Chances are, and don’t take this personally, the turnover was due to the fact it’s not easy to work with the French businesses and their management. There’s a lot of looking down and overconfidence combined with micromanaging and patronizing, and the communication issues oftentimes stem from your lackluster English skills.
This is based on mine and my friends’ experience as a software engineer/software house. Some software houses outright refuse to work for the French, through unofficial policy.
Totally agree on the management, it was horrible. In fact, the only good manager my team had was the Indian manager (who also had to deal with turnover and training there, and considerably less power than the other ones), the France and Canada-based managers were just either too absent and useless to remove blockers, or too present and micromanaging, depending on the time of the year.
Concerning communication issues, i think i disagree, this has little to do with english skills. I've had working relationships with Serbian, Germans, Dutchs and portugese, and we could communicate well enough. I think its cultural, east Asian and to a lesser extent Anglo (barring Australians and Irish who are more direct) have different expectations of what is acceptable to say directly and what should be hidden behind words. That's stuff i expect from the management here, not ICs, and i really dislike that. I've talked last year quite extensively to a Norwegian oil rig engineer who worked with Koreans, he said he had the same experience with them (and that each time he could work with Scottish engineers he would do so)
