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 :)
