Unfortunately the US really has ridiculous Visa policies across the board, with different types of documentation needed for different levels of the same thing.
If you want to do a CPT (internship while your course is ongoing), you can just inform your school and it's fine. But if you want to do it after the course (OPT), you have to apply for an EAD, which adds another 3 months of delay. Why can't the attestation on your I-94 be enough?
It's like the USCIS creates additional paper work for itself so that it can cry about having too much work.
French education visas allow 20 or 25 hours of work per week built into the visa. But getting to stay after the education is complete is really hard for non-EU citizens.
If you have a master or licence professionnelle it's easy enough to stay, as long as you get a job offer for more than 40k€/year or so (which isn't that hard).
If you have a lower diploma than that and you don't want to study for a higher level in France, you can only stay if you get a job offer among a list of needed jobs in your region (IT-related jobs are needed in almost all regions). There's a lot of red tape, but it's not as difficult as it seems.
Then you get a heap of international students doing jobs that have typically been for local teenagers and the lower skilled, often with huge labor violation issues.
