I am French, moved to the UK a few years ago.

There are many cultural issues that will prevent France from ever becoming a startup nation.

One of them is the fact that there's this idea floating around where you have to have higher education (Bac +5, aka 5 years of uni) to do anything even remotely related to IT, as if it was some kind of rocket science (where a degree would actually help). In fact, the first thing many French people will ask me when they learn about my job is how do I do it and whether I went to uni. They are all shocked when I tell them no when everywhere else self-taught developers are a common occurrence.

You simply cannot get any IT job without that; even junior positions require it. This automatically disqualifies a lot of self-taught developers (like me) even if they have actual work experience, and I'm not sure if the ones that are left (those with the required education) are any better considering they never had the chance to work on a real project.

The salaries are also awful. As a senior engineer (with the required education) you're still only looking around at 40k euros. I was already making more than that as a junior in London! (not to mention the Euros vs British Pounds conversion). An engineer is also not that well placed on the social ladder, management (even something relatively simple like running a small shop/restaurant) is deemed much more prestigious than software engineering.

The relationship between employees and management is toxic. There is no concept of teamwork and where the "boss" is actually working with you towards the same goal as you. Instead, the boss is always seen as an enemy. There is no complicity what so ever between employees and management. This was actually a shock for me when I got my first job in the UK and realised that actually bosses are cool (<3 to my former managers, if you're reading this) and are there to support you. A meeting with the boss in France usually means you did something wrong, while everywhere else it's just a routine talk to go over any eventual issues, ask for advice (whether for the current job or about your career in general) and see if anything can be improved.

Finally bureaucracy and taxes are still awful. Even if you can theoretically get tax relief on new companies and so on, the bureaucracy involved is a tax itself, and often not worth it.

This comment thread (on an earlier post about this) sums it up pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169504

Pay is a problem but it’s one of many. The working culture is another big problem. Here’s a thread that summarises it quite well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17169504