I relocated from Paris to SF as a senior dev, and I am going back after 1 year. Yes I was making like 3x more in salary, but then housing in SF cost at least 2x more than in Paris, commute is just as bad, healthcare is a mess etc. And taxes are not that low :) - lower than in France, but you do not get much back, ie no healthcare, no retirement, not very good infrastructures etc. For me overall financially it is more interesting to go back.
Regarding jobs, I never had any problems to find interesting jobs in Paris, but I am working in embedded/low-level/networking/telcos systems, and I think Europe is skewed towards this kind of stuff whereas SV is skewed towards web/mobile.
To be honest I think it really depends of your lifestyle and priorities. I really enjoyed my year in SF, it is a beautiful city with great peoples, but I'll be happy to get back to Paris.
Honestly, my best advice for youngsters would be to leave the country for a few years. That's just the best option on the long term. They can come back to France, if they ever want to, and their experience will [hopefully] allow them to get interviews in the very few decent Parisian places.
I'm in distributed large scale systems. Not much of those in Paris I'm afraid ^^
I relocated from Paris to SF as a senior dev, and I am going back after 1 year. Yes I was making like 3x more in salary, but then housing in SF cost at least 2x more than in Paris, commute is just as bad, healthcare is a mess etc. And taxes are not that low :) - lower than in France, but you do not get much back, ie no healthcare, no retirement, not very good infrastructures etc. For me overall financially it is more interesting to go back.
Regarding jobs, I never had any problems to find interesting jobs in Paris, but I am working in embedded/low-level/networking/telcos systems, and I think Europe is skewed towards this kind of stuff whereas SV is skewed towards web/mobile.
To be honest I think it really depends of your lifestyle and priorities. I really enjoyed my year in SF, it is a beautiful city with great peoples, but I'll be happy to get back to Paris.