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Ask HN: Paris vs Silicon Valley engineering culture

5 points by lasryaric ↗ HN
Hi there. I am a french software engineer who spent years working in Silicon valley big companies and start-ups (Apple, Drive.ai, Aurora autonomous driving, YC, and so on).

Two years ago I moved to France and started looking for opportunities in Paris. I found the culture to be quite different. I went on many interviews, and here are the differences I have observed:

- Interview questions are less uniform, you have very different formats and questions from one company to another. Feels like the industry is warming up, but is not mature yet. - Questions are focused on high-level concepts like Domain drive design, using classes vs functions, whereas in silicon valley you get asked questions about data structures and algorithms, multi-threaded programming, guarantees of a system, pros and cons of a system, etc. - I found the interviews to be a lot easier.

I am having a hard time understanding if: - This is just a different culture? - The industry is not as mature? - This is an industry-wide shift? - I am just nostalgic of California? :)

To be honest, I found the quality of apps that you can find on the French app store not as good as the ones you can find in the US (Seloger.com vs trulia, Venmo vs Lydia,...), but we also have some insanely good apps (Alan, Molotov TV). That being said, I have no actual quantitative way of measuring that.

To be clear: I am not implying that people are smarter in the valley than in France, my overall feeling is more about the maturity of the ecosystem. In the valley, start-ups have been around for a longer time, you have people who moved from big tech to startups, back to big tech, and so on...

Any insight is welcomed, I am just sharing my overall feeling here. Be kind :)

6 comments

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idiomaticrust
I've read a book about Polish game dev studio's history and IIRC this was about CDA - they wanted to have something in Paris to develop games. So they hired some studios there and this studio hired developers and started to work on the new game.

But there was really small progress. Managers talked with managers, and weeks and months passed, but there were no satisfying results.

Big bosses of the company wanted to figure out what is going on, so they started visiting their Paris investment. It turned out that developers in Paris start work around 10 am, they have lunch in the middle and they end work around 2, sometimes 3 pm if they stay late for their job :D

Maybe it's game dev specific thing there. I don't know. Story was described in book "Nie tylko Wiedźmin. Historia polskich gier komputerowych"

lasryaric
Ahah, what I have observed here (I have been in 3 start-ups and interviewed quite a few people) is that people work much longer hours. It's a pretty well-known thing among french expats: if you come back to France, you are more likely to work longer hours.

Again, this is just my view of the industry, with a few data points here and there.

idiomaticrust
From personal experience, I prefer to work for US companies. I worked for a few US based and for one French.

The gig in France didn't end well - I had to build an MVP of a video streaming service. It wasn't even a full-time job - it was part-time work - 4 hours per day. It ended after around 4 months.

It turned out that: - my everyday reports that I've sent wasn't read - they didn't test platform at any stage while I was developing it - they thought that if I received an HTML+CSS design from them it will be super easy to add missing features - they thought that HTML+CSS is like 80% of the work done :) - they were super not satisfied with result that they had after 4 months

And of course, it was just my fault :)

Shinmon
Doesn't sound like a France vs US issue but more like a really shitty experience at a shitty company.
idiomaticrust
Yes, of course. Over the years I had a mostly positive experience with North American companies - I may be super biased here, but I prefer to work for these companies.
Shinmon
That's valid point. Just wanted to mention that it isn't necessarily fair to French companies to judge them by one bad apple.

Another side not, which probably doesn't apply here, but in general: Work culture is different everywhere. Not better or worse, but just different and coming into a company with the wrong expectations and behavior is probably a recipe for disaster.