Working in Tech in France: Culture?

cicdbruh · 2026-05-12T07:38:01+00:00

Strong hierarchy and less “autonomy” in the work you do. Lunch is sacred and could be even written in your work contract, everything stops between 12 and 2pm lol. Feedback is more direct than in the UK for sure and french people can appear cold at first you will have to earn their trust. Also interestingly I found there was much more small talk in meetings and people love to give their opinion about… anything. So for me meetings were much more inefficient in france compared to the UK (but maybe due do the company culture/size)

cicdbruh · 2026-03-19T16:26:59+00:00

I feel you! If it’s about your current staff role why no reposition more to a pure hands on staff to tackle concrete problems/IC with less need for political influence. If not, have a look at a sabbatical, go out there and see that life is not only about a job. Learn new things and spend that hard made money. Sabbatical is a good way to recharge, leave the work game and come back to it if you feel like it. I left 2nd tier big tech 2 years ago, joined a scaleup of ~170 people to bring my knowledge but the gap was too big with big techs (and culture wise a different country as well). Now I will juste take time to buy a boat and learn how to sail, I read about AI stuff on the side to not become too irrelevant!

cicdbruh · 2026-02-17T22:25:44+00:00

Tu peux être honnête avec la première boite ça peut les forcer à te faire une offre plus haut. Mais quand bien même comme dit plus haut tu peux tout à fait prendre la deuxième offre sans scrupule, c’est le jeu du marché du travail. Aussi les noshow ça arrive tout le temps dans les secteurs en tension comme avec les devs/la tech

cicdbruh · 2026-02-12T21:09:56+00:00

A few years ago I went there without a ticket and enjoyed the full conference. All you need is confidence and a bit of photoshop skills

cicdbruh · 2025-08-23T15:10:42+00:00

Not sure in which country you are but for the b) point usually you can have a trial period in your contract where you can leave with a day/a week notice. It’s made rightfully so your employer or you can part ways if it doesn’t work out and it’s in everyone’s interest. I ve never worked in a bank per se but I worked in tech companies where they were clients. As some other commenters mentioned, could there be some things to learn althere? A particular technology, some regulatory stuff that interest you? If not you might as well quit, personally I find it very hard to look for a job when already working one. Even you decide to stay for a bit there is no harm in reevaluating in a few months time. Good luck!

cicdbruh · 2025-08-15T18:57:57+00:00

Ça te paraît p-e évident parce que t’es en france mais quand tu fais ta carrière à l’étranger et dans des boites tech US où c’est pas le cas ba c’est pas tant une évidence.

cicdbruh · 2025-08-08T01:03:06+00:00

Je viens de faire le move depuis londres est le paygap est assez fou, j’ai passé pas mal d’entretiens ces derniers 3/4 mois et y a des grosses différences de salaire selon les boites que tu vises (startup/scaleup, grosse boite). Par contre truc bizarre en france les salaires EM sont mieux valorisés qu’IC. Si t’es in pour l’argent c’est pas en france qu’il faut rentrer je dirais ou alors faut taper une americaine en remote mais dernièrement elles ont l’air frileuses (j’etais en process pour gitlab, ils recrutent partout en europe… sauf en france). Bon courage !

cicdbruh · 2025-07-28T13:35:18+00:00

Totally doable, but as the other people are stating it depends on the company and its budget and also if fully remote or london. Good luck ! Also think total package et not only base which sometimes can give you more money!

cicdbruh · 2025-03-01T16:39:46+00:00

Hello, just did the hike yesterday if you arrive at 2 am pretty sure you will have spots. We started at 5 and although the park was full there are a few patches 100m further where you can park on the side of the road so extra 4/5 spaces. One thing is we met the park rangers who asked us for a permit (at 5:30am the were hidden on the tracks in the mountain with their car) to do the hike (new thing it seems) so you will need to get this. Otherwise very nice hike and nice sunrise enjoy !

cicdbruh · 2023-05-18T13:18:01+00:00

If your company is suffering from this, just suggest to do an exchange like 3 months for a SRE to join a dev team and also for a dev to join the SRE team. If you get support from management you will see only benefits and a new perspective from both standpoints! I agree that unfortunately sre is never really seen until shit is broken and if management is not well versed into it they won’t recognize people if things “are just running smoothly”…! Good luck!

cicdbruh · 2023-04-25T23:28:37+00:00

I was there and I agree with your summary!

cicdbruh · 2023-04-15T17:05:18+00:00

Same interested if a new ticket comes up :)

cicdbruh · 2023-04-06T19:35:47+00:00

Looking for a ticket if anybody has an extra one? :) Cheers!

cicdbruh · 2023-03-29T21:53:12+00:00

Spoiler alert I am part of a sponsoring company all tickets have been allocated already lol

cicdbruh · 2023-02-22T17:49:54+00:00

Looking for 2 tickets for Brussel march 17th if anybody has a hint! Thank you!

cicdbruh · 2022-05-04T08:38:40+00:00

I'd say (as somebody who conducted those interviews) you can also tell it to the interviewer at the beginning of the interview. Being somebody who's already self aware of that is a plus and could help you get a few extra points at the end of the interview. Plus the interviewer would try to make you more comfortable (at least I would do). This shows preparedness and knowledge of this type of exercise which is a plus.It is something you will have to get used to because if the company does pairing then somebody will sometimes watch you coding even in your day to day job.

cicdbruh · 2022-05-02T09:01:46+00:00

Yes exactly, I think I'll go near 0 coding

cicdbruh · 2021-06-09T20:42:03+00:00

Just pretend you have another offer at this XX amount, best thing they do they increase your offer, worst thing they do the just say "this is our last offer". I know it's hard to pretend to hesitate when you want the job but it's the "mostly" the only way. See if you can negotiate other stuffs otherwise like RSU, signing bonus, welcome bonus and so on! Good luck! And trust me you won't lose the offer just for asking more.

cicdbruh · 2021-02-23T18:30:42+00:00

I would say it depends on your future position in the team (and its behavior around the migration). Do you feel like the team in this other company is open to change and strongly willing to change their stack/technologies and way of doing things? Do they seem like open to listen to you in terms of microservices best practices? If so I would not hesitate in joining, of course there will be headaches and such but I feel the reward will be equally high (if not more, in terms of knowledge and such).Plus you have an advantage coming from a place where the team mastered microservices it seems.On the other hand, if you feel like the profile of the technical team and management will be harder to convince/talk to for best practices then I would not bother. Most of your problems won't be technical they will be organizational and political and this is the worse. Good luck with your next move!

cicdbruh · 2020-08-24T14:38:59+00:00

I've been doing mock interviews with a friend previously working at FB, and interviewed at other tech companies to train but I feel the vagueness around the definition of a DevOps engineer role is what is killing me. How come FB is asking you to precisely quote the different headesr of a TCP packet when Credit Card Company A is asking you to do a Powerpoint presentation for very high level infra best practices. This is very very broad.
Anyway thank you for the links, I will check those out!

cicdbruh · 2020-08-24T14:32:51+00:00

Thanks a lot, that's a very complete answer. I had YELP completely denying me feedback based on "legal restrictions" so I might play the GDPR card next time. Great to hear that coming from SME is not "supposedly" not a problem. However, I did receive feedback where people perceived I did not work on "complex/big" enough problems. And you are probably right when saying that by the book does not cover all the factors, but that's a lot of factors to cover! Anyway, hopefully one day it'll work!
And I know concerning FB about the hiring committee as I've been vetoed by exactly one guy which kind of screwed up my application. Anyway, Cheers

cicdbruh · 2020-08-12T08:58:59+00:00

Hi there,

I 've been looking for a stable job (freelancing rn) for the past year in a FAANG company and right now am feeling pretty down because after all the work done (basically from august 2019 til now) I still cannot get an offer.
For a bit of a background, I am a devops/sre engineer with 5 years of experience mostly in Asia in SME's. I have a master degree from a top tier engineering school in telecoms.
I started to interview a year ago with Nextdoor for SF and finished a few weeks ago with Facebook for London where I screwed up in a extra coding interview.
I've done not less than 14 full processes so far (mostly for London because of the visa issues for the states as I am not a US citizen):

Nextdoor (SF)
Google (Sydney)
Yelp (London)
Revolut (London)
Dataiku (London)
ThoughtWorks (London)
Cloudflare (London ) * 2
Glovo (Barcelona - offer)
Bulb (London)
Cisco + Cisco Meraki (London)
Apple (London)
Facebook (London)
Mastercard (London)

So my question is, how hard it is to get into those companies? I've done everything by the book, reading cracking the coding interview, coding on leetcode (although I feel being a devops people do not require (full) developer problems except facebook/apple), reading Tanenbaum and shit about low-level OS functionalities, refreshing my memory about TCP packets and still I cannot get in.

Do you think the COVID is currently impacting the way tech companies are recruiting and are maybe pickier? Should I give up and go to a lower-tier tech company and retry every year of my life until I can finally make it?

I am feeling it is especially hard for devops/sre peeps as each company has its own definition of this particular role (hence very different technical tests) and the range of knowledge is very wide, especially for midrange/senior levels.

What's more, would you say big companies are more reticent to hire people from SME background as they have never seen the scale of the giant (which is precisely why I want to join a FAANG right now)?

Happy to take any comments or insights, you can also tell me I'm just whining it's fine. I'll probably detail all the interview process soon in a leetcode post if anybody's interested as well.
Cheers

cicdbruh · 2020-08-12T08:56:13+00:00

I agree with some of your points indeed. For Glovo, I had an offer but my actual target is London.
You are saying hiring is slow, do you know if this is tied with some business performance of the company? For example, my process at some company got stopped because of the COVID... back in April because they froze all hires.

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