Web developer: why I left Paris for Lyon!

Are you a web developer in Paris? Working in a challenging environment? Thinking of leaving Paris to head out to the regions?

We interviewed Yohann, a web developer who decided to change cities to relaunch his career.

In 2016, he chose to leave his Paris job to live and work in Lyon. Today he's the NodeJS lead at a Lyon-based startup. With a different quality of life…

He shares his experience with us.

______________________________

Can you introduce yourself? (Age, profession, current situation…)

I'm 27, a developer by training. I'm currently a back-end NodeJs developer at a small company in Saint-Priest (next to Lyon).

What was your situation (job, startup) in Paris?

Before leaving Paris, I worked at a small company in the 12th arrondissement. I was a .NET developer on an IAM (Identity Access Management) project.

Taking the plunge: what made you decide to leave Paris and move to Lyon?

In 2016, after a successful Hackathon in the Ardennes, I decided to leave my job in Paris to work on a personal project in tourism. As a result, with no fixed salary, it was impossible for me to keep my apartment in Maisons-Alfort because of the high rent. After a year working on my project, I decided to find a job again. I didn't want to go back to Paris for many reasons. Rents and life in general are expensive, public transit is unpleasant. People are often rushed, always in a hurry, and I find that Parisian life generates a lot of stress.

Paris is known as the startup capital with interesting technical challenges. What do you think of the Lyon startup ecosystem?

When I was looking for a new role, I did find lots of interesting offers in Paris. The Lyon ecosystem is certainly less developed because there are fewer companies than in Paris. However, I had no trouble finding interesting roles with great challenges. I had interviews with startups in very different sectors like robotics, energy, an accounting bot, or even a startup wanting to revolutionize tomorrow's stores. Salaries are slightly lower than in the Paris region, but the cost of living is lower, so personally I have a higher standard of living than when I was working in Paris. In Lyon, there are also web and digital meetups.

What are the positive impacts of this life change?

I've only been living in Lyon for 3 months and, so far, I feel good. Public transit is cleaner and less disrupted, the city is alive, the city center has everything a city dweller needs. The city is also smaller, and for someone who loves the countryside like me, it's much closer than in the Paris region. The mountains and the sea are within reasonable distance, so you can do weekend trips skiing or to the beach in summer. To finish, I'd say I feel people are less stressed, less rushed in everyday life.

What would you like to find from Paris that you don't have in Lyon?

The only thing I'd like is an even more developed ecosystem, but I think that will evolve in the future. Other than that, there's nothing I had in Paris that I don't have in Lyon.

What advice would you give to Parisians who want to leave?

In our field of development or the digital world, there will always be an interesting role in Lyon. We have the added luck of being able to negotiate our salary properly. So if you want to leave Paris, it's entirely possible without losing the city life you find in Paris. And if Lyon doesn't appeal to you, there are plenty of cities with developed enough ecosystems to find what you're looking for, like Rennes, Nantes, Montpellier…