I'm currently a front-end web developer in France.
I have an experience of 3 years of web-based front-end dev. Before that, I was developping GUIs with Qt and C++ during 3 years.
My main skills are writing code, designing software architectures and as I'm in a small company I do a little UX work as well.
I have some back-end notions. I could focus on that an improve it considerably with a little time and effort, but that's not what I like the most today.
I'm considering changing jobs soon. My number one concern today is money (as i'm currently looking to pay my mortgage and eat something else than bread and pasta). I reckon it will shift toward getting a project with a little more meaning and technical challenges in the next 2 or 3 years, when the money problem is solved.
What field/technologies could be a good time investment ?
I’m living in Paris and having the same concern as the OP, wondering which technologies one could invest in to have a better pay.
I heard the best way is to do contracting, but I wonder what prerequisites/technologies one needs to start contracting at a high rate.
Salaries are low (I made the same money in London as a junior that I would in Paris as a senior), bureaucracy and bullshit jobs are rampant - in fact, engineers aren’t really a prestigious position and some paper-pushing idiot delivering zero net value (besides creating work for other paper-pushers) will end up getting more money and recognition - the entire working culture is based on bullshit jobs, much more so than other countries and there’s always this mindset of “us versus them” and being at odds with management, something that ultimately leads to disaster especially in IT (I can’t imagine working if I had to be in conflict with my line manager who’s also a senior developer and gives me invaluable advice). Finally IT is considered as some kind of rocket science or black magic where they require 5+ years of higher education for anything even remotely related to IT (tech support, etc) which means getting into the industry is very hard unless you are ready for 5 years of misery before being able to get your dream job.
The second part I didn't see. A lot of colleague work without a 5+ year degree on some technical jobs.
More, I feel that the engineering spirit has been lost in the it jobs. Working as an engineer doesn't necessarly require a 5 year degree (it helps). I feel there's a lot of hype around high level tools, a lot of trends and very very few focused thinking. Most of my colleages don't seem to want to know how a computer works or how their framework is implemented. When something doesn't work as expected I see a lot of panicked faces, very few focused ones.
THOUGH, I have heard some good things about the usual big names (Google, Facebook, whatever) and you can get some sweet work conditions in the public (or very near to public) sector.
In contracting the big differentiator seems to be working for yourself vs being sold by a company, so go to more meetups, try getting freelance jobs on your own. I don't know anything about the regulatory environment for such but it's supposed to have gotten easier in recent years.
The biggest differentiator really is - be in demand. Companies prefer to hire employees and get contractors only if they must, i.e. if no one wants to join as a perm at the wage they offer. So, to contract, you need to be at the high end of the market. Luckily, due to craziness of the tech threadmill, all it takes is getting some experience in the newest/hottest tech in a given area (such as frontend/backend/mobile/bigdata etc.)
A friend of mine with a 3 years experience just got a 45k salary in Aix en Provence for C++ qt gig. I reckon it's above avetage but not that much above. But he is very good at negotiating his salary.
As some others mentioned, France is not the best when it comes to tech salaries. That being said, if you want to make more money, you will either have to prove that you can bring more value or build something of your own. If you feel limited by the market in France, then a few US companies will be interested in hiring you as a contractor. You will then have to pay a bunch of taxes you didn't know about in France but your cash inflow will increase if you price yourself right.
In terms of technology, what everyone looks for is a general understanding of software (architecture, algorithms, data structure, etc) and then mastery in one or more languages. I'd recommend looking into a functional language (Scala, Elixir etc) to broaden your thinking as well.
I'm glad to read that. I focus a lot on those aspects of the job, and I think that they are very important to produce good work. These are the aspect of the job I love most. Interviewers around here (south of france) don't seem to be interested in that. They tend to ask very specific questions about languages or framework instead.
This process is both very exciting and stressing. It is very different once you actually get on campus for the first time and realize that despite being a western country, the culture in the US is very different. Adapting to that is important. Then after a few years, the most challening part of your adaption imo is to resolve your adopted culture with the culture you grew up with.
What kind of skills in particular would you recommend to work on and how does one go about improving said skills ?
just saying
A good place to start would be to learn GatsbyJS. It's a "static" site generator using React. It's super fast and easy to get started. Gridsome is the Vue alternative, but it's not quite as polished as Gatsby.
In Paris, you can easily get a job with 55K€ as a Salesforce developer after 2 years of experience. A confirmed developer (4 to 5 years) can earn 65K€ without any problem.
Salesforce provides a lot of content and training to be a Salesforce developer: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/for...
PS: I am the CEO of a small company and we are looking for people who want to learn Salesforce and to be a Salesforce developer. If you’re interested, send me an email at hello@bluefactory.io
I am from Brazil and I am looking for a job right now in the US or remote. The sheer quantity of React positions everywhere makes it a certainty that the best time investment right now is React. Not a single doubt in my mind that this is true for the next 2-3 years.
But don't neglect some fundamentals that count a lot for the best paying jobs. Back-end knowledge is one. It will be valuable for employers to know about at least one back-end for web tech (Rails, Django...), good SQL skills, some basic devops knowledge like continuous integration configuration, strong Javascript, etc.
To make money on it you can make a pro plan.
