An American Geek in Paris — Chapter 0
Je suis un geek…
I have probably been a geek since I was born or at least since I was 7 and met a couple of astronauts on a goodwill tour and became fascinated with space travel. Along with long hair, rock and roll, and Vietnam it was kind of a big thing in the 60s and early 70s.
For the past few decades I’ve made my life as an engineer in Silicon Valley. Although I arrived there after the orchards had already disappeared, it was still early. To put it in context there was still a tiny sewing machine store on University Ave in Palo Alto down the street from my very first office. Even a store selling uniforms for nurses. Your basic American main street before silicon, software and money changed everything. The Intel 286 and the Motorola 68020 were the top dogs in CPUs and Sun Microsystems was the closest thing we had to a unicorn.
I do startups. A lot of startups. A couple go public, a couple crash and burn, some get acquired and some go nowhere. Along the way I go from being a space guy to a software guy. I manage, I code, but mostly I manage.
Fast forward to 2017. Our kids are grown and on their own. Silicon Valley is booming but becoming ever more crowded and expensive. It takes an hour to get to the office because of the nearly continuous traffic jams. The financial bar for startups keeps getting raised because of the salaries you need to pay to allow your employees to live there. Also it turns out that some Silicon Valley companies are not just sexist but many can also be ageist AF. It’s time for a change of venue.
My wife convinces me to look at Europe. The tech scene there is hot, particularly in the big capitals like Berlin, Paris, and London — although Brexit weighs on the latter. I put my cv on talent.io — the European rough equivalent of hired.com. Many video chats and a couple of trips later, lafourchette in Paris(also known as thefork) makes me a compelling offer and we decide to take the plunge and head way east. Also a good way north as Paris is just a soupcon further north than Seattle.
Following a whole lot of complicated international move and visa logistics my wife, our Border Collie Hendrix (not part of any of my passwords), and I finally arrive in Paris on January 3rd, 2018.
The first thing that struck us at the airport and shuttling into Paris is that on the surface at least, this is not a technology town. At any of the bay area airports, advertising for tech predominates. Paris on the other hand is a fashion and luxury goods town. The signs you see are for Cartier, Hermes, LVMH, Tag Heuer. First impressions can be deceiving though, we see a guy with a pricey leather bag that looks like a man purse but actually holds a small laptop. Walking around downtown Paris we see several large buildings, including the Louvre, blanketed by 40' tall iPhone X posters. In Paris the iPhone X is viewed as much as a fashion/luxury good as it is a technology product.
One of the things I want to do while I’m here is to compare and contrast the European technology culture with Silicon Valley. I’ll write more in future chapters but I‘ll kick it off today with:
Language
Tech in London of course is all done in English. That’s also the case in Berlin where English predominates in the tech startups that have sprouted up all over what used to be East Berlin. In Paris many startups also operate in English but if everyone in the meeting speaks French then they’ll go with that. Luckily I speak French so I’m good to go. Or so I thought.
In technical environments the French language is being overrun by English at a frenetic pace. Having to constantly switch between the two languages wouldn’t be too bad by itself but the French aren’t just dropping English terms into conversation they are also Frenchifying technical terms. They may have learned this from the Québécois who have been abusing antique French for centuries.
The algorithm for Frenchification is pretty straightforward — any English verb conjugation ending in ed is instead finished with é. That’s é pronounced like the Canadian eh.
Here are some important examples I learned in my first week: crashé (crashed), shippé (shipped), debuggé (debugged), networké, and deployé (deployed). Ok that last one is a plant since that’s the correct literal translation of deployed. There’s also buildé which can be present or past tense. It reminds me of all the Japanese nouns that are basically the English noun followed by u. Beer-u, orange-u, etc…
Just when I think I’m catching on someone hits me with mépé (pronounced meh-peh). Turns out that mep is “mise-en-production” or “put into production.” Need the verb form of an acronym? Just tack an é on to it.
Most companies have a unique set of acronyms but mostly these come from a single language. In France acronyms might come from French or English and are order dependent. CI is continuous integration and Contrat d’Interface (Interface Contract). RH is “resources humaines” a.k.a. HR.
Just because you speak the language doesn’t mean you don’t have a whole lot to learn.
OK google, translate some technical Frenglish:
Not bad Google, not bad at all. And yes, I’ve submitted a correction.
