[leoedin]

Contracting rates in Paris seem to be much higher - €700-€1000 a day seems common from what I’ve seen.

I suspect a big part of it is labour laws. The UK is similar. Companies don’t want to take on the legal commitment of a high salary person, so they take on contractors instead.

[Beretta_Vexee]

This will depend enormously on the company: a consulting and IT services company like Capgemini will employ Moroccan university graduates at 32K€/year. Apple will recruit the best engineers from telecoms companies, arms manufacturers, research institutes and intelligence services for 120K€/year and the same in share, equity.

France knows how to train excellent engineers and give them responsibilities in major government bodies, but doesn't know how to keep them in France. A glass ceiling is rapidly forming for engineers. French companies only value management. There's also this constant desire on the part of French companies to go low-cost.

The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit.

[smartties]

> The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit.

Your comment is on point, though I’d slightly adjust the part about French engineers career goal. From my experience, many French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries. They also often have never heard of leetcode/system design/behavioral interviews. They assume their career trajectory depends almost entirely on the ranking/prestige of their engineering school (which is true for french companies), but in practice, most U.S. recruiters/companies don’t even know what a French engineering school is. A bachelor/master degree and a good grind on leetcode is enough for them.

For most students I studied with, the dream is to secure a 45K~50k salary right after graduation, and target 80k as an end-of-career goal, by following this path:

-Attend a top engineering school.

-Join a CAC40 company as a software engineer.

-Transition into management after 10–15 years.

[Beretta_Vexee]

> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.

I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.

French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.

I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.