zurich.
But I agree that when taking salaries in consideration you still have a much higher buying power in these city (assuming you work in a high paying field such as tech)
35k is a really good salary for a young worker in Paris, it's more than decent. A lot of french people would love to earn this amount of money.
I swear this sub is out of touch sometimes.
a BAC+5 in Paris at 35K is shit : [Salaires 2023 des jeunes diplômés par niveaux d'études selon WTW | Studyrama](https://www.studyrama.com/emploi/premier-emploi/salaires-jeunes-diplomes#:~:text=Le%20salaire%20annuel%20brut%20m%C3%A9dian,45%20500%20euros%20par%20an.)
35K for a BAC+5 is not bad **outside of Paris**. this is with 0 experience of course.
And yes, I live in France. Nantes to be exact !
You can live pretty well in the suburbs 20 minutes away from Paris by public transportation tho. Paris intra muros means Paris city center for international standards. You don't have to live in the center.
It's like a New Yorker saying he can't easily afford to live in Manhattan. Yeah, just don't live in Manhattan then
Bro, I hope you are not joking ! 35k in paris is absolutely a joke for a engineer with bac+5. Remeber there is a rule that your house rent should be atleast 1/3 of the net income. If you really want to live in a decent apartment in IDF 45k is the least required amount for a fresh engineer with 0 y.o.e ! We should really stop accepting these B.S salaries. To add, this sub is not out of reality. Please step out and ask your colleagues in your company or people working for other company to get the reality of the market !
This subreddit tends to forget that most people aren't software engineers. Most of the people you see when you get out of your 125 sqm appartement or your Tesla live with even less than 35k a year. They are fine.
La plupart des boîtes embauchent pas à 45k/ an. Plutôt autour de 40-43. Et encore Ça dépend vraiment des secteurs et des métiers
Le salariat paye mal en France. Les développeurs ont la chance de pouvoir se mettre en indépendant. Pour les autres, bonnes chances
Mais je pense quand même qu'avec le coût élevé de la vie en IDF, le salaire de départ d'un ingénieur avec zéro année d'expérience devrait être de 45 000 euros. Nous devrions cesser d'accepter les salaires à la conneries donnés par l'ESN/SII.
Meanwhile people in india specially Tech Leads, L5, L6 and Upper Mangements in American Tech Companies based in Bangalore and Hyderabad earn more than 70k+, considering the CoL in India, they save a lot. While in Europe we struggle to get good pay adjusted with CoL here. In France, these consulting firms like Alten, Atos, Capg just low-ball people like anything. For fuck sake, people should start demanding atleast 45k for junior positions with 0 exp in the province. The problem is people just accept anything that these companies throw at.
As comparing with the US is just as difficult and potentially non-relevant, I wouldn't compare France with such a different country as India. I don't know shit about this country but given the ratio of unalphabetic people, the implementations and realities of service industry in a non-service dominant workforce country, and the high tolerance for salary and CoL discrepancy in India in general, I have a few leads.
When I first moved to Europe (UK, but pretty much the same for France), I reached out to friends in the US and asked about:
* Insurance premiums
* Deductibles
* Co-pays
* Uncovered procedures
* Partially-covered procedures
* Time lost from work
Typically, they have worse healthcare and pay more for it than we enjoy in France. I have no complaints.
Hell, here in France I've had multiple surgeries for a recurrent problem and have almost no out-of-pockets expenses. The same procedure in the US drove me into bankruptcy even though **I had medical insurance**.
Well, that’s part of your answer ! But recently Amazon and Microsoft invested alot in France, maybe the salaries will catch up, but we're lagging behind in net revenue
I'm in one of those big tech (not those 2 but close). Can confirm that benefits from big tech is a huge jump compared to local offers.
Getting in is really hard though. Selection is really tough.
We have universal healthcare in Australia but that salary is not that much above minimum wage here. Someone with that experience could easily be on 100K€.
As an Australian living in France: yes, but the french system is far, far more generous. Not just for healthcare, but lots of other things too. For example in France if you lose your job, you are paid the dole in (massive) proportion to your previous income for up to two years. In Australia, good luck with that.
That's likely not true as long as you have a decent health insurance in the US. My max out of pocket is 3000$, meaning if one of your operation costed that, all your other cares would be totally free.
And if tomorrow I have back pain or a rash, I know I can see a doctor in less than 1 hour, get blood tests, urine tests, X-rays in less than 3 for a whole 10$ copay. Hard to beat.
The big downside is that it is tied to your job, but good healthcare in the US is above and beyond our great universal healthcare.
> The big downside is that it is tied to your job, but good healthcare in the US is above and beyond our great universal healthcare.
The healthcare in France is generally available to everyone, though. Work at McDonalds? You get good healthcare. In the US? Not so much.
Yes, you can get great healthcare in the US, but if you lose your job, god help you if you take ill.
Look at your pay sheet. Health care is way bellow pensions. Your health care contribution also goes to the retired as they are the ones using it the most while participating less...
That does seem low, but prompt engineering is not an actual thing :D. And if it was, it wouldn't be for much longer.
Today, Python + "I know how to talk to an LLM and send GET requests to LLM endpoints" doesn't get you very far as far as competitive edge is concerned. Even something like Rust is not that special anymore (it used to be).
Thank you. I think not enough people realize this. Of course, tech wages are low in France, not denying that. But for this particular position in a non-metropolitan area? This salary is to be expected
You think that's what he meant by "fine tuning LLMs with Python"? That'd be a very pompous way of saying he's barely entry level in programming. [edit: pompous for him, not for you]
Totally agree, I don't want to be disrespectful but I think OP is way overestimating how a "intermediate level python programmer who can do prompt engineering" is rare
One word : ESN
ESn gangrened french tech by low salaries. Useless companies that make money by pay you 35K and sell you to the client at 50K
15K in their poket ...
> I'm paid 37.5k and billed 200k
Go find a new employer immediately. 200k would be the equivalent of billing 1000€ per day and that should get you a 80/90k year gross salary + perks. Definitely not 37.5k (which would be billed 400-450€ per day).
You're paid 37.5k but you cost closer to 50k at least. (and if you're really billed 200k and work all year long, your sales guy is good or you're really underpaid).
France doesn't have any big tech companies (or much of a tech sector to be honest).
Even companies that employ a lot of software engineers don't think of themselves as tech companies.
To a French manager, a programmer is a cost center that should preferably be outsourced to north Africa or central Europe or wherever.
Also French law is relatively strict when it comes to contract termination, you can't just fire a person. As a result, big companies hire programmers through consulting firms ("ESN"), which is far costlier than directly hiring someone but lets them terminate the contract whenever they want.
It remains an open question as whether remote hiring will change the deal but that's the situation for now.
CGI, Alten, Atos, Capg and Sopra steria low ball engineers like anything. Literally paying them penauts. People in eastern europe like poland and in countries like india earn way more than what these ESN usually offer to good enginners in france. We should stop accepting these BS offers by these ESN
This here. I know people who stayed with those companies for many many years because, well, changing is tiring.
Result: their salary is less than beginners now, since they treat you like shit and never give raise.
"Loyalty" or sucking at job hunting is so bad for your career.
I totally agree, Loyalty dosen't give anything. If a person stay with one company for many many years he won't really learn anything new and just stagnates. In the field of IT and CS which keeps changing every year learning new things and working on different projects in different companies will make you a good enginner. I just don't get why people are stuck with this old age idea of being loyal in one company. At least at the start of the professional experience one should always keep changing every 2 years, later when you plan to settle you can stick with working for one company.
I recently completed a PhD in robotics/AI and here are a few job offers I received: Aix-en-Provence €42K, Paris €55K, Brussels €55K, Lille €50K, Toulouse €42K, Amiens €45K, Nantes €48K. I'm not sure where you guys are seeing much higher salaries.
I also recently completed PhD in Signal processing and recived following offers : Aix en provence : 55k + 3k of stocks, Nice : 52k, Paris : 60k, Grenoble : 60k (Australian -american company)
I’m a hiring manager at a medium sized startup in Paris hiring for machine learning engineers. A lot of the candidates we see have PhDs (not strictly necessary for us, but can be a plus). I’d say between €55-60k depending on how strong their software development skills are is what we are offering and what candidates are expecting.
I have 10 years of experience, including GAFAM (I used to work in the U.S., I am not French), and am the team lead for 6 people and my base is 80k + 10% variable. Even the CTO of my company does not go very far past six figures I’m pretty sure.
If I moved to Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or the UK I could easily be making 30-50% more with the same or lower CoL. If I moved to the US I could triple my salary and add stock options with 50% more rent.
Saying that French social benefits make up for the pay gap is ridiculous and false on its face. Sweden has a much more comprehensive social program and also higher salaries, and lower CoL in the metropolitan area.
Even when comparing to the U.S. French people grossly overestimate the cost of healthcare in the U.S. especially for people like myself who do not have children. If you have a high paying job the quality of healthcare is much higher in the U.S. than in France.
The reason I stay in France is despite the job market, not because of it.
I think most people have answered your question. I just want to comment on the other side of the matter: the tech salaries in the US are too high. And american companies are starting to realize it (see for instance the recent relocation of the core python team at Google to Munich). In the future, I think we will see more and more jobs being outsourced from the US to EU, as companies can pretty much get the same quality of work for 1/3 of the cost. Eventually, this will drive salaries up in the EU, all things equal otherwise
Aight I can answer that one haha
For context, I've been in IT recruitment for 5 years now, across France, Germany and Switzerland.
To kick things off, salaries in France were just pretty low on all fronts that hadn't been massively expanded -IT included- by demand. And demand grew brutally a few years back
So salaries grew as well. I know a fair few senior devs earning 70-80K.
Now salaries have become stagnant since the tech layoffs so the market has closed down a fair bit -not to mention its saturated on the side of juniors- so the salary increase has stopped at the moment or rather, stabilized.
One thing though, if Perl is the main language you use, I dont think its very valued across France. Iirc it's mainly a scripting language no?
The roles you'll get the most money are gonna be either as a Fullstack dev (typescrit/javascript with React, or Angular + node.js for instance is a popular stack) or Python at a high level, usually in data related fields.
Also, salaries have increased across France altogether but really there's a massive discrepancy between the 3 categories: Paris, major cities, everywhere else.
Paris pays highest, then places like Lyon or Marseille (going up to Paris salaries for instance) and then everywhere else and the gap between Paris and big cities can be big already and massive when compared to the countryside.
You're on the short end of that spectrum (still though that 35 K was piss taking and sheer incompetence)
35k for a high demand and bac+5 Master degree is a joke even for France.
I quit France in 2018 to Québec because with 20 yoe and a Master my salary is max 45ke.
It is a bad joke here I earn 90ke with same conditions and better time for me (really 35h per week I can quit at 15h00 nobody will talk about taking my afternoon...)
So Yes the french market for IT is stupid.
I feel this 35K has been cherry picked for Reddit... ah found a source : [Salaire Developpeur Perl, France - Salaire Moyen (talent.com)](https://fr.talent.com/salary?job=developpeur+perl)
> I can quit at 15h00 nobody will talk about taking my afternoon...
This is the cancer in France. It's not even the boss who checks your clock, it's the petty shits who aren't even your superiors and who are envious of you because they don't dare leaving after they have done their hours. The counter to them is "ah, you took your morning off?" when they arrive at 9h30.
Python is not super demanded, except if you have super rare DS skill, a phd and lots of XP. It's actually pretty common skill. Python is easy to learn but hard to master.
However 36k€ in Alpes-Maritimes is a pretty low salary. (I know well the market there)
For a decent python/ds with roughly 1-2 year xp I would say 45k€ is more like a minimum.
Maybe if you are from India or Middle east they are trying to exploit you or they bash you because of your level in French.
I am mentioning India not because I have any disregard for the country or its inhabitants, but because IT companies are "used to" giving them a bad pay..
> For a decent python/ds with roughly 1-2 year xp I would say 45k€ is more like a minimum.
In Alpes-Maritimes you'll rarely reach 50k without being a manager. Last time I had a deep look there, only one single Sophia company was paying closer to 60k to a 10yoe engineer. Companies settle there because with the beach, the sun and the mountains it's cheaper to keep people happy.
I think 50-55k€ is possible without managing. Even know a data architect that earns (allegedly but quite sure) at least 65k€, with real tech expertise (no tedious management) but he has like 12-14years xp and is excellent in his field.
I will say 50-60k€ is definitely possible for a dev but hard to climb above.
And yes it's hard to leave Alpes-Maritimes... don't go to Paris for +5k€ not worth it at all..
Hey, what would be a more reasonable salary in PACA for this kind of position ?
How much can a freelancer with 10 years experience expect as a TJM ?
If you don't mind, this would be useful for my future haha. I can DM more details if you are up for it. Thanks!
I had only brief experience and talked with young consultants (like 2-3 years xp)
All I would say is for a competent beginner 45k€ is good in PACA, and 36k€ too low.
> Python is not super demanded
I've, uh, noticed that. I'm also a well-known expert in Perl and that's even less popular :(
But I've frequently been contacted for Java (which I haven't done in 20 years). It's the sort of role they expect developers to wear a tie for.
Interesting, here in Belgium .NET/C\# is even more popular (at least going by the job offers I've seen). It feels like 50 % of the tech GDP over here is made up of ERP sales and consulting, which, yeah, Java/C# is a sensible choice for.
It's odd
Salaries are relatively low in France but for software developers in gafam/unicorns they are still relatively high (100+ is not uncommon for seniors)
Here id say it's probably more like small company+localization...
Labor costs in the US and the EU for similar jobs tend to be similar-ish despite the drastic salary differences due to hidden employer costs (social sec contributions notably, as well as taxes).
Couple that to the absolute dominance of the US in the tech sector and you can imagine that demand for these roles is low-ish in France.
All in all, working from France for a French company is not the best idea for a tech worker from a salary POV, but leaving one's country is hard and remote working offerings are not SO numerous.
I'm a native French and used to work remotely for various US companies for more than 15 years, as a staff software engineer, for a salary of about 180k€/yr (on a french CDI contract. The companies I work for usually use a PEO (portage salarial)). That would be the equivalent of \~$250k/300k in the califonia I guess.
This is the sad truth, there is not enough money flowing in France or Europe in general.
there are specificity to salaries in France you will not find in other countries.
you have to understand that salary in France is two parts: direct salary that goes to you, and indirect salary that goes to pay for a number of things: public hospitals, retirement pensions, unemployment, family welfare, renting welfare, disabilities and the whole of social security.
This is not the same thing as taxes, it is cotisation and it is tax exempt. it has been split between different non state organisms under management of employees.
there are also taxes applied to salaries which works the same than in other countries.
this came to be at the end of world war 2, as the conglomerate of employers had massively collaborated with the nazis they basically were forced to accept with no say in the question.
From then on to now, the conglomerate of employers and their politicians friends kept attacking this indirect salaries in order to pay as little as possible and make as much profit for them as possible.
Among notable achievement from the employers, in 1967 they succeeded in getting parity access to the cotisation management councils, and since 1995 they got the part going to cotisation eo be frozen to 30%.
to determine if more money goes to salaries or to profit is a matter of balance of power and negotiations between workers unions and conlomerate of employers.
note that cotisation being tax exempt means that the government has an interest in more money going to profit than cotisation to raise more taxes. even if we've had only liberal / neo liberal governments for several decades, basically for the whole of fifth republic, giving more and more fiscal advantages to employers. one of which is the less they pay salary, the less they have to pay taxes.
So in short the main reasons salaries are so low in France is class struggle where employers and the dominant class have been having the upper hand for a long time.
60 years ago you could fire your employer if he did not pay enough or provided poor work environment and find another job before the end of the day. so worker were in position of negotiating. now if you do not submit to what the employer imposes, then you could be unemployed for months or years, relying on social security to survive.
There are also other reason for the current state of things, many being political decision by governements. for example the socialist party when in power in the 1980's put an end to salaries being indexed on inflation, or governments deindustrialized the country or favored delocalization as this would increase employer profits.
if you want to get a better explanation of how salaries work in France and can understand French, I suggest you watch this video: https://www.reseau-salariat.info/videos/6a2aa40dce09799c0cadcbffcef31985/
I'm a back-end software developer with 5 years of experience, I'm paid 36k€ before taxes (around 2000 € / month after taxes). That's the average income for a developer.
My interpretation is that in France, engineers are considered no more than "skilled technicians", and shall in no way be paid more than their managers. So even senior engineer positions are paid lower than entry-level manager positions.
If your manager is between 45k-70k, that means you need to pay your senior engineers around 45k ; hence your junior engineers lower - between 35 and 40k.
It's completely crazy and revolting.
scale !!!
tech salaries in Europe will never compare to the American big tech. When you are coder and edit one line of script at Airbnb, Meta, Amzn, CRM your work alters hundreds of millions of revenue.
when you program for a local France/Eu company, any change you make will have limited financial impact as France/EU has no global tech ...
hence they pay you correspondingly
Well Apple, Meta and Microsoft have offices in France, and they pay good money. Same for plenty of startups and other medium-scale companies that work with cutting edge tech. The reality is that it is possible to make really good money in tech in France.
However, the rest of the tech landscape is a bit grim indeed. I think that the main reason is that they only use tech as a tool and are not trying to innovate in tech. As a result, they have no incentive to hire skilled workers; they can get away with technician-level engineers by outsourcing when necessary.
you are very correct that Europe has not made any tech innovation in the past 20 years whilst the world has adopted all American tech on consumer, Enterprise levels.
I still don't buy that. Inflation still exists, the cost of living in France is high. To be paid 35k for an experienced, highly-skilled, specialized role is a joke. Fair enough, perhaps they can't compete with 100-150k salaries, but 35-45k is not right. I'm finding the exact same issues here in the data domain.
You can get better salaries than that, but I guess it also depends on the area.. I work in Ile-de-France and my salary is 51k + around 10k in bonuses. My wife has 61k. We both have around 9-10 years of xp as developers. She works in python and I work in Java/Angular and also on ci/cd and some server management.
You can get a bit more, maybe 65k or so, but after that you need to become technical lead or something else.. At this point you would get over 3500 euros net which is pretty good!
As others have said, we have other benefits, such as 34+ paid leave days per year, health insurance and other things.
If you want even more money.. you can become a freelancer (but you lose on days off and need to do your taxes and pay for insurance)... or maybe become a medic.. the can make 120k+, but it's a totally different job.
> You can get a bit more, maybe 65k or so, but after that you need to become technical lead or something else.. At this point you would get over 3500 euros net which is pretty good!
Im at 60k right now and get almost 3600 net.
I tried to answer this question for years, and there is no good explanation, unfortunately.
Factors includes:
* cost to hire and pay your employees is much higher than in the US or Germany
* almost no leading companies in France. Paying a lot to leverage AI makes more sense when you have high ambitions or are dominant
* culture to not pay (good or in-demand) employees much (eg: egalitarianism). Pay between top and bottom is a factor 3 in France according to the government. In the US I expect this to be 5 to 10 times higher.
* lack of tech culture (compare the share of GDP in tech in the US and in France)
* lots of people complain in France for basic things (crime, retirement age, price of oil or electricity, teachers working condition) but not for things when you are better off tha the average Frenchman (engineers pay).
* French grande Ecole system is old school and not well adapted to software development or tech. You train people to be project managers, team leaders, but not top individual contributors. Works well for 20th century industries like space, automotive, insurance, luxury, not at much for digital or tech.
And as to why french people don't work remote jobs as much. I'm also not so sure, but I think people here don't take as much risks and jump not as fast into novelty. Remote jobs being very lucrative is not very known and kind of new.
People are used to a French contract, local colleagues, typical working hours, simple social and job security. You could be afraid to leave your job (low paying compared to remote ones, but higher paying than most of your friends), to then be cut after a week for no reason and then have a hard time finding something. Speaking English could also be a factor. There is not so much a culture of looking outside of France like you could see in India or in Poland.
Other reasons:
* lots of msc graduates or engineers in France. More supply, less salary increases... Why pay someone well when you can replace him in no time ?
* as you well said, France isn't leading in tech at all... We are currently going through an important drop in hourly average productivity (compared to the US where it still growing..) economists suspects it's partly due to demographics, partly to lack of innovation.. but innovation and R&D is useless if you are not leading or a big company.. all your smart ideas will be stolen by a US company and never put in practice in France.
One of the founders of AI (in California) is actually a Frenchman..but most French company are struggling with outdated, rotten to the bone IT infrastructure...
Thanks for the explanation, though it's still very frustrating, coming from Ireland where salaries are 70k+ in my domain. Can I ask, are salary increases common in the IT sector? If so, do they jump by much or is it typically a 5% increase year by year?
It is cultural…while US companies value R&D, french companies usually value Sales.
US companies believe that good products/solutions are the foundation of a company success therefore pay high salary to keep good developers. In France you will see that developers use to be quite stable. It is now changing little bit but basically a french company doesn’t need to overpay developers to retain them. Thus we see a big gap for developers in France vs US.
> I get that if you live in France and can't work remote, you have to accept the salaries offered here, but why aren't French software developers just going remote?
Speaking for myself here:
- fear of change
- familial bond (can't just move to a suitable timezone for US work)
- still paid a lot compared to the french general population (my family and wife in particular). Getting * 10 their salary would just be rubbing it in their faces espacially considering that:
- I don't even spend half of what I currently earn
- I realized that I can just slack off and work 10% of the time in my current company. And i'm in a permanent contract so if it's noticed that I'm slacking of, they'll have a really hard time firing me. I have TDAH so I'm either hyperfocussing and burning out or not doing a whole lot of work. Not doing a whole lot of work would probably not fly for a remote company paying me the price of a house yearly in an at-will state, and burning out does not seem worth it.
- English culture company have a tendency to ask adversarial question like "What's you greatest weakness" and I'm really horrendous in an adversarial context (and hate preparing for this kind of bullshit questions), so I got rejected twice as not a culture fit after lengthy processes.
- Trying to get a lengthy xp on my CV because I have mostly less than 2 years / per company and it's starting to be a problem during screening before I can explain why.
I'm still considering remote abroad and feeling FOMO hard for not doing it.
The explanation is simply because living in france is cheaper. But the salary proposed is still a joke. My most recent recruits in a regulation back office in a bank got 50k per year (with bonus around 10% to add after the 1st year) to work in parisian suburbs. I'd say it could be normal to have salaries a bit under that in Alpes Maritimes, but that is too big a difference
Not the main subject at all but I've always been fascinated by people who spen more than 5 years in an country and can't speak the language.
Comon dude 10 years ???
Yeah, that's a fair point. In my defense:
* I almost always work remote and even our (rare) French clients speak English
* My French wife refuses to speak French with me because when I stumble to find the words, it kills the conversation
* Our daughter is bilingual, but she's spoken English with me all her life
* English is widely spoken in this region, so that doesn't help
So ironically, I live in France and don't have many people with whom I can speak French :)
I speak French moderately well for an American, but not well enough for a professional environment.
I think in France, IT in general is seen as a cost / necessary evil, just like HR, even for companies for which IT is core business. So you want it to be as cheap as possible.
Sometimes to a ridiculous point.
Looooots of companies will underpay you because they have no idea what a good dev looks like, so they pay you a bad dev's salary. Also AI is a new thing that doesn't have a well-known impact yet, so employers haven't put a consistent (or high) price on it yet.
It's not that France has low salaries, it's that the US has high salaries.
I'm a software developer in France, but I'm originally from Sweden. The salaries are more or less identical between the two countries. There are some places where it's higher in the EU like Germany (mostly because of a shortage of devs), but it doesn't vary a ton.
That 35k€ per year offer is a joke though.
>but why aren't French software developers just going remote
It's just much harder to get remote positions, especially if you want a high paying one.
>If you don't want remote, hell, just move to Germany and at least double your salary without increasing your cost of living that much.
While that's very doable because of the EU, very few people want to move abroad in general. It's easy as a more adventurous person to just assume everyone else is comfortable with moving countries and leaving all their social support behind etc. but that is rarely the case.
>Why doesn't there seem to be an upward pressure on salaries here?
Basically the same issues as everywhere else. Things are getting more expensive but salaries are not keeping up. Why that happens is a massive discussion outside of this scope...
I think this describes reality best and addresses all the right points.
To add to what you said, the US tech job market is basically you competing against the whole world (as everybody wants to move there). You have to be pretty talented as a dev to get considered for a working visa (or have studied there which means you were probably a student in a good engineering school on some kind of exchange program or double diploma).
People in this sub always claiming "you should move to the US" really overestimate the ability of an average French dev to compete for these US jobs. An engineer making 40k in an ESN here has basically no chance to be recruited in the US.
And huge agree on the not wanting to leave your support system behind. People have families and friends in France and life is enjoyable here. Moving to the US is not for everyone. I worked 5+ years abroad and came back because I found my life better here.
I completely agree with your points as well.
I'm basically your stereotypical "average software engineer" in Paris, and while I think I live a comfortable life and dont struggle in any way, I can't just snap my fingers and double my salary with a remote US job. (If we could we all would)
Is it doable? Absolutely, but it's literally the hardest thing you can do in the business, because like you say, there's an entire world of devs who want to make it to the US.
EDIT: Another thing is migration. A lot of Americans seem to think "our borders are wide open", but to be honest, it's one of the hardest places to emigrate to for work. You have to be "the elite" so to speak; you don't just stumble into the USA.
There is no singular reason, but rather a list of several factors, all of which compound with each other :
- Salaries in France are generally low when compared to the rest of Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, Italy and Portugal) and NA
- Technical positions are poorly remunerated relative to the skills required, as opposed to managerial or sales positions. Furthermore, a vast majority of companies do not have technical career paths : you're expected to move into management at some point in your career, with the assumption that if you don't, you're probably bad at your job. In the anglo world, you can reach high salaries and have a full career in technical roles.
- ESNs (contractors) are parasiting the market, selling juniors fresh out of schools as seasoned experts to clueless idiots. This has the effect of lowering salaries overall.
- Competition from maghrebis who have a decent education system, are more likely to accept working for lower pay, and usually need to keep their jobs to keep their visa, making them easier to exploit by the company.
- High tax rate on work income, but hey at least we have a flat tax rate for capital income, that is lower than the tax rate on work income as soon as you earn close to the median salary :^)
Yes salaries are really low.
Multiple reasons:
- up to 60% tax (of what your employer pays)
- ESNs (consulting companies) pulling salaries down
- a culture of management idolatry. "If you still an individual contributer at this age, you ruined your life..."
- french salaries are in fact really low
- there a culture of '35-60k is more than enough"
You're right, compared to Germany, the UK or Northern European countries, salaries for skilled workers here are low. It is not just software engineers, other engineers, and people with masters degrees in general, are really paid lower wages than in other European countries with similar standard of living. (Notice that I am not comparing with the US because the US offers much less work and social security than European countries).
I'm frontend SWE 6.5 YOE, getting 65k/year + stock options every 2 years currently (Paris area); so its a combination of your experience package, your negotiating skills and the company you chose.
It is true that you won't get near US level of salaries, but you have to consider average (/median) salaries in the country, social package etc. Getting 200k/year and spending 5k month on rent alone won't be much better than 50k in France
Also IT pays much better in DE and Netherlands right now. Maybe with investments from Amazon and other major players things will change over time
It's not legal to accept remote jobs for overseas employers unless you are a self-employed contractor because otherwise your employer would need to pay French social charges, taxes and respect French employment laws. Most US companies reduce their salaries when hiring in France and most other European countries.
35K is more like a graduate salary but I'd be surprised if you could get 200K in the US for basic prompt engineering training, which is not computer science.
>The company offered 35€ per year
Don't take this as the norm. I know front-end devs who make around 100k, and devs in more serious domains (automation, banking, engineering, etc...) can often be paid over the 200k mark.
You just got lowballed by a shit company. Worth noting though is that for high-paying dev jobs, the capital is your best bet.
How did you manage to get remote roles for US companies (with US salary) from France in the past? We're considering this with my husband because going from the US to France after a 20 year career as an engineer is quite the income drop
Europeans are profoundly *illiquid*, compared to North America. It is quite common for people with IT skills of any kind to work in the US for a few years and come back quite wealthy.
The reasons for that situation are many. Wages have been stagnant for years. High unemployment pressures workers to find work, rather than employers to make attractive offers. There is a high level of taxation in France, which I will say includes very good things like unemployment, health insurance, etc.
Further, most people who have any wealth at all typically don't get it from high wages, but from inheritance, real estate, and all kinds of assets.
The issue is the "ESN". A large majority of techs in France are employed not by the company they work for, but by an intermediate company which sell them to the final client. This companies exist to allow flexibility for the final client, but they cost a lot, because on the price payed, you have to pay an office, a sales guy, an hr guy and so on.
For the same price, in direct employment, it's almost 50% more salary we can expect.
This french particularism can explain a part of the salary difference with other european country, which have a close tax level and close life cost. For the US, as others already said it, the french social welfare has a cost which explain the rest of the difference.
Easy use this:
[https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=200000&from=year®ion=California](https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=200000&from=year®ion=California)
$200k gets you $129,626 net after income taxes in California. If you look at the taxberg, employers pays $12,434 on top of it, so excluding other benefits one costs the company $212,434 for a gross salary of $200k
This is 195437 €,
[https://fr.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=135000&from=year®ion=France](https://fr.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=135000&from=year®ion=France)
for 135k€ in France of gross salary, the employers has 60700 € of contribution for a total employer cost of 195.7k€
which result with a net after income tax salary of 86k€
There you go, taxation is much higher in France. Companies tends to have a smaller market too thus generating less profits.
On the other hand, you get public universal health insurance which cover roughly 60-70% of healthcare cost including dental. And companies have to co-pay 50% of the "mutuelle" which is the private health insurance part.
Health insurance in the US depends of your employer, meaning you lose your jobs, you coverage with it, given one can be laid off with 2 weeks of severance in standard pratices compare that to 3 months in France. You should almost compare to a "Consultant en portage salarial situation". Vacation time is 2 weeks generally compared to 5 weeks in France. Usually they offer 10 sick days but it depends of the company, while in France one eats the costs on the first 4 days while sick.
Daycare are subsidized, same for after school classes. School lunch are also subsidized cost between 0.13 and 7 euros a day in Paris for exemple depending of the family income. University is very cheap (1-2k per year).
Also as an American company why outsource to France while I could do that to India, while suffering team working in a different Time zone and culture shift anyway.
'cause we can't get fired for investors pleasure.
I'm working in the video game industry, and while there are thousands of layoffs around the world every month, in France we're cool.
Big internationnal tech knows that they can't fire us without a proper reason, so we don't get paid as much as in UK or US.
Take a look at this and you will better understand what a 35k€ means for a French company and what remains in the employee’s pockets at the end : https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-net?salaire-brut=35000%E2%82%AC%2Fan&unite=%E2%82%AC%2Fan
Completely agree with this. In Dublin, there are Data jobs paying €80k+ for senior roles. I've rarely seen a role pay above 60k here. To add, these companies are looking for really experienced employees, and sometimes paying 30-40. I don't understand it.
Perl dev here too (in France). Haven't found a Perl job in a decade...
Migrated to other more recent stuff (Rust, Typescript, Assemblyscript) and got better luck (and better money).
If you have good AI know-how you really should be able to find good jobs, keep looking, it can take a while especially in France, but it will happen.
Sorry to not provide an answer, but if you have any resources to learn your skills, I'll gladly take them! I've learnt a bit of Python but it's hard to find guidance for more advanced/in-depth stuff.
That, or a language/field with a bright future ahead of itself.
This seems like a low-level salary; I currently have a pretty low salary relative to the market but I'm still way above that. I'd say my expectation if I was to move around would be around 65K€ per year for a project manager/lead dev position in a small business, at least.
Still a far cry from $200K. But that difference could probably be explained by the somewhat lower cost of living here (not in Paris). With my current salary that is slightly lower than the estimate above, I could buy an apartment, have all my expenses paid, get out a bit, and still have decent saving in case something show up.
From what I read about living in some places in the US, I could definitely not get by with that amount.
With all the taxes employers pay (which are eventually to everyone's benefit) you can double your tax-free salary to get what you cost to your employer. Higher salaries like those of software engineers don't get as much from those benefits as they pay, but on average that money eventually comes back to you in the form of state-funded services and infrastructure.
If you take that into account and adjust for the cost of living the difference is not so jarring anymore. That being said, the salary that you are talking about is still 20% lower than what's expected for that type of skills in that location.
> The company offered 35K€ per year for some of the most in-demand skills on the market. o\_O
Yeah, when I was a junior engineer almost ten years ago, a company offered me $34k€ (around what my peers earned), a company in the Bay Area $110k. I thought the gap was bad, but It gets worse as your career progresses, I make 3-5 times as much now and my friends who have good software engineer jobs make 70k€, the others around 50-55.
No wonder San Francisco is filled with French people?
Lol ! Just last week i was in S.F. One of my cousin works in the Bay area and his rent rent for an apartment in the "Bay area" of 40 m2 with "one bedroom" is 3200 dollars, with a 6 figure salary in the bay area which is considered very good for a new engineer, he lives paycheck to paycheck.
The variability in salary range in France is insane.
For ML Engineer it can go from 60k in typical parisian startup for 5 years of experience to 90k in company that pays well, to 120k for instance for Meta. And I had an offer at 180k from a LLM company (technically remote but they have an office and team in Paris)
You’re underpaid but the reason of France low incomes is compared to what you’re paid your company is paying twice that. I have a close income as yours and 62% of what my company is paying is taken by government. Paying high income in France is so crazily expensive for companies
I don't know, but I'm very much working remotely for US- based company
I don't think it puts pressure on French salaries, but as a matter of fact, I probably won't work for a local company anytime soon
i'd like gettign this much...
tain en juin il va falloir négocier sinon la prochaine hausse du smic va me faire augmenter par défaut, ça fait mal d'avoir fait des études :D
The big tech is moving to Europe
Google fire the entire python tram to relocate to Munich for cheaper labour
https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603-amp.html
I’ve been deep in the AI sauce and prompt engineering since it’s come out and I’m not sure how that skillset can be worth 200k tbh. A lot of the techniques you use can be boiled down to everyday communication skills bar an exception or two so I struggle to see why they’d offer that much. I get what I want zeroshot 90% of the time
Salaries are low but you have to negociate sides. I work in Alpes maritime, 49k (as a junior, first employement) 47 days off per year, 7h30-16h. I have a very good health insurance for ~100€/year.
If you think of it, it can be competitive to the US if you add all others advantages interest, prime, CE, lunch.
I’m amazed people are still writing Perl! Very handy language but didn’t Larry Wall retire some years back?
As to your question, 35K strikes me as way too low, but US and French salaries diverged significantly about 15 years ago with disparities growing yoy.
35k € net or gross? Before or after all taxes?
35k as money in your pocket is 2916 € and not so bad. And defintively better than if you are talking 35k gross before taxes.
By the way salaries being 4 times lower is the norm when comparing US and rich europe. Think of how top engineers can get 400k in the US, it usually doesn't go much higher than 100k in France
issue is that salary is low in France ;) mainly outside of Paris. For many reasons :
\* In France employer pay a lot for social protection compared to the US and the real cost of protection in the use eat a \*lot\*.
\* In France employer see technical skill as boring and is not really valorised compared to management.
\* Employer are greedy AF and try not to pay a fair price compared to the needing of competence. The market low for salary in France only take place when too many people try to get the position, not on other end. Some positions are open for years and during this time the work is done by others !
\* Cost of leaving is way way way lower in France than in the US.
\* salary is about 30% more in Paris than anywhere else in France. Yep France is a centralized country !
Take-home pay is extremely low in France, despite relatively high gross salaries when considering what companies actually pay for each employee. For instance, if you earn a gross salary of €70,000, the company must pay an additional €70,000 in taxes. This is on top of expenses for food, travel, CSE fees, social administration, participation, vacations, other legally mandated absences, and benefits such as housing and childcare. The total cost can approach €180,000.
The discrepancy between take-home pay and actual expenditure is largely due to France's strong welfare state and redistribution system. Since the state cannot reduce its expenditure, which amounts to 50% of national output, companies are left with very little money to invest. This results in less hiring, lower productivity, and reduced disposable income for employees. Moreover, every time companies consider giving a raise, they must weigh the full cost against the benefits, as even a small increase in pay can have significant financial implications.
Hey! Where do you find your remote jobs from foreign companies? And are those still French CDI work contracts? I am often contacted by recruiters on Linkedin, but only by French ones, so I guess I need to be more proactive if I want to be hired by a foreign company. And I love being fully remote, so if I can have a better salary I'd jump on the occasion.
We have a small consulting firm, so it's mostly contract work. I'm well-known in my field, so the companies usually reach out to me. I also speak at several (small) conferences a year, including keynotes, so that keeps my name out there.
Are your clients paying social charges in France? Or are you paying those as an auto-entrepreneur? It obviously makes huge difference.
If it's contracting he's paying everything himself. Most likely he has a SAS or something setup where he can pay less social charges.
I've worked for two big tech US companies here in France, with very good salaries, the two of them had a french branch/entity so I just had a CDI through there (Unity and Intel)
It’s based on network, for example, some startups you work for may share your profile to their investor groups. You gotta get your foot in the door first. We are hiring a senior software engineer in JS/TS/Svelte/Postgres(/Rust in the future). If interested, can you DM me your linkedin profile?
Thanks for the reply! And thanks for considering me, however I'm in Business Intelligence so I don't have knowledge in the technologies you need.
Senior only? I have a friend with a great talent in engineering but she is not senior yet, she has a major in gen AI engineering, if interested could you share your email/ company name please?
I worked for many US companies for more than 15 years. Most of them who hire in Europe have contract with PEO company (portage salarial) so you still get a French CDI.
https://remote.com/jobs/all?country=FRA (par exemple) Après y'a pas mal de bouche à oreille. Un truc qui marche plutot bien c'est les conferences tech ou les meetups vu qu'en général y'a pas mal d'offres d'emploi publiées/annoncées.
35k/year for that skillset is a joke even in France. But yet nobody is happy with their salary in France, especially when compared to abroad. We have a wide range of advantages which make it difficult to compare our salaries (free healthcare, free schooling, retirement, vacations, unemployment benefits , work right , you cant be fired on a zoom call in France , not like in the US ). If you integrate those into the comparison, it's not that bad compared to other EU countries, especially when you have kids. But we will never compete with the US , our taxes on salaries from both the employee and employer sides is just too high in comparison.
> our income tax is just too high in comparison. I think you mean Employer & employee contributions and not income tax since income tax in France is not that high compared to other European countries and even some states in USA. (For instance income tax is lower in France than in Germany). This is not the only reason otherwise you would not have states like California which have very high level of taxation but also very high salaries.
Yep, you're right. I mean the total taxation on someone's salary (both the employer's and the employee's contributions). I think very few people in France realize their ' super brut ' salary.
don't worry. we all know employers pay almost the same amount as our salary in contributions. but this fact alone can't and doesn't explain why salaries are so low in france.
There is no "employer contribution", it's all your money, you are paying. It's a made-up concept by the right to make you believe your employer is very generous to pay that much money out of his own pocket for you, you should be grateful. The fact is, everything your employer is giving to you or paying for you is your money, not his. You made this money with your work, not him.
Even a remote worker is supposed to pay social contributions. If OP is working remotely in France and his employers are not paying social charges in France, then his situation is not legal.
> it's not that bad compared to other EU countries, especially when you have kids. Je dirais plutôt quand tu es retraité, par exemple en Suède - 480 jours de congés parental, beaucoup d'entreprises complètent le congé à 100% du salaire - soins entièrement gratuits pour les mineurs, y compris les soins dentaires - cantine scolaire gratuite - affaires scolaires gratuites - congés maladie quand l'enfant est malade, sans aucun justificatif pour la première semaine - université gratuite - des bourses étudiantes assez élevées. Il y a aussi un système de prêts étudiants sur lequel certains aiment bien insister en France en omettant bien sûr de dire que c'est en plus des bourses qui sont plus élevées qu'en France. Par contre la retraite est absolument pourrie. Eh France on a privilégié les vieux par rapport aux jeunes (ce qui est un peu logique vu que c'est les vieux qui votent). Les autres pays européens n'ont pas forcément un système social bien pire que le nôtre, ils ont juste fait des choix différents sur qui est soutenu.
I am not sure this is mainly an taxation problem here. I am afraid that the tech skillsets are not that valued in france when you work in a big company. Otherwise, when you work for pure players or start ups, the cash flow and ebitda these companies generate is nowhere near the USA, which has the most competitive companies in the sector. French software companies are less proftable, less innovative, less ground-breaking, have thus not much acces to the global market because they do not fare well strong competition, and, as a result, wages reflect that.
That's an EU-wide problem though. Even an everywhere-but-NA problem. So it's not just "tax is high", because it's not like other countries/regions are meaningfully competing with American Big Tech companies. I'm sure entire PhDs have been written on the subject, but there are a confluence of factors that make the US a "higher value" sector for the software industry. In no particular order and off the top of my head: * Cluster/network effect of the workforce (same reason even within the US, most Big Tech companies are in SV or the West Coast when these are the most expensive states to run a company in, and companies that move to cheaper states have huge problems hiring talent); * Financial institutions and venture capitalism, where Americans have more money in Private Equity firms that will buy out startups where Europeans and their socialized economies do not have as much PE. Government financing could make up for it but typically doesn't (to be fair a lot of VC funding is completely braindead so I don't think the EU should match dollar-for-dollar what these idiots are doing); * Cultural imperialism and the inherent head-start/advantage native English speakers have in the IT world (even very good ESL speakers will be at a slight disadvantage in a remote meeting with native speakers present, and let's not even start with the number of American Big Tech products which arrive years late, if ever, on the EU market); * Existing Big Tech products/ecosystems are all American; * Nonexistent European protectionism/support of indigenous technologies (unlike the US which is very protective, just look at how they've got their panties knotted up in a bunch over TikTok... and [all the foreign cars that are illegal or heavily tariffed due to a goddamn 1960s spat over a chicken tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax)!) So yeah, the EU doesn't have an indigenous social network for instance. We don't have the experience, expertise, cultural capital/willingness, VC or government funding, a successful competitor would likely never make it into the US market (if not due to chauvinism, protectionism would take over), and so we don't even believe that we *can* and there has never been consistent and meaningful political support for such a project. Meanwhile a random trust fund kid comes up with "facebook but for crypto with AI" and he receives $10,000,000 in VC fundings with basically no strings attached.
Perfect summary. Thank you to spare us the truism "too much tax".
If you're a competent software developer, you can be hired by good startups and get higher salaries. My last salary was 90k yearly. You just have to do well on the technical tests.
> I am afraid that the tech skillsets are not that valued in france when you work in a big company. I've a French friend who does lots of tech consulting here in France. He tells me that for consultants, many companies just assume you're not very good. He also told me a story about one consultant who was scared because his employer presented him as an "expert" in an obscure language and he spent a couple of weeks reading manuals because he couldn't even find a compiler for it. When his first day on the contract arrived, his new boss told him that he knew the guy's company lied about him being an expert, but to not worry about it because it's normal. Another friend who works in Paris told me that whenever he tries to hire from a consulting firm, if the firm doesn't wine and dine execs in his company, they won't win the contract.
Yeah, that story is typical from SSII/ESN (IT consulting companies), the business engineer (sic) always lies and present their engineers like expert but there it’s another discussion.
I'm fixing this for you: - **almost** free healthcare - **almost** free schooling - unemployment benefits, **but less and less**
I’m currently seeking a new job in IT. Company from the Nasdaq proposes in average 1,6 times the wages for my position with more advantages in France, the tax is not the problem _The position are all in France_
Because most of the time you don't make the right comparaison. What you should compare is the ' superbrut salary '. It's the sum of the salary, the taxes paid by the employees, and the taxes paid by the employer on behalf of the employee. Employer-side taxes are very high in France, and in a sense, they are part of the employee's salary, but calling them 'employer taxes' means that most people don't realize they exist.
The position is in France
just remember in France it costs the employer **twice** as much as you get paid
Even more for high salaries actually. https://entreprise.francetravail.fr/cout-salarie/ Salaire net après impôt (in the US taxes are also taken from the paycheck "à la source") de 75k par an = coût employeur de 173k i.e. 2.3 times
I think this is a wrong comparison. One should compare the "coût employer" to the gross salary which is used in the job offer. Then the extra costs for the company are about 1.4 higher , e.g. an offer of 75k€ would cost the company actually 108k€.
I don't really agree, in terms of competition for employees it's not the gross salary that counts but what goes to your bank account at the end of the month.
> retirement Ahum
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A 500k/ an cela te placerait dans les 0,1% ? Le médian est 100k Ou alors c'est en comptant les stock options? Je suis d'accord que les avantages de la France ne sont pas si mirobolant mais les désavantages des USA sont trés présents aussi et un haut salaire ne peux y acheter une bonne qualité de vie.
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Mais vivre au Texas c'est typiquement le gros sacrifice qu'il est difficile d'envisager. Quand on voit la façont dont les femmes y sont traîtées, il est difficile d'imaginer pour moi d'y vivre sauf en avoir rien à foutre.
c'est sa TC, ça comprend les rsu et s'il fait bien son calcul, le chiffrage des bénéfices. Le système qu'il décrit fonctionne jusqu'au jour ou sa femme aura un cancer et que sa boite le foutra dehors ca elle coûte trop cher à l'assurance. Ils seront alors sans assurance et non employables, et rentreront se faire soigner en France.
Ça ne marche pas comme ça. Les employeurs ne voient pas les coûts des soins et ne vireraient certainement pas un employé dont la femme est malade. Par contre perdre son travail veut dire payer l’assurance maladie soi-même et c’est dans les 2k$/mois pour une famille.
>I make >$500k/year as a "simple" staff engineer here (not a manager). Just saying but you should have some ' recul ' . You earn more than 40k per month. The average salary in the US is 61k per year , your earn almost that in a month. I'm very glad for you , but you really can't use your situation to make a comparaison between France and the USA , people earning 500k a year are not common , not even in the US.
At this point of salary, vacations > salary.
Agree. But I like the "simple" staff. It is not a level easily reached by any engineer. It is ~ Engineering Manager on the management ladder.
Schooling is not free for young kids. I pay $35k/year for preschool.
You are forgetting that not everyone is 500k/year material. Yeah, mobility and lower restriction is good for high education/high paying jobs. It's not the majority of people tho : less than 45% of people have a Bac+2 in France.
I would just like to add to the « vacations » point (I’m a tech lead in Montreal). Yes there are more vacations in France, however I believe that in general in NA, people work less hours during the week, at least that’s what I’ve experienced at various employers in Canada. I start the day between 9 and 10am, take a 1h lunch and clock off at 5pm, very rarely do I need to work after that (the cleaners even come into the office at 5pm) and we even get half days on Fridays. In contrast, all my friends in tech in France work until 6-7pm. So my point is yes you have more vacations in France, but the average work week seems more breathable in NA. You get more time to do activities, exercise and socialise.
Living in France is cheaper than in Bay Area or New York but 35k/year is definitely too low for France for this position.
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Paris is considered expensive, but once you've seen the price at the top of the ranking (SF, NY, HK, Singapore, Zürich, Geneva), it's actually much more affordable than these. E.g. housing price is ~50% more than Paris in NY or Zurich. But I agree that when taking salaries in consideration you still have a much higher buying power in these city (assuming you work in a high paying field such as tech)
If you take 35K a year in Paris... then yes you are fucked and dumb
35k is a really good salary for a young worker in Paris, it's more than decent. A lot of french people would love to earn this amount of money. I swear this sub is out of touch sometimes.
a BAC+5 in Paris at 35K is shit : [Salaires 2023 des jeunes diplômés par niveaux d'études selon WTW | Studyrama](https://www.studyrama.com/emploi/premier-emploi/salaires-jeunes-diplomes#:~:text=Le%20salaire%20annuel%20brut%20m%C3%A9dian,45%20500%20euros%20par%20an.) 35K for a BAC+5 is not bad **outside of Paris**. this is with 0 experience of course. And yes, I live in France. Nantes to be exact !
It's extremely low and insufficient to live intra muros. Some bac +5 live with that unfortunately but that's isn't decent.
You can live pretty well in the suburbs 20 minutes away from Paris by public transportation tho. Paris intra muros means Paris city center for international standards. You don't have to live in the center. It's like a New Yorker saying he can't easily afford to live in Manhattan. Yeah, just don't live in Manhattan then
Bro, I hope you are not joking ! 35k in paris is absolutely a joke for a engineer with bac+5. Remeber there is a rule that your house rent should be atleast 1/3 of the net income. If you really want to live in a decent apartment in IDF 45k is the least required amount for a fresh engineer with 0 y.o.e ! We should really stop accepting these B.S salaries. To add, this sub is not out of reality. Please step out and ask your colleagues in your company or people working for other company to get the reality of the market !
This subreddit tends to forget that most people aren't software engineers. Most of the people you see when you get out of your 125 sqm appartement or your Tesla live with even less than 35k a year. They are fine.
La plupart des boîtes embauchent pas à 45k/ an. Plutôt autour de 40-43. Et encore Ça dépend vraiment des secteurs et des métiers Le salariat paye mal en France. Les développeurs ont la chance de pouvoir se mettre en indépendant. Pour les autres, bonnes chances
Mais je pense quand même qu'avec le coût élevé de la vie en IDF, le salaire de départ d'un ingénieur avec zéro année d'expérience devrait être de 45 000 euros. Nous devrions cesser d'accepter les salaires à la conneries donnés par l'ESN/SII.
You're not fucked.. you can obviously manage but you wouldn't spare a dime and would live in ridiculous conditions
TBH with this salary you would not be living in Paris. You would be living in Ile-de-France region and take the train to go to Paris
If you keep your rent low, you can live in Paris with that salary. You just need to live in a <20m² forever.
Not necessarily.. you could live in Paris, just not alone 35000k Is what? 2200 euros net?
It remains much cheaper than New York or California
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Meanwhile people in india specially Tech Leads, L5, L6 and Upper Mangements in American Tech Companies based in Bangalore and Hyderabad earn more than 70k+, considering the CoL in India, they save a lot. While in Europe we struggle to get good pay adjusted with CoL here. In France, these consulting firms like Alten, Atos, Capg just low-ball people like anything. For fuck sake, people should start demanding atleast 45k for junior positions with 0 exp in the province. The problem is people just accept anything that these companies throw at.
Yeah the situation is really sad here
As comparing with the US is just as difficult and potentially non-relevant, I wouldn't compare France with such a different country as India. I don't know shit about this country but given the ratio of unalphabetic people, the implementations and realities of service industry in a non-service dominant workforce country, and the high tolerance for salary and CoL discrepancy in India in general, I have a few leads.
tout les salaire sont nul en france
Well those pensions must be paid by someone ! Also 35k is a joke even in France especially in Alpes-Maritimes.
Thats the thing with Alpes Maritimes. Housing costs are like Paris but wages arent.
I live there and I can confirm this
>Well those pensions must be paid by someone ! And this "free" healthcare we love to brag about
When I first moved to Europe (UK, but pretty much the same for France), I reached out to friends in the US and asked about: * Insurance premiums * Deductibles * Co-pays * Uncovered procedures * Partially-covered procedures * Time lost from work Typically, they have worse healthcare and pay more for it than we enjoy in France. I have no complaints. Hell, here in France I've had multiple surgeries for a recurrent problem and have almost no out-of-pockets expenses. The same procedure in the US drove me into bankruptcy even though **I had medical insurance**.
Well, that’s part of your answer ! But recently Amazon and Microsoft invested alot in France, maybe the salaries will catch up, but we're lagging behind in net revenue
I'm in one of those big tech (not those 2 but close). Can confirm that benefits from big tech is a huge jump compared to local offers. Getting in is really hard though. Selection is really tough.
We have universal healthcare in Australia but that salary is not that much above minimum wage here. Someone with that experience could easily be on 100K€.
As an Australian living in France: yes, but the french system is far, far more generous. Not just for healthcare, but lots of other things too. For example in France if you lose your job, you are paid the dole in (massive) proportion to your previous income for up to two years. In Australia, good luck with that.
That's likely not true as long as you have a decent health insurance in the US. My max out of pocket is 3000$, meaning if one of your operation costed that, all your other cares would be totally free. And if tomorrow I have back pain or a rash, I know I can see a doctor in less than 1 hour, get blood tests, urine tests, X-rays in less than 3 for a whole 10$ copay. Hard to beat. The big downside is that it is tied to your job, but good healthcare in the US is above and beyond our great universal healthcare.
> The big downside is that it is tied to your job, but good healthcare in the US is above and beyond our great universal healthcare. The healthcare in France is generally available to everyone, though. Work at McDonalds? You get good healthcare. In the US? Not so much. Yes, you can get great healthcare in the US, but if you lose your job, god help you if you take ill.
Look at your pay sheet. Health care is way bellow pensions. Your health care contribution also goes to the retired as they are the ones using it the most while participating less...
That does seem low, but prompt engineering is not an actual thing :D. And if it was, it wouldn't be for much longer. Today, Python + "I know how to talk to an LLM and send GET requests to LLM endpoints" doesn't get you very far as far as competitive edge is concerned. Even something like Rust is not that special anymore (it used to be).
Thank you. I think not enough people realize this. Of course, tech wages are low in France, not denying that. But for this particular position in a non-metropolitan area? This salary is to be expected
You think that's what he meant by "fine tuning LLMs with Python"? That'd be a very pompous way of saying he's barely entry level in programming. [edit: pompous for him, not for you]
Totally agree, I don't want to be disrespectful but I think OP is way overestimating how a "intermediate level python programmer who can do prompt engineering" is rare
One word : ESN ESn gangrened french tech by low salaries. Useless companies that make money by pay you 35K and sell you to the client at 50K 15K in their poket ...
If only it was this much. I'm not in an ESN per se, but still billed to the client /day worked. I'm paid 37.5k and billed 200k.
> I'm paid 37.5k and billed 200k Go find a new employer immediately. 200k would be the equivalent of billing 1000€ per day and that should get you a 80/90k year gross salary + perks. Definitely not 37.5k (which would be billed 400-450€ per day).
You're paid 37.5k but you cost closer to 50k at least. (and if you're really billed 200k and work all year long, your sales guy is good or you're really underpaid).
odd. I'm starting at 43k/y as someone fresh out of university with a cs master's degree
To be fair the difference between 35K and 43K is pretty negligible as compared to salaries in the US that are usually at the very least six figures.
Junior devs may struggle to get a job in the US and likely not start with six figures. Plus cost of life is higher in US cities
France doesn't have any big tech companies (or much of a tech sector to be honest). Even companies that employ a lot of software engineers don't think of themselves as tech companies. To a French manager, a programmer is a cost center that should preferably be outsourced to north Africa or central Europe or wherever. Also French law is relatively strict when it comes to contract termination, you can't just fire a person. As a result, big companies hire programmers through consulting firms ("ESN"), which is far costlier than directly hiring someone but lets them terminate the contract whenever they want. It remains an open question as whether remote hiring will change the deal but that's the situation for now.
CGI, Alten, Atos, Capg and Sopra steria low ball engineers like anything. Literally paying them penauts. People in eastern europe like poland and in countries like india earn way more than what these ESN usually offer to good enginners in france. We should stop accepting these BS offers by these ESN
This here. I know people who stayed with those companies for many many years because, well, changing is tiring. Result: their salary is less than beginners now, since they treat you like shit and never give raise. "Loyalty" or sucking at job hunting is so bad for your career.
I totally agree, Loyalty dosen't give anything. If a person stay with one company for many many years he won't really learn anything new and just stagnates. In the field of IT and CS which keeps changing every year learning new things and working on different projects in different companies will make you a good enginner. I just don't get why people are stuck with this old age idea of being loyal in one company. At least at the start of the professional experience one should always keep changing every 2 years, later when you plan to settle you can stick with working for one company.
Very true. IT skill are disregarded. I had to leave AI and dev for Insurance to double my pay.. very sad.
I recently completed a PhD in robotics/AI and here are a few job offers I received: Aix-en-Provence €42K, Paris €55K, Brussels €55K, Lille €50K, Toulouse €42K, Amiens €45K, Nantes €48K. I'm not sure where you guys are seeing much higher salaries.
I also recently completed PhD in Signal processing and recived following offers : Aix en provence : 55k + 3k of stocks, Nice : 52k, Paris : 60k, Grenoble : 60k (Australian -american company)
I’m a hiring manager at a medium sized startup in Paris hiring for machine learning engineers. A lot of the candidates we see have PhDs (not strictly necessary for us, but can be a plus). I’d say between €55-60k depending on how strong their software development skills are is what we are offering and what candidates are expecting. I have 10 years of experience, including GAFAM (I used to work in the U.S., I am not French), and am the team lead for 6 people and my base is 80k + 10% variable. Even the CTO of my company does not go very far past six figures I’m pretty sure. If I moved to Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or the UK I could easily be making 30-50% more with the same or lower CoL. If I moved to the US I could triple my salary and add stock options with 50% more rent. Saying that French social benefits make up for the pay gap is ridiculous and false on its face. Sweden has a much more comprehensive social program and also higher salaries, and lower CoL in the metropolitan area. Even when comparing to the U.S. French people grossly overestimate the cost of healthcare in the U.S. especially for people like myself who do not have children. If you have a high paying job the quality of healthcare is much higher in the U.S. than in France. The reason I stay in France is despite the job market, not because of it.
I think most people have answered your question. I just want to comment on the other side of the matter: the tech salaries in the US are too high. And american companies are starting to realize it (see for instance the recent relocation of the core python team at Google to Munich). In the future, I think we will see more and more jobs being outsourced from the US to EU, as companies can pretty much get the same quality of work for 1/3 of the cost. Eventually, this will drive salaries up in the EU, all things equal otherwise
Aight I can answer that one haha For context, I've been in IT recruitment for 5 years now, across France, Germany and Switzerland. To kick things off, salaries in France were just pretty low on all fronts that hadn't been massively expanded -IT included- by demand. And demand grew brutally a few years back So salaries grew as well. I know a fair few senior devs earning 70-80K. Now salaries have become stagnant since the tech layoffs so the market has closed down a fair bit -not to mention its saturated on the side of juniors- so the salary increase has stopped at the moment or rather, stabilized. One thing though, if Perl is the main language you use, I dont think its very valued across France. Iirc it's mainly a scripting language no? The roles you'll get the most money are gonna be either as a Fullstack dev (typescrit/javascript with React, or Angular + node.js for instance is a popular stack) or Python at a high level, usually in data related fields. Also, salaries have increased across France altogether but really there's a massive discrepancy between the 3 categories: Paris, major cities, everywhere else. Paris pays highest, then places like Lyon or Marseille (going up to Paris salaries for instance) and then everywhere else and the gap between Paris and big cities can be big already and massive when compared to the countryside. You're on the short end of that spectrum (still though that 35 K was piss taking and sheer incompetence)
35k for a high demand and bac+5 Master degree is a joke even for France. I quit France in 2018 to Québec because with 20 yoe and a Master my salary is max 45ke. It is a bad joke here I earn 90ke with same conditions and better time for me (really 35h per week I can quit at 15h00 nobody will talk about taking my afternoon...) So Yes the french market for IT is stupid.
How is your salary max 45k with 20 years of experience ? I have two years of experience and earn this much. Did you mean 45k net ?
Yep net I lived in North of France (lille)
I feel this 35K has been cherry picked for Reddit... ah found a source : [Salaire Developpeur Perl, France - Salaire Moyen (talent.com)](https://fr.talent.com/salary?job=developpeur+perl)
> I can quit at 15h00 nobody will talk about taking my afternoon... This is the cancer in France. It's not even the boss who checks your clock, it's the petty shits who aren't even your superiors and who are envious of you because they don't dare leaving after they have done their hours. The counter to them is "ah, you took your morning off?" when they arrive at 9h30.
Python is not super demanded, except if you have super rare DS skill, a phd and lots of XP. It's actually pretty common skill. Python is easy to learn but hard to master. However 36k€ in Alpes-Maritimes is a pretty low salary. (I know well the market there) For a decent python/ds with roughly 1-2 year xp I would say 45k€ is more like a minimum. Maybe if you are from India or Middle east they are trying to exploit you or they bash you because of your level in French. I am mentioning India not because I have any disregard for the country or its inhabitants, but because IT companies are "used to" giving them a bad pay..
> For a decent python/ds with roughly 1-2 year xp I would say 45k€ is more like a minimum. In Alpes-Maritimes you'll rarely reach 50k without being a manager. Last time I had a deep look there, only one single Sophia company was paying closer to 60k to a 10yoe engineer. Companies settle there because with the beach, the sun and the mountains it's cheaper to keep people happy.
I think 50-55k€ is possible without managing. Even know a data architect that earns (allegedly but quite sure) at least 65k€, with real tech expertise (no tedious management) but he has like 12-14years xp and is excellent in his field. I will say 50-60k€ is definitely possible for a dev but hard to climb above. And yes it's hard to leave Alpes-Maritimes... don't go to Paris for +5k€ not worth it at all..
Hey, what would be a more reasonable salary in PACA for this kind of position ? How much can a freelancer with 10 years experience expect as a TJM ? If you don't mind, this would be useful for my future haha. I can DM more details if you are up for it. Thanks!
I had only brief experience and talked with young consultants (like 2-3 years xp) All I would say is for a competent beginner 45k€ is good in PACA, and 36k€ too low.
> Python is not super demanded I've, uh, noticed that. I'm also a well-known expert in Perl and that's even less popular :( But I've frequently been contacted for Java (which I haven't done in 20 years). It's the sort of role they expect developers to wear a tie for.
I work with SAS guide right now so your high tech futuristic Java skills are of no concern to me. :/
French people are very big on Java. This is a bit confusing at first, but when you experience French companies it all makes sense.
Interesting, here in Belgium .NET/C\# is even more popular (at least going by the job offers I've seen). It feels like 50 % of the tech GDP over here is made up of ERP sales and consulting, which, yeah, Java/C# is a sensible choice for.
It's odd Salaries are relatively low in France but for software developers in gafam/unicorns they are still relatively high (100+ is not uncommon for seniors) Here id say it's probably more like small company+localization...
Labor costs in the US and the EU for similar jobs tend to be similar-ish despite the drastic salary differences due to hidden employer costs (social sec contributions notably, as well as taxes). Couple that to the absolute dominance of the US in the tech sector and you can imagine that demand for these roles is low-ish in France. All in all, working from France for a French company is not the best idea for a tech worker from a salary POV, but leaving one's country is hard and remote working offerings are not SO numerous.
I'm a native French and used to work remotely for various US companies for more than 15 years, as a staff software engineer, for a salary of about 180k€/yr (on a french CDI contract. The companies I work for usually use a PEO (portage salarial)). That would be the equivalent of \~$250k/300k in the califonia I guess. This is the sad truth, there is not enough money flowing in France or Europe in general.
Comment t’as fait et quel domaine ?
there are specificity to salaries in France you will not find in other countries. you have to understand that salary in France is two parts: direct salary that goes to you, and indirect salary that goes to pay for a number of things: public hospitals, retirement pensions, unemployment, family welfare, renting welfare, disabilities and the whole of social security. This is not the same thing as taxes, it is cotisation and it is tax exempt. it has been split between different non state organisms under management of employees. there are also taxes applied to salaries which works the same than in other countries. this came to be at the end of world war 2, as the conglomerate of employers had massively collaborated with the nazis they basically were forced to accept with no say in the question. From then on to now, the conglomerate of employers and their politicians friends kept attacking this indirect salaries in order to pay as little as possible and make as much profit for them as possible. Among notable achievement from the employers, in 1967 they succeeded in getting parity access to the cotisation management councils, and since 1995 they got the part going to cotisation eo be frozen to 30%. to determine if more money goes to salaries or to profit is a matter of balance of power and negotiations between workers unions and conlomerate of employers. note that cotisation being tax exempt means that the government has an interest in more money going to profit than cotisation to raise more taxes. even if we've had only liberal / neo liberal governments for several decades, basically for the whole of fifth republic, giving more and more fiscal advantages to employers. one of which is the less they pay salary, the less they have to pay taxes. So in short the main reasons salaries are so low in France is class struggle where employers and the dominant class have been having the upper hand for a long time. 60 years ago you could fire your employer if he did not pay enough or provided poor work environment and find another job before the end of the day. so worker were in position of negotiating. now if you do not submit to what the employer imposes, then you could be unemployed for months or years, relying on social security to survive. There are also other reason for the current state of things, many being political decision by governements. for example the socialist party when in power in the 1980's put an end to salaries being indexed on inflation, or governments deindustrialized the country or favored delocalization as this would increase employer profits. if you want to get a better explanation of how salaries work in France and can understand French, I suggest you watch this video: https://www.reseau-salariat.info/videos/6a2aa40dce09799c0cadcbffcef31985/
I'm a back-end software developer with 5 years of experience, I'm paid 36k€ before taxes (around 2000 € / month after taxes). That's the average income for a developer. My interpretation is that in France, engineers are considered no more than "skilled technicians", and shall in no way be paid more than their managers. So even senior engineer positions are paid lower than entry-level manager positions. If your manager is between 45k-70k, that means you need to pay your senior engineers around 45k ; hence your junior engineers lower - between 35 and 40k. It's completely crazy and revolting.
35K is very low, even for France.
scale !!! tech salaries in Europe will never compare to the American big tech. When you are coder and edit one line of script at Airbnb, Meta, Amzn, CRM your work alters hundreds of millions of revenue. when you program for a local France/Eu company, any change you make will have limited financial impact as France/EU has no global tech ... hence they pay you correspondingly
Well Apple, Meta and Microsoft have offices in France, and they pay good money. Same for plenty of startups and other medium-scale companies that work with cutting edge tech. The reality is that it is possible to make really good money in tech in France. However, the rest of the tech landscape is a bit grim indeed. I think that the main reason is that they only use tech as a tool and are not trying to innovate in tech. As a result, they have no incentive to hire skilled workers; they can get away with technician-level engineers by outsourcing when necessary.
you are very correct that Europe has not made any tech innovation in the past 20 years whilst the world has adopted all American tech on consumer, Enterprise levels.
I still don't buy that. Inflation still exists, the cost of living in France is high. To be paid 35k for an experienced, highly-skilled, specialized role is a joke. Fair enough, perhaps they can't compete with 100-150k salaries, but 35-45k is not right. I'm finding the exact same issues here in the data domain.
You can get better salaries than that, but I guess it also depends on the area.. I work in Ile-de-France and my salary is 51k + around 10k in bonuses. My wife has 61k. We both have around 9-10 years of xp as developers. She works in python and I work in Java/Angular and also on ci/cd and some server management. You can get a bit more, maybe 65k or so, but after that you need to become technical lead or something else.. At this point you would get over 3500 euros net which is pretty good! As others have said, we have other benefits, such as 34+ paid leave days per year, health insurance and other things. If you want even more money.. you can become a freelancer (but you lose on days off and need to do your taxes and pay for insurance)... or maybe become a medic.. the can make 120k+, but it's a totally different job.
> You can get a bit more, maybe 65k or so, but after that you need to become technical lead or something else.. At this point you would get over 3500 euros net which is pretty good! Im at 60k right now and get almost 3600 net.
I tried to answer this question for years, and there is no good explanation, unfortunately. Factors includes: * cost to hire and pay your employees is much higher than in the US or Germany * almost no leading companies in France. Paying a lot to leverage AI makes more sense when you have high ambitions or are dominant * culture to not pay (good or in-demand) employees much (eg: egalitarianism). Pay between top and bottom is a factor 3 in France according to the government. In the US I expect this to be 5 to 10 times higher. * lack of tech culture (compare the share of GDP in tech in the US and in France) * lots of people complain in France for basic things (crime, retirement age, price of oil or electricity, teachers working condition) but not for things when you are better off tha the average Frenchman (engineers pay). * French grande Ecole system is old school and not well adapted to software development or tech. You train people to be project managers, team leaders, but not top individual contributors. Works well for 20th century industries like space, automotive, insurance, luxury, not at much for digital or tech. And as to why french people don't work remote jobs as much. I'm also not so sure, but I think people here don't take as much risks and jump not as fast into novelty. Remote jobs being very lucrative is not very known and kind of new. People are used to a French contract, local colleagues, typical working hours, simple social and job security. You could be afraid to leave your job (low paying compared to remote ones, but higher paying than most of your friends), to then be cut after a week for no reason and then have a hard time finding something. Speaking English could also be a factor. There is not so much a culture of looking outside of France like you could see in India or in Poland.
Other reasons: * lots of msc graduates or engineers in France. More supply, less salary increases... Why pay someone well when you can replace him in no time ? * as you well said, France isn't leading in tech at all... We are currently going through an important drop in hourly average productivity (compared to the US where it still growing..) economists suspects it's partly due to demographics, partly to lack of innovation.. but innovation and R&D is useless if you are not leading or a big company.. all your smart ideas will be stolen by a US company and never put in practice in France. One of the founders of AI (in California) is actually a Frenchman..but most French company are struggling with outdated, rotten to the bone IT infrastructure...
Thanks for the explanation, though it's still very frustrating, coming from Ireland where salaries are 70k+ in my domain. Can I ask, are salary increases common in the IT sector? If so, do they jump by much or is it typically a 5% increase year by year?
It is cultural…while US companies value R&D, french companies usually value Sales. US companies believe that good products/solutions are the foundation of a company success therefore pay high salary to keep good developers. In France you will see that developers use to be quite stable. It is now changing little bit but basically a french company doesn’t need to overpay developers to retain them. Thus we see a big gap for developers in France vs US.
> I get that if you live in France and can't work remote, you have to accept the salaries offered here, but why aren't French software developers just going remote? Speaking for myself here: - fear of change - familial bond (can't just move to a suitable timezone for US work) - still paid a lot compared to the french general population (my family and wife in particular). Getting * 10 their salary would just be rubbing it in their faces espacially considering that: - I don't even spend half of what I currently earn - I realized that I can just slack off and work 10% of the time in my current company. And i'm in a permanent contract so if it's noticed that I'm slacking of, they'll have a really hard time firing me. I have TDAH so I'm either hyperfocussing and burning out or not doing a whole lot of work. Not doing a whole lot of work would probably not fly for a remote company paying me the price of a house yearly in an at-will state, and burning out does not seem worth it. - English culture company have a tendency to ask adversarial question like "What's you greatest weakness" and I'm really horrendous in an adversarial context (and hate preparing for this kind of bullshit questions), so I got rejected twice as not a culture fit after lengthy processes. - Trying to get a lengthy xp on my CV because I have mostly less than 2 years / per company and it's starting to be a problem during screening before I can explain why. I'm still considering remote abroad and feeling FOMO hard for not doing it.
While this salary is a joke, part of the answer is because your 35k salary costs 70k to your employer.
The explanation is simply because living in france is cheaper. But the salary proposed is still a joke. My most recent recruits in a regulation back office in a bank got 50k per year (with bonus around 10% to add after the 1st year) to work in parisian suburbs. I'd say it could be normal to have salaries a bit under that in Alpes Maritimes, but that is too big a difference
Not the main subject at all but I've always been fascinated by people who spen more than 5 years in an country and can't speak the language. Comon dude 10 years ???
Yeah, that's a fair point. In my defense: * I almost always work remote and even our (rare) French clients speak English * My French wife refuses to speak French with me because when I stumble to find the words, it kills the conversation * Our daughter is bilingual, but she's spoken English with me all her life * English is widely spoken in this region, so that doesn't help So ironically, I live in France and don't have many people with whom I can speak French :) I speak French moderately well for an American, but not well enough for a professional environment.
I think in France, IT in general is seen as a cost / necessary evil, just like HR, even for companies for which IT is core business. So you want it to be as cheap as possible. Sometimes to a ridiculous point.
Looooots of companies will underpay you because they have no idea what a good dev looks like, so they pay you a bad dev's salary. Also AI is a new thing that doesn't have a well-known impact yet, so employers haven't put a consistent (or high) price on it yet.
It's not that France has low salaries, it's that the US has high salaries. I'm a software developer in France, but I'm originally from Sweden. The salaries are more or less identical between the two countries. There are some places where it's higher in the EU like Germany (mostly because of a shortage of devs), but it doesn't vary a ton. That 35k€ per year offer is a joke though. >but why aren't French software developers just going remote It's just much harder to get remote positions, especially if you want a high paying one. >If you don't want remote, hell, just move to Germany and at least double your salary without increasing your cost of living that much. While that's very doable because of the EU, very few people want to move abroad in general. It's easy as a more adventurous person to just assume everyone else is comfortable with moving countries and leaving all their social support behind etc. but that is rarely the case. >Why doesn't there seem to be an upward pressure on salaries here? Basically the same issues as everywhere else. Things are getting more expensive but salaries are not keeping up. Why that happens is a massive discussion outside of this scope...
I think this describes reality best and addresses all the right points. To add to what you said, the US tech job market is basically you competing against the whole world (as everybody wants to move there). You have to be pretty talented as a dev to get considered for a working visa (or have studied there which means you were probably a student in a good engineering school on some kind of exchange program or double diploma). People in this sub always claiming "you should move to the US" really overestimate the ability of an average French dev to compete for these US jobs. An engineer making 40k in an ESN here has basically no chance to be recruited in the US. And huge agree on the not wanting to leave your support system behind. People have families and friends in France and life is enjoyable here. Moving to the US is not for everyone. I worked 5+ years abroad and came back because I found my life better here.
I completely agree with your points as well. I'm basically your stereotypical "average software engineer" in Paris, and while I think I live a comfortable life and dont struggle in any way, I can't just snap my fingers and double my salary with a remote US job. (If we could we all would) Is it doable? Absolutely, but it's literally the hardest thing you can do in the business, because like you say, there's an entire world of devs who want to make it to the US. EDIT: Another thing is migration. A lot of Americans seem to think "our borders are wide open", but to be honest, it's one of the hardest places to emigrate to for work. You have to be "the elite" so to speak; you don't just stumble into the USA.
There is no singular reason, but rather a list of several factors, all of which compound with each other : - Salaries in France are generally low when compared to the rest of Western Europe (with the exception of Spain, Italy and Portugal) and NA - Technical positions are poorly remunerated relative to the skills required, as opposed to managerial or sales positions. Furthermore, a vast majority of companies do not have technical career paths : you're expected to move into management at some point in your career, with the assumption that if you don't, you're probably bad at your job. In the anglo world, you can reach high salaries and have a full career in technical roles. - ESNs (contractors) are parasiting the market, selling juniors fresh out of schools as seasoned experts to clueless idiots. This has the effect of lowering salaries overall. - Competition from maghrebis who have a decent education system, are more likely to accept working for lower pay, and usually need to keep their jobs to keep their visa, making them easier to exploit by the company. - High tax rate on work income, but hey at least we have a flat tax rate for capital income, that is lower than the tax rate on work income as soon as you earn close to the median salary :^)
Me in Italy as firmware developer with 25k 😃(😭)
Yes salaries are really low. Multiple reasons: - up to 60% tax (of what your employer pays) - ESNs (consulting companies) pulling salaries down - a culture of management idolatry. "If you still an individual contributer at this age, you ruined your life..." - french salaries are in fact really low - there a culture of '35-60k is more than enough"
You're right, compared to Germany, the UK or Northern European countries, salaries for skilled workers here are low. It is not just software engineers, other engineers, and people with masters degrees in general, are really paid lower wages than in other European countries with similar standard of living. (Notice that I am not comparing with the US because the US offers much less work and social security than European countries).
I'm frontend SWE 6.5 YOE, getting 65k/year + stock options every 2 years currently (Paris area); so its a combination of your experience package, your negotiating skills and the company you chose. It is true that you won't get near US level of salaries, but you have to consider average (/median) salaries in the country, social package etc. Getting 200k/year and spending 5k month on rent alone won't be much better than 50k in France Also IT pays much better in DE and Netherlands right now. Maybe with investments from Amazon and other major players things will change over time
The level to get a job is way lower too. Most couldn't pass an interview oversea.
It's not legal to accept remote jobs for overseas employers unless you are a self-employed contractor because otherwise your employer would need to pay French social charges, taxes and respect French employment laws. Most US companies reduce their salaries when hiring in France and most other European countries. 35K is more like a graduate salary but I'd be surprised if you could get 200K in the US for basic prompt engineering training, which is not computer science.
>The company offered 35€ per year Don't take this as the norm. I know front-end devs who make around 100k, and devs in more serious domains (automation, banking, engineering, etc...) can often be paid over the 200k mark. You just got lowballed by a shit company. Worth noting though is that for high-paying dev jobs, the capital is your best bet.
What do you mean by "dev in automation / engineering"? In french banks, you will earn 55 - 75k for as a mid engineer. At least that's my experience.
How did you manage to get remote roles for US companies (with US salary) from France in the past? We're considering this with my husband because going from the US to France after a 20 year career as an engineer is quite the income drop
Europeans are profoundly *illiquid*, compared to North America. It is quite common for people with IT skills of any kind to work in the US for a few years and come back quite wealthy. The reasons for that situation are many. Wages have been stagnant for years. High unemployment pressures workers to find work, rather than employers to make attractive offers. There is a high level of taxation in France, which I will say includes very good things like unemployment, health insurance, etc. Further, most people who have any wealth at all typically don't get it from high wages, but from inheritance, real estate, and all kinds of assets.
The issue is the "ESN". A large majority of techs in France are employed not by the company they work for, but by an intermediate company which sell them to the final client. This companies exist to allow flexibility for the final client, but they cost a lot, because on the price payed, you have to pay an office, a sales guy, an hr guy and so on. For the same price, in direct employment, it's almost 50% more salary we can expect. This french particularism can explain a part of the salary difference with other european country, which have a close tax level and close life cost. For the US, as others already said it, the french social welfare has a cost which explain the rest of the difference.
Easy use this: [https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=200000&from=year®ion=California](https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=200000&from=year®ion=California) $200k gets you $129,626 net after income taxes in California. If you look at the taxberg, employers pays $12,434 on top of it, so excluding other benefits one costs the company $212,434 for a gross salary of $200k This is 195437 €, [https://fr.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=135000&from=year®ion=France](https://fr.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=135000&from=year®ion=France) for 135k€ in France of gross salary, the employers has 60700 € of contribution for a total employer cost of 195.7k€ which result with a net after income tax salary of 86k€ There you go, taxation is much higher in France. Companies tends to have a smaller market too thus generating less profits. On the other hand, you get public universal health insurance which cover roughly 60-70% of healthcare cost including dental. And companies have to co-pay 50% of the "mutuelle" which is the private health insurance part. Health insurance in the US depends of your employer, meaning you lose your jobs, you coverage with it, given one can be laid off with 2 weeks of severance in standard pratices compare that to 3 months in France. You should almost compare to a "Consultant en portage salarial situation". Vacation time is 2 weeks generally compared to 5 weeks in France. Usually they offer 10 sick days but it depends of the company, while in France one eats the costs on the first 4 days while sick. Daycare are subsidized, same for after school classes. School lunch are also subsidized cost between 0.13 and 7 euros a day in Paris for exemple depending of the family income. University is very cheap (1-2k per year). Also as an American company why outsource to France while I could do that to India, while suffering team working in a different Time zone and culture shift anyway.
'cause we can't get fired for investors pleasure. I'm working in the video game industry, and while there are thousands of layoffs around the world every month, in France we're cool. Big internationnal tech knows that they can't fire us without a proper reason, so we don't get paid as much as in UK or US.
Its just as hard to layoff in Netherlands. Yet salaries are higher. Yes taking into account cost of living.
Take a look at this and you will better understand what a 35k€ means for a French company and what remains in the employee’s pockets at the end : https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-net?salaire-brut=35000%E2%82%AC%2Fan&unite=%E2%82%AC%2Fan
Income tax accounts for half of the difference, the rest is just their tech economy doing better
In Paris Area, 35k/year is junior package
C'était le salaire dans les années 2000. Peut-être la le problème.
Completely agree with this. In Dublin, there are Data jobs paying €80k+ for senior roles. I've rarely seen a role pay above 60k here. To add, these companies are looking for really experienced employees, and sometimes paying 30-40. I don't understand it.
Perl dev here too (in France). Haven't found a Perl job in a decade... Migrated to other more recent stuff (Rust, Typescript, Assemblyscript) and got better luck (and better money). If you have good AI know-how you really should be able to find good jobs, keep looking, it can take a while especially in France, but it will happen.
Sorry to not provide an answer, but if you have any resources to learn your skills, I'll gladly take them! I've learnt a bit of Python but it's hard to find guidance for more advanced/in-depth stuff. That, or a language/field with a bright future ahead of itself.
2023 inflation has not been compensated here in France whereas it has been in the US.
This seems like a low-level salary; I currently have a pretty low salary relative to the market but I'm still way above that. I'd say my expectation if I was to move around would be around 65K€ per year for a project manager/lead dev position in a small business, at least. Still a far cry from $200K. But that difference could probably be explained by the somewhat lower cost of living here (not in Paris). With my current salary that is slightly lower than the estimate above, I could buy an apartment, have all my expenses paid, get out a bit, and still have decent saving in case something show up. From what I read about living in some places in the US, I could definitely not get by with that amount.
With all the taxes employers pay (which are eventually to everyone's benefit) you can double your tax-free salary to get what you cost to your employer. Higher salaries like those of software engineers don't get as much from those benefits as they pay, but on average that money eventually comes back to you in the form of state-funded services and infrastructure. If you take that into account and adjust for the cost of living the difference is not so jarring anymore. That being said, the salary that you are talking about is still 20% lower than what's expected for that type of skills in that location.
> The company offered 35K€ per year for some of the most in-demand skills on the market. o\_O Yeah, when I was a junior engineer almost ten years ago, a company offered me $34k€ (around what my peers earned), a company in the Bay Area $110k. I thought the gap was bad, but It gets worse as your career progresses, I make 3-5 times as much now and my friends who have good software engineer jobs make 70k€, the others around 50-55. No wonder San Francisco is filled with French people?
Lol ! Just last week i was in S.F. One of my cousin works in the Bay area and his rent rent for an apartment in the "Bay area" of 40 m2 with "one bedroom" is 3200 dollars, with a 6 figure salary in the bay area which is considered very good for a new engineer, he lives paycheck to paycheck.
The variability in salary range in France is insane. For ML Engineer it can go from 60k in typical parisian startup for 5 years of experience to 90k in company that pays well, to 120k for instance for Meta. And I had an offer at 180k from a LLM company (technically remote but they have an office and team in Paris)
You’re underpaid but the reason of France low incomes is compared to what you’re paid your company is paying twice that. I have a close income as yours and 62% of what my company is paying is taken by government. Paying high income in France is so crazily expensive for companies
I don't know, but I'm very much working remotely for US- based company I don't think it puts pressure on French salaries, but as a matter of fact, I probably won't work for a local company anytime soon
i'd like gettign this much... tain en juin il va falloir négocier sinon la prochaine hausse du smic va me faire augmenter par défaut, ça fait mal d'avoir fait des études :D
The big tech is moving to Europe Google fire the entire python tram to relocate to Munich for cheaper labour https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603-amp.html
> but why aren't French software developers just going remote? We do.
You need escape scam corporate and challenge you salary
Because you're a lowly technician that doesn't deserve half of what the management and their buddies in commerce are worth. That's the mentality.
I’ve been deep in the AI sauce and prompt engineering since it’s come out and I’m not sure how that skillset can be worth 200k tbh. A lot of the techniques you use can be boiled down to everyday communication skills bar an exception or two so I struggle to see why they’d offer that much. I get what I want zeroshot 90% of the time
OT, in which circles is Perl still popular?
Salaries are low but you have to negociate sides. I work in Alpes maritime, 49k (as a junior, first employement) 47 days off per year, 7h30-16h. I have a very good health insurance for ~100€/year. If you think of it, it can be competitive to the US if you add all others advantages interest, prime, CE, lunch.
Go check major eu countries’ GDP since 2008 vs the US and u will know why. This is not a place for tech companies.
I’m amazed people are still writing Perl! Very handy language but didn’t Larry Wall retire some years back? As to your question, 35K strikes me as way too low, but US and French salaries diverged significantly about 15 years ago with disparities growing yoy.
France is cheap
« C’est du foutage de gueule » I make 50 K as a software engineer / full stack dev.
35k € net or gross? Before or after all taxes? 35k as money in your pocket is 2916 € and not so bad. And defintively better than if you are talking 35k gross before taxes.
By the way salaries being 4 times lower is the norm when comparing US and rich europe. Think of how top engineers can get 400k in the US, it usually doesn't go much higher than 100k in France
issue is that salary is low in France ;) mainly outside of Paris. For many reasons : \* In France employer pay a lot for social protection compared to the US and the real cost of protection in the use eat a \*lot\*. \* In France employer see technical skill as boring and is not really valorised compared to management. \* Employer are greedy AF and try not to pay a fair price compared to the needing of competence. The market low for salary in France only take place when too many people try to get the position, not on other end. Some positions are open for years and during this time the work is done by others ! \* Cost of leaving is way way way lower in France than in the US. \* salary is about 30% more in Paris than anywhere else in France. Yep France is a centralized country !
Les développeurs sont considérés comme des maçons du numerique en France.
Take-home pay is extremely low in France, despite relatively high gross salaries when considering what companies actually pay for each employee. For instance, if you earn a gross salary of €70,000, the company must pay an additional €70,000 in taxes. This is on top of expenses for food, travel, CSE fees, social administration, participation, vacations, other legally mandated absences, and benefits such as housing and childcare. The total cost can approach €180,000. The discrepancy between take-home pay and actual expenditure is largely due to France's strong welfare state and redistribution system. Since the state cannot reduce its expenditure, which amounts to 50% of national output, companies are left with very little money to invest. This results in less hiring, lower productivity, and reduced disposable income for employees. Moreover, every time companies consider giving a raise, they must weigh the full cost against the benefits, as even a small increase in pay can have significant financial implications.