Moving to France for work: salaries, visas and resumes
Below is a brief overview of how you can now move to France to work in IT: what kind of visa should you count on, what salary you need for this visa, and how to adapt your resume to local traditions.
Current political situation
Not for the sake of buthert, but purely facts for. (c)
The situation now is such that all non-EU immigrants, regardless of educational level, are seen as evil to be confronted . In practice, this means a very high (more than half) rejection rate for salarié visas - a work residence permit for a
specialist who has not studied in France and with a salary of less than 54 brut / year (about 3 thousand euros / month net, use this calculator to recalculate).
Moreover, if your salary is above 54, you are subject to the European blue card agreements ( carte bleue = passeport talent emploi hautement qualifié), and the work permit you must issue. In addition, the blue card makes it much easier to transport the family. With salarié, you either do everything synchronously - the children and the wife get visas with you, come on the same tickets at the same time, or you come alone, wait a year and a half (!), Go to the terribly bureaucratic procedure regroupement familial, wait another 6- 18 months and already then transport the family.
Therefore, for simplicity, we will further consider moving with a salary higher than 54.
54 - what is the level?
In general, the figure 54 was not taken from the ceiling, this is one and a half average salaries in France.
Given that the local system is inclined towards universal equalization, one and a half average salaries are a lot, for example, we open Glassdoor on Google Paris , and we see that the average salary of Software Engineer is 58.
Local recruiters will tell you that 54 is a senior with 10 years of experience , but actually depends on the region and on your specialty. Salaries in Paris are about 5-10 thousand higher than salaries in the south, and salaries in the south are about 5 thousand higher than salaries in central France.
The most expensive are the devs / full stack dudes like “I will do whatever you want on django / react and deploy it to OVH (local cloud service, very cheap and crappy)”, as well as the date of Scientists (image / video processing especially). These categories can get their 54 even in the south, and if you are from the front-end or, for example, Java Finance Senior, it is easier to immediately look in the direction of Paris. All of the above is my personal impression of the current local market, but the situation is changing rapidly. Now American companies such as Texas Instruments and Intel are actively leaving the southern market, while eastern giants such as Huawei and Hitachi, on the contrary, are actively expanding their presence. Both of these effects drive salaries in the south together.
Facebook and Apple come to Paris at the same time, which helps to increase salaries in Paris - now you can leave Google on Facebook, and before you paid your salary in Google with the complicated scheme “leave Google - start your own startup - go back to Google”.
But this is lyrics, a review of salaries and how they are raised I can do separately if it is interesting.
What to write in the resume?
You are going to a politically inappropriate and intolerant country - this must be immediately understood.
For example: the hashtag #MeToo has been translated approximately the same in almost all countries of the world (#I don’t afraid to say in Russia, #MoiAussi = “me too” in Canada), except France. In France, it was localized as #BalanceTonPorc = “surrender your pig” (it’s difficult to translate, in fact, there are a lot of politically incorrect meanings).
Therefore, if you are a white man, then you should add a photo to your resume - this will play for you.
A standard resume occupies exactly one page and the practice of “throwing two pages in a basket of sv for unprofessionalism” is quite common.
The exception is the Scientists date with a degree and publications when you, in fact, are a researcher working for the industry.
If your education is not French, and not specialized, just drop 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 STAR = “situation, task, action, result” :
“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 home-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: in a couple of days I deployed a test system on one of the test machines and have been waiting for the approval of the security service for a year and a half. 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 relocate to France - at work?
Answer: no, from personal experience - I had a job move - no.
My personal experience says that you need to move to study , if with your wife - then on two student visas, that is, both apply for study.
Thus, it’s easier for you to look for work (after receiving the master they automatically give you a visa that allows you to live and work in France for 1 year, which greatly facilitates the search for work, because you are in place, you can start at least tomorrow + French education), time for obtaining a European passport is reduced to about 3 years (from 6 years when moving to work), and you have an invaluable year to calmly learn a language in the environment (it is really very necessary, but in the environment it learns quietly six months before B1 = minimum spoken).
More about my wife - they often ask me in PM, what if they come on a student visa, and my wife does not want to work and study. There is an option to enroll your wife in school and let him “study”, staying in the second / third / fourth year until you find work, and then apply for citizenship together and get it in a year. So often do the 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 for a family, but to live on a rental + travel + 1 car - without any problems. It’s hard in what sense - in order for one person to raise his salary as two developer’s salaries, 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 date of Scientists, or, for example,
Thank you for reading.