Below is a brief overview of how you can now move to France to work in IT: what kind of visa you should expect, what salary you need to have for this visa, and how to adapt your resume to local traditions.
Current political situation.
Not for the sake of butthurt, but purely for facts. (With)
The situation is now such that all non-EU immigrants, regardless of education level, are treated as . In practice, this means a very high (more than half) percentage of visa refusals — working residence permit for
a specialist who did not study in France and with a salary of less than 54 brut / year (approximately 3 thousand euros / month net, use for recalculation).
Moreover, if your salary is above 54, you fall under the European agreements on the “blue card” (), and you are required to issue a working residence permit. In addition, the blue card makes it much easier to transport the family. With salarié, you either do everything in sync - your children and wife get visas with you, come on the same tickets at the same time, or you come alone, wait a year and a half (!), apply for a terribly bureaucratic regroupement familial procedure, wait another 6- 18 months and already then transport the family.
Therefore, for simplicity, we will further consider moving with a salary above 54.
54 - what level is it?
In general, the number 54 is not taken from the ceiling, it is one and a half average salaries in France.
Considering that the local system gravitates toward general equalization, one and a half average salaries is a lot, for example, we open , and we see that the average salary of Software Engineer = 58.
Local recruiters will tell you that 54 is a senior with 10 years of experience, but it really depends on the region and on your specialty. Salaries in Paris are about 5-10 thousand higher than those in the south, and salaries in the south are about 5 thousand higher than in central France.
The most expensive are devops/full stack dudes like “make whatever you want with django/react and deploy it to OVH (local cloud service, very cheap and crappy)”, as well as data scientists (image / video processing especially). These categories can get their 54 even in the south, and if you are from the frontend or, for example, Java Finance Senior, then it’s easier to immediately look towards Paris. All of the above is my personal impression of the current local market, but the situation is rapidly changing. Now American companies like Texas Instruments and Intel are actively leaving the southern market, while eastern giants like Huawei and Hitachi, on the contrary, are actively expanding their presence. Both of these effects together drive up wages in the south. At the same time, Facebook and Apple are coming to Paris, which contributes to an increase in salaries in Paris - now you can leave Google for Facebook, and before Google raised your salary with a complex scheme “leave Google - found your own startup - return to Google."
But this is already lyrics, I can do a review of salaries and how they are raised separately, if it is interesting.
What to write in the resume?
You are going to a non-politically correct and non-tolerant country - this must be understood right away.
For example, the hashtag #MeToo has been translated in roughly the same way in almost every country in the world (#I'm Not Afraid to Say in Russia, #MoiAussi = “me too” in Canada), except for France. In France, it was localized as #BalanceTonPorc = “hand over your pig” (difficult to translate, in fact, there are many politically incorrect meanings here).
Therefore, if you are a white man, then you should add a photo to your resume - this will play for you.
The standard resume is exactly one page long, and the practice of “throwing two pages into the trash can for being unprofessional” is quite common.
The exception is the date of a Scientist with a degree and publications, when you are, in fact, a researcher working for the industry.
If your education is not French, and not specialized, just delete this item from your resume.
If CS - write so that it is clear that this is CS.
As for projects, do not write phrases like “2016-2018 NameBank / DevOps: Prometheus, Grafana, AWS”.
Write according to the scheme :
“Devops in the technical department of a large bank, in a group of 10 people responsible for monitoring and preventing incidents.
Project: transition from a self-made monitoring system to Prometheus, 100 machines in production on AWS, 3 people on the project, I am the project leader, the duration of the project is one and a half years. What was done: I deployed a test system on one of the test machines in a couple of days and have been waiting for the approval of the security service for six months now. Result: the boss is satisfied, the group was given more money after the demonstration”, and so on.
In conclusion - is this a good way to move to France - for work?
Answer: no, from personal experience - I had a move for work - no.
My personal experience says that , if with his wife - then on two student visas, that is, both sign up for study.
Thus, it is easier for you to look for a job (after receiving the master, they automatically give you a visa that allows you to live and work in France for 1 year, which makes it much easier to find a job, because you are there, you can start even tomorrow + French education), the time for obtaining a European passport is reduced to about 3 years (from 6 years when moving for work), and you have an invaluable year to calmly learn the language in the environment (it is really very necessary, but in the environment it is easy to learn six months before B1 = minimum spoken).
More about my wife - they often ask me in PM what if I come on a student visa, and my wife does not want to work and study. There is an option to enroll your wife for study and let her “study”, staying for the second / third / fourth year until you find a job, and then apply for citizenship together and get it in a year. This is often done by guys from Algeria and Tunisia, for example. The problem in this case is purely monetary - it will be difficult to buy an apartment + travel + have 2 cars per family, but renting + traveling + 1 car is no problem at all. It’s hard in what sense - in order to raise a salary for one person as two salaries of a developer, in IT you need to be the head of about 50-100 people, or look for some very specific niche in Eastern companies - see above about the data of Scientists, or, for example, now there are big Basic spoken Chinese was a plus.
Thank you for reading.
Source: habr.com