Tech salaries in Canada are very low and I really hope this will raise the bar for everybody. Most of the talent (outside of Quebec) migrates south of the border at some point, because it makes no financial sense to stay. Innovation outside of Toronto is low/inexistent and it is hard to get funding. I am always amazed when founders make the national news here when they raise 1-2M$ CAD. At the same time, you have CEOs complaining that the video game industry is poaching dev unfairly (because the salaries are subsidized) instead of raising their own salaries... It really is a sad state. It might be due to the fact that we have a culture of small/medium businesses that are very slow to adopt new technologies and a mentally of what we called in french "born for small bread". At the same time, since nobody is really making a lot of money you also have a more equal society leading to a better quality of life IMO (less crime, more generosity, etc).
As a new grad myself, I am in this situation where I get offers of >120k USD if I move to SV with a growth potential (both in technical and financial terms) far better than what I can get here. In Quebec (where I live), I saw most of my peers stay around and accept salaries ranging from 65k CAD to 80k CAD (50k-61k USD). From what I know, an average senior can expect 120-130k CAD in Montreal. The only way to make more is by being a consultant, which is why you see a lot of them around here (for better or worse). I would feel a bit guilty to move to the US right now considering I got basically a free education and I do want to contribute back to society.
With 26 years in software development, low level linux (kernel "stuff") and low level windows (kernel "stuff" again), with work including from analyzing malware to writting DRM that was left unbroken for 3 years, to high level software, system administration on various unixes and unix like beasts, including low level networking, fluent in c, c++, asm x86/64, go and some "stuff" I am not proud off (c#, java, python, js, php), expirience in management, team leadership, working for bluechips, US three letter agencies and army (as a part of my previous jobs), annoyingly proficient in security (..., there is more, but who cares) I earn 24k netto euros a year and consider myself lucky, due to a fact that I cant move to another country based on broken marriage and my wish to still parent my kid every second week. Oh, you have 120k salery? I wouldnt complain if I were you.
/sarcasm off
Just my 5 cents, Instead of counting the money, concentrate on what makes you happy. You will pass better on long term. At the end there is not much you can take into grave. And money certanly doesnt make it softer.
Your advice at the end is good but I would add that you shouldn't let others take advantage of you.
People aren't being paid $200k-$2M / year for reasons of charity. They get paid that much because their contribution to the company is higher than that.
>Your advice at the end is good but I would add that you shouldn't let others take advantage of you.
Everybody is being taken advantage of if you think about it, especially if you're a salaried employee.
Hell, if you ask Googlers earning $600k they'll think they're being taken advantage of. If you ask CEOs of F500 companies they'll also think they're being take advantage of. If you ask Multi-Billionaires with offshore accounts in tax havens to pay their fair share of taxes, they'll also think they're bein taken advantage of.
If you let this way of thinking drive your life, you'll end up very miserable.
And exactly this is the part where people have problem understanding. If there is no company that you could sell your knowlidge for the sallary you would like to have, it doesnt matter how good you are. I know lots of local developers that are top notch, earning even less, on the other side, forgive me the wording, I know a few midiocre people, that were kicked out of my company as incompetent (they really were incompetent) and later passed google interviews (before anyone says it, I dont want to work at google, there are other more honorable jobs like selling drugs to kids or selling arms to central africa - I'll pass those too)).
Bottom line, knowlidge is not worth a penny, it doesnt matter. Only how good you are to selling yourself and if there is no company preparing to offer you a higher sallary - relocate somewhere else. Or decide not to move and be satisfied with what you have. Like I decided my kid is more important than Tesla and bunch of expansive gadgets (while I do have long term ENTP/INTP relationship with a former photomodel that has IQ higher that anyone that was hitting on her though ;) ). And I am happy. More than most people running for money.
I will repeat it once again. Go for whatever makes you happy. Ignore the money, as a developer you will survive. Dont put money as your goal as you will be miserable at the end.
SV is so gluttonous that we forget how good we have it relative to almost every other market in the world. We do half-page rants just because we accidentally stepped in dog doo before work.
In 2019, PDFTron, a Vancouver-based tech company, received a USD $71 million investment from Silversmith Capital Partners (a Tier 1 growth equity firm).
Vancouver’s tech scene is exploding, with a number of top tier tech companies being based here (like Clio) and majors setting up dev offices (Shopify, Amazon, Microsoft).
That's really good news and we need more of it for sure. But looking at objective total $ invested (and growth), it does not paint the same picture. Those examples are still exceptions rather than the new norm, we just don't have that many (would-be) unicorns/fast-growing companies. Even if we did, I am still unsure the salaries would go up and most companies don't give equity... I am rather pessimistic about this tech boom narrative that the medias try to sell us. What I see is some large firms taking advantage of a low CAD while most tech companies are still at low/zero growth and offer very mediocre salaries. Maybe it's only in Quebec though.
The QC is notably bad for salaries, but part of that is also the highest taxes in Canada and corresponding social services. Low housing prices, too.
> What I see is some large firms taking advantage of a low CAD while most tech companies are still at low/zero growth and offer very mediocre salaries.
Absolutely. You could throw around $120-150k yearly rates in CAD and you'd have applications from all over the country. Currently CAD-USD is around .77 so they're looking at a 25% discount.
Vancouver, however, has seen a crazy high influx of foreign capital -- way more $$$ coming from China than from a $71 million dole via Investment Firm -- and the price of housing in Vancouver is absurd.
I've been to Vancouver a lot, it's a great place to be, but in terms of climate, culture, and activities you can get mostly the same in Seattle. If Seattle is too expensive work remote or commute from Mt. Vernon or Bellingham.
I often see people framing the US & Canada primarily as a competition in tech. The exact opposite is largely the case. The US benefits enormously from having a wealthy, vibrant Canada, including in its tech sector. We're permanent allies, liberal democracies and share a very large border as well as $600 billion in goods trade. The ability for technology, labor, products, services and capital to freely flow back and forth between the two of us makes us both far better off. Canada prospering in tech, rather than taking away from the US, brings more to the US-CA economic zone, including any talented persons they import that the US doesn't. There is more than enough tech riches to go around, the US doesn't need to own everything and shouldn't try to.
If anything the US should be directly helping Canada to boom in tech. Enlarge the regional blackhole, suck up all the world's talent. They're our largest export market, the richer they get, the more people they have, the more US exports they are likely to buy (and vice versa). Canada's tech talent will occasionally also go south and start companies in the US. Canadian investors can fund US start-ups from their successes. US investors can back Canadian start-ups and public companies. The more the merrier.
I graduated in 2000 from Computer Engineering (in Canada). A solid fraction of my peers ended up in Silicon Valley. It’s not just for the wages. Silicon Valley just where most of the jobs are and it remains the best place in the world if you’re an engineer.
The grass is always greener, I guess. I’m a software engineer from the US and I’d never move to SV in a million years. There are more things in life than money.
There are so many cities here with better quality of life and lower cost of living.
Quality of life is subjective, and there are no cities that offer as much financial and career opportunity to the average senior software developer as SV does right now. Yes, cost of living is high, but you’ll still come out far ahead the average senior software dev living in some midwestern city. There are exceptions / edge cases, but they’re just that.
> you’ll still come out far ahead the average senior software dev living in some midwestern city
Come out far ahead how?
I'm already pulling close to 6 figures, and I expect to reach $120-130k in a relatively short time period. Do I -need- to move to SV and live in much shittier conditions and have an insane cost of living just to earn some more money? ... I feel that remote work makes this an outdated concept (my company is fully distributed).
I'm almost 24 and if I continue to manage my finances correctly, I should have my own spacious home by 25. I'm in South Carolina, but there are plenty of other reasonable places in the US. The money that I don't have to spend on high cost of living goes straight to my savings. I get that my situation is atypical, but it's absolutely possible to have a great life and earn great money while not living in SV. If I ever feel like I need to earn more money, there's nothing stopping me from creating my own startup, etc.
I guess I'll never have the "prestige" of working in SV, but I seem to do just fine by going to conferences and networking.
It really depends on what you want. I’m not trying to shit on your life choices, you may be optimizing for exactly the right things for you.
My point on “coming out far ahead” is limited to finances. Yes, you can buy a house in SC and be making $100k once you hit 2-3 years of experience. That’s a great outcome, full stop. Nothing wrong with it.
But someone with your equivalent experience working at a big tech company in SV is already making 2-3x as much as you. Cost of living increase eats up some of that, but not even close to all of it. Especially if they live with a roommate or two and avoid buying a new Tesla, they can save $50-100k per year fairly easily.
And the difference becomes even more stark in another 5-7 years. You’ll be making $150k in SC but the dev in SV will be making $400k - 600k. They’ll also have 100x as many job options should they desire a change or get laid off, and they’ll have a much easier time raising funds and making key hires if they want to start their own company. Or becoming a key hire at a friend’s company. Or investing in a friend’s company. Etc, etc.
Again, there are genuine downsides to living in SV, and you may have made the right choice for you, but I find a lot of devs outside of SV have a really inaccurate view of just what they’re giving up, and that skews their analysis.
Silicon Valley tech companies pay something like $400-$500k if you're good enough and have 10 years experience. It goes up from there as well but it's harder to get those promotions. I also know people who made that much at 25-ish due to good negotiation (at a pre-IPO late stage startup) or were in a hot field (ML). That's not counting the usual startup lottery.
That money can offset cost of living quiet easily.
Check out levels.fyi. Moving to the Bay Area to work at a random startup makes little sense, but moving to one of the BigCos can be very financially rewarding.
> I'm almost 24 and if I continue to manage my finances correctly, I should have my own spacious home by 25
Check out this comment someone made complaining how high the CoL is in the Bay Area, even for someone making $300k. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22228756 Their analysis is flawed and overstates expenses, but even then this hypothetical tech employee saves > $110k/year (including a 401k and match). That's enough to put a down payment on a house in SC every year. If you're investing minded, you could own an apartment building in about 10 years and never have to worry about money again.
That's certainly compelling, but it still comes with huge downsides like lack of space, having to live with roommates, not having any family nearby, not being able to work fully remotely, likely not having a healthy work-life balance, etc.
If I weren't working remotely, this would be more compelling I think.
Lack of space is subjective, you certainly don’t have to have roommates if you make $300k, and work/life balance is above average at many of these companies. That said, remote work is more rare, and flights from SF to SC to visit family are a pain.
I think the bigger issue for many people is probably cultural. I’ve loved my time in SF and NYC because I love cities, am fairly liberal-minded, don’t mind small living space, and don’t really care about living near extended family. Working remotely from a sprawling home in a small town near family is the opposite of what I want for my life. YMMV!
It really depends on the career opportunities you have in SC and how they correspond to your career aspirations. There really is nothing wrong with not going to the the valley or another big tech hub, but if you want to say, become a specialist in some area of ML, then there will only be a few places to do that. It isn’t (just) about prestige.
If your goal is a comfortable life and financial stability, then you are completely right. If you want to become a millionaire or more, then you’ll have a better shot SV. If you are really focused on a specific technical topic, then SV, if you are a generalist and enjoy your work but don’t want to live it, then SC is fine.
Cost of living is only relevant compared to the salary you make and SV can pay very well. Quality of life wise most of the SV is a giant suburb so if you like suburbs it's about the same as anywhere else.
> I often see people framing the US & Canada primarily as a competition in tech.
I've never heard US and Canada mentioned as competition in anything - let alone in tech. Geographically, demographically, technologically and economically, Canada is in no position to compete with the US.
> The US benefits enormously from having a wealthy, vibrant Canada, including in its tech sector.
Enormously? Canada pretty much sells us their resources and some canadian manufactured US cars. We account for 76% of all canada's trade, canada represents a much smaller portion of our overall trade. One party benefits a lot more than the other party.
> We're permanent allies, liberal democracies and share a very large border as well as $600 billion in goods trade.
No such thing as permanent allies. Just like there is no such thing as permanent government since canada existed mostly as a nonvoting subject of a monarchy.
> They're our largest export market
And also one we seem to have a neverending trade deficit with.
> If anything the US should be directly helping Canada to boom in tech.
Or we could help arkansas, idaho, pennsylvannia and a countless other states "boom in tech". Shouldn't Canada be the ones helping themselves? Shouldn't the US be helping ourselves?
As a Candian, it seems to me so very pathetically and predictably Canadian to literally herald the surrender of your own industries to foreign takeover.
Canada is (often) to tech what Mexico is to cars.
Mexican 'assembly' of cars is fine and good, but they don't exactly move up the value chain from there.
Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2/3 the wages, unfortunately, this doesn't map to a successful entrepreneurial climate. Now, that's a hard thing to contemplate, as 'nobody' can really compete with SV at their own game, but it's disingenuous in the least to farm out labor and compare that activity with those doing much of the higher-level work, and most importantly: controlling the profits.
Maybe the Mexico analogy goes a little bit too far, as there are tech startups and a few decent companies in Toronto, by and large, but they have serious trouble scaling into anything. To be fair, it's not like most US cities are any better. In fact, aside from the weather and lack of charm, Toronto is a 'better all-around city' than most American cities.
But there's a serious lack of exceptionalism, and far too many of Toronto's best move on to the US, London, or elsewhere.
This kind of 'pathetic nationalism' is why loathe the CBC. It's as though they are utterly unaware of the extent to which they extoll mediocrity.
Canadians are well educated, get along pretty well, and the 'average person' in Canada in many ways lives better than the average American, at very least there's a lot less calamity, fraud, there's full healthcare which isn't great but it's mostly good.
But - on the issue of talent and exceptionalism, it's a disaster. We are near the bottom of the OECD it talent and R&D expenditures. Canada sends China 'raw materials' and they send us back finished goods: this is the opposite of 'first world/developing world' trading norm.
We should not be hailing mediocrity as a victory. It's nice to have jobs, but there is no Valley of the North.
I’m not sure why you’re upset with the CBC over this, we’ve been a branch plant economy since the 1960s. A lot of this has to do with Canadian temperament and mindset, which isn’t particularly entrepreneurial due a dearth of leadership from its investor class.
There have been many tech darlings out of Canada over the years (top of my head - Shopify, Hootsuite, Flickr, Matrox, ATI, BioWare, Eidos, iStockPhoto, Nortel, Corel, BNR, Cognos, Delrina, Hummingbird, Newbridge, Jetform, RIM/Blackberry, OpenText, Mitel, Newbridge networks, QNX, Sierra Wireless, SMART technologies, Redknee, PointClickCare, Solace) but often a reasonable exit lies with pools of capital outside of the country such as IPOing in the US capital markets.
Which gets to my confusion over your complaint. The problem with Canada over the last 50+ Years is that its capital holders are extremely risk averse and largely old money. That’s changing with recent funds, but it takes time for that to lead to improved VC and other funding. But we see this problem in every industry. A major chunk of Canada’s Oil and Gas interests for example are owned by foreigners. I’m not sure what your suggested approach is — Government subsidized entrepreneurship? We already have that to some degree.
Even in the USA we are increasingly seeing grads taking the FAANG paycheque instead of doing a startup. The stress and market barriers are too high to make it worthwhile relative to the alternative of making $150k at age 22.
I’m not sure why you’re upset with the CBC over this
Not just the CBC, but they do it a lot. There is this cloying "we've finally made it!" back-slapping the press reliably produces every time a well-known company announces an expansion, no matter how big or small, and really any time some positive PR comes out of the Canadian tech sector. The energy we spend congratulating ourselves for a job well done unintentionally lays bare how provincial we really are.
The reason this is so infuriating is the congratulatory rhetoric rings hollow for many Canadians with US work experience who realize how much better it is, in so many (but not all) ways, to be a tech worker in the US vs. in Canada.
To produce articles with the tone of the OP, you would need to be either myopic or disingenuous.
This is especially so in the context of a company like Google. If you're a Canadian engineer who can get a job at Google, your take-home pay after housing will be dramatically higher in the US than in Canada (if you don't like the lifestyle sacrifices that requires in the Bay Area or NYC, you can do better in umpteen smaller cities). All the while you will have access to better health care, lower wait times, and easy immigration status (TN).
we’ve been a branch plant economy since the 1960s. A lot of
this has to do with Canadian temperament and mindset, which
isn’t particularly entrepreneurial due a dearth of
leadership from its investor class.
No argument there. Those in Canada who really control the money are overwhelmingly complacent, more interested in maintaining what they have than taking real risks. Much of it isn't self-made, it's just inherited from early 20th century industrialists. Not that many modern self-made wealth stories other than a bunch of people speculating on real estate, literally collecting rent rather than adding productive capacity or consumer surplus.
Being a tech worker in the US isn’t all that great once you’re building a family and need to consider the education, housing, healthcare impacts of the US system. There is more to life than comp. In particular , having experienced both systems quite intensively, I really don’t agree the healthcare is better in the US.
I certainly encourage young Canadian tech workers to move to the US for a while (as I did) to make some money and see what it’s like.
However, many of us eventually moved back. One of the better deals is to work remotely for US tech while in Canada, to get some of the comp benefits while living in a much better overall country (in terms of many factors - happiness, quality of life, life expectancy, inclusiveness, etc). This will be subjective of course. But I don’t think it’s disingenuous or myopic to be happy that these tech giants are growing in Canada. It keeps people here. Being here makes a difference.
"we’ve been a branch plant economy since the 1960s."
Wherever you want to draw the line - R&D investment, industrial complexity, and product sophistication have been going down for the last 30 years and the major turning point was NAFTA, large scale migration, and the more globally oriented policies. Most it seemed pretty rational at the time (much of it still does) but now that we see the results, it's time to take a more nuanced approach.
I agree with everything you said. Especially your point about the blindness to it all. People spin these narratives like "Silicon Valley North" and "Hollywood North" when reality it's all branch offices.
There is a lack of investment capital available to companies based in Canada. Programs like IRAP and SR&ED don't help in any meaningful way.
Canada is a great country, but we've been underperforming for a while now and we should be a lot more concerned about that.
I think IRAP and SRED are okay, they just led to government picking winners (IRAP) and an awful ecosystem of vendors and abuse (SRED).
I’m of the opinion that Canada should take that money and do what Israel did with Yozma. Match the creation of VC funds with government capital and generous exit terms (e.g. government matches with 50% capital, is totally silent partner and can be bought out at any time with a 30% premium). I bet big VCs would jump at the opportunity and everyone would win (Israel actually saw a return in the end).
This seems shortsighted. Auto assembly workers don’t start car companies. But tech company workers do start companies.
If people immigrate to canada instead of the us to work in tech, I would expect there to be more companies founded here eventually. Further, fewer caandians will go to the us if hiring rises. I can only imagine it will have upwards pressure on wages too, which will eventually help create a pool of people with some capital for angel investing.
I am against the narrative of this as equivalent to, or comparable to the Silicon Valley.
Of course, it is 'good for Toronto' in many ways, there's little doubt.
The Ontario government, during negotiations with Cisco for a juicy corporate subsidy, indicated that salaries are 'very competitive' and that they'd do 'anything to keep it that way'. Literally stating that he wanted to keep us 'poorer' to guarantee the jobs. (Sorry I can't find the reference).
From a certain perspective, it's understandable: Ontario's competitive advantage is 'a lot of decent tech workers with lower pay' so it makes sense to back that, after all, it's what brings the jobs.
But the very thing that provides a nice economic baseline of wealth (compared to most other countries), also severely limits our potential to be competitive in most areas. Basically, a gilded cage.
The problem with Canada's approach to the US and globalism in this manner is that it systematically reduces the ability of Canadian businesses to be competitive at higher levels.
A commenter noted 'that it brings tech jobs and they might go on to make startups' - which is a good point. But this won't likely be the case, paradoxically, the opposite.
Essentially, NAFTA/USMCA makes Canada an economic suburb: nice place, with basic prosperity, but lacking in exceptionalism and the ability to form groups that bring in real profits, excess surpluses, control, power & influence.
It seems like a paradox - shouldn't free trade, migration etc. make Canada more diverse and competitive? But it's not: Since NAFTA and 'globalization' and 'all of these jobs' ... Canada's expenditures on R&D has actually decreased. Have a look [1].
This in particular, is a disaster. Very important to note that public spending on R&D is not that low (i.e. Canada does good research at University level). And it's not so much that Canadian tech companies spend less on R&D' but it's that Canada produces less and less of the companies that naturally spend on R&D i.e. drugs, medical equipment, tech, etc..
Not only that, in the last 30 years, industrial diversity has actually been shrinking! Have a look [2] Canada isn't even in the top group anymore. Not only this, the sophistication of exports has been going down.
So therein lies the paradox: intelligent people keep saying 'these jobs are great, they'll help us move up the ladder', but it's not the case. NAFTA, large scale migration, other artifacts of globalization and Canada's peculiar history have meant that we get to go to a very 'good spot on the ladder' but actually going higher than that gets even harder.
The Canadian economy is increasingly dependent on Natural Resources and Auto Manufacture for export, and internally, it's driven by 'core businesses' like Finance & Insurance (especially mortgages), construction (again housing) and all of the other things that make a civic community work.
Basically, Canada is becoming a 'very well run civic entity' with less and less R&D spending, less economic complexity, less exceptionalism, fewer knowledge-based exports, and ever greater consumption of foreign products and service and it's the natural result of plain vanilla economic liberal policies, applied without really much thought to the special context of the country. Due to Canada's unique history and lack of its own institutional foundations, it means something different for us than say, Sweden. Almost all of Canadian media consumption is American. The vast majority of the products and services we consume are designed and produced elsewhere, usually in the US.
In order to 'get better' I think we might need a new approach, but I don't think that's what Canadians want - I think even popularity, most Canadians just want 'decent jobs, safety, their Toyota and Netflix'. And so a new Google office is perfect for that.
"The Ontario government, during negotiations with Cisco for a juicy corporate subsidy, indicated that salaries are 'very competitive' and that they'd do 'anything to keep it that way'. Literally stating that he wanted to keep us 'poorer' to guarantee the jobs. (Sorry I can't find the reference)."
This was also a point made during the amazon pitch - cheap labour.
"Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2/3 the wages,"
Actually Canada products a lot of decent tech people, most of which go south the US. The ones that stay, or the ones that immigrate here, mostly work for 2/3rd (or less) of the wages.
But yes, Canadian economy is mostly "rip and ship"; and that seems to apply to talent education as well.
Having extra tech jobs in Canada will certainly, at least, keep some talent in the market. Having talent kept in the local market makes it easier for entrepreneurs to attract them. I don't agree with your assessment that this is peanuts.
Not a Canadian, but Canada is leagues ahead of the US in a lot of important ways. In my opinion, at the level of nations, it's much better to be boringly mediocre than outrageously good or bad in any one way or another. Toronto is a first class city, like you said: what more "exceptionalism" do you need?
> Now, that's a hard thing to contemplate, as 'nobody' can really compete with SV at their own game
As in total aggregate, I agree. On a per-capita basis, no. Some countries have a very healthy tech sector without being as large as in the US. Canada does not not need to have FAANG, just an F is enough.
An 'F' generally requires a critical mass of competitive expertise in certain areas, along with the 'F' (and smaller entities) to commercialize it. Basically an 'industrial hub'.
Sweden, Switzerland have F-like companies, but also the surrounding competitive base (and often direct participation of government) to support them.
Switzerland is very competitive in drugs, among many other things.
Interesting example: Sweden makes Fighter Jets (Grippon), maybe the most sophisticated of all product categories.
Making 'Fighter Jets' requires a highly specialized industrial base, and the investment/cooperation of government: Jet sales are done as much through the diplomatic corps as anything else. Policy is shaped around it.
But how did Sweden get there? Well, because they're a sovereign nation and have fought several wars with Russia, 'everyone serves' as part of their community requirements. In the 1960's tiny Sweden had one of the largest air forces in the world! So, out of this (and other developments), they have the ability to make advanced fighters.
So it's a panacea of cultural elements and underpinning institutions that enable exceptional entities.
The problem with what I have just described, is that it 'does not compute' in the American, neoliberal model. In America, entrepreneurs 'raise money' and 'make companies' and 'many fail, but some win'. This kind of neoliberal model is heralded as the 'true free-market solution', but in reality, it disproportionately favours very large countries.
Smaller nations have to play a different game.
The Canadian elite has mostly bought into the neoliberal model, even most 'progressives'. So Canada s a small country, caught up in playing from the American ideological playbook.
As an American who's committed to staying in Canada until my kids leave the house, and who's experienced the Canadian hiring market for the last 10 years, I'm both excited and concerned.
Excited, because now that I've joined one of these SV companies recently expanding their presence Canada, my yearly TC is now an integer multiple of what I was making at a local small company.
But I'm also concerned, because the majority of Canadian companies absolutely cannot compete. At all. My fear is all the biggest talent will get sucked into US-based companies. Super hypocritical of me, I know.
Google’s expansion means that Google is succeeding, not the scene around them. Their hiring more people doesn’t increase the number of tech-related companies at all. Maybe the number of banh mi shops will grow. It just means that Google likes the lower cost of running some operations up there.
The scene around might grow and might not. Wannabe Googlers might come on spec and work for a different employer if Google doesn’t work out. Xooglers will be emerge eventually, but if they’re not making googly money, it’s hard to see them staying to work in tech.
Also a USA-ian in Canada, under similar circumstances.
Currently remote for a US firm, doing well by local standards. I desperately wish there were more competitive local options, esp. in places that are NOT Toronto or Vancouver. In the US you can go to Austin, Denver, Seattle, the Washington DC area, NYC, SF, even Raleigh-Durham for tech jobs... but in Canada it's just YYZ and YVN.
The cheap labour pool as a consequence of the weak Canadian dollar certainly helps, alongside having identical time zones and nearly identical culture to the United States. Lots of Canadian consultancies butter their bread with USD.
For way too long Canada has had this weird artificial market capture problem. The easier it is for us to break down those fake barriers, the better it is for everyone.
Salaries are about to go up way more for the average employee. Simultaneously, any companies that were making money on labor price arbitrage are about to have a real tough time; Good riddance.
If you get into a senior role at one of the big tech firms, pay matches the valley. For lesser roles, Canada is cheaper, but the gap is closing rapidly as talent runs dry.
Potential ambiguity here. Yes, “staff” engineers at google earn very high salaries, but people unfamiliar with titles might think this term means a competent but otherwise unremarkable member of the technical staff.
At google a Staff engineer is a title notably higher than senior swe, and many talented people will not reach this title or pay grade.
The point I'm making in my comment is that "Senior Software Engineers" are not making >600K in SF.
"Senior Software Engineer" is a role you can reach in 3-8 years of experience.
"Staff" is a whole different ordeal, a role many never reach. And even then compensation is closer to 450K; you might find some around 600K but those are outliers (whereas OP made it sound that >600K is something common)
The above was referring to total comp. From what I have read, annual stock/RSU compensation is equivalent to salary. I have read that a $300,000 salary is not unheard of for a senior FAANG engineering role.
It's rather rare, from what I can tell. Esp. in the context of immigration, h1bdata can be useful. Google llc has precisely 1 software engineer certified at a salary above 300k. 250k, more achievable, with very senior status.
What really happens though is RSU appreciation. GOOG has more than doubled in the past 4 years. You are awarded X dollars of stock on hire and every annual review period, but that is converted into shares awarded every Y months. If you achieved a 1:1 salary:RSU vesting ratio, today that would probably be 1:2, a 50 percent pay raise.
I think the RSUs and bonuses aren’t included in those H1B data reports. Anyone L5 and higher (as well as many L4s) at Google is pulling in at least 300k in total liquid compensation per year.
Just to be clear, that salary is prevailing wage which is usually lower than the actual salary you're getting (does not include RSUs or stock on top of that). In my case the difference was about 30 to 40% lower.
The PERM / H1B figures only show base salary and exclude RSUs which for most big tech companies is the larger factor at senior and above levels. Netflix pay all cash so their PERM figures are much more representative and match the levels.fyi numbers pretty well, giving me confidence that those self reported figures are broadly accurate.
(When comparing keep in mind Netflix hire only at senior software engineer level and above and have a single level title so staff/principal levels are collapsed to senior just with higher salaries.)
This is why a simplifying assumption was made with the 1:1 ratio of salary:RSUs. Obviously it matters when comparing two companies, but in this case the question was simply "who makes 600k" and the answer is 'probably nobody unless the stock did real gud'
The salary:stock ratio increases the higher Your level. 600k would likely be an L7 offer, though you could reach that at a lower level through stock appreciation.
I know people who joined post IPO and make more than that at Shopify as Senior Developers. Is primarily equity though. Salaries do lag in Canada vs USA.
So who in Toronto is paying senior or staff developers with 10 years of experience the local equivalent of >$400k USD (in lower cost cities than NYC/SF)?
I left Toronto immediately after my Master's, but have multiple extremely talented friends who feel they've topped out at well under half that.
No, $600k in SF is better than $200k in Canada in probably all circumstances. As long as your housing costs don’t scale with your income, you are already winning with an extra $100k of comp per year. That isn’t even considering that lots of things are more expensive in Canada, taxes are a bit higher, and Vancouver and Toronto aren’t cheap.
Google's announcement was 1000 Montreal, 1000 Toronto, 3000 Kitchener-Waterloo. Montreal and KW being the engineering locations. Both Montreal and KW have much more reasonable housing, and are far cheaper than Toronto/Vancouver.
Yep; I have friends in the 250k to 500k USD bracket who pine away at the notion of moving back home to Canada, but there's no way in hell they'd maintain that level of compensation.
The pool of technical talent is also pretty great.
If you're in a non-primary market in the U.S. (non NYC/SF/Boston), my experience has been that you can hire comparable or better talent in Canadian cities for less the local U.S. median salary, especially in talent-starved markets within the U.S. It's an open secret that many Americans are somehow unaware of.
Also with easier immigration, Canada’s talent pool will only get better. Already the US is losing people to Canada due to overly restrictive immigration laws. I’ve even heard immigration offices offering to help with Canadian immigration on the radio in the SF Bay
I think Canada is losing far more people to the US than the other way around, at least at the higher end of the market. Canadian salaries just aren't competitive at that level.
The US is the NBA, the stars definitely do go there. A pretty good life strategy is to work in the states from 30-45 while you're young and healthy, then come back to Canada for peace and safety to raise your family. I've seen a few people do that. I'm not sure it ends up being that bad for Canada. On the one hand they lose stars during their productive years, on the other hand they come back during their spending years with more money/knowledge/sophistication than they would have had.
Create a business != create jobs.
A large infusion of outside capital will boost a local economy. They will own homes and buy things from local merchants which will create jobs.
That is still lesser than the impact of entrepreneurs abroad. Ask the Canadian govt what they would prefer and it won't be suburban families. Canada will always be 2nd in technology.
The immigration process itself has gotten appreciably worse though.
A few years ago, it took me fifteen minutes to renew a Work Permit at the border. Last year, it was an intentionally unpleasant all-day affair. The online system is horrifically backlogged, far beyond the 100 or so days it says on the website.
Yes, Canada's bet on skilled immigration is really smart of them, and it's a neat way of side-stepping the usual social tensions that we hear about wrt. "anti-immigrant" sentiment from socially marginalized or low-income natives.
So while there certainly is a skilled worker immigration path, if you are accepted by the board as a refugee, you will be met with help and kindness. And even while waiting, we do not separate kids from you and put them in cages. And we accept the most refugees in the world: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696974
How is that different than the U.S.? Are refugees not met with help and kindness in America?
> And even while waiting, we do not separate kids from you and put them in cages
While I do not agree with this tactic, I also think that this paints an unfair picture, since Canada has never experienced immigration issues to the degree that the U.S. has. Maybe the U.S. should do what Mexico did and let caravans of migrants show up at the border in Vancouver?
"According to the US-based Pew Research Center, which looked the the UNHCR data, 2018 was the first time the US did not lead the world in refugee resettlement since 1980."
I guess congratulations? I don't necessarily view "accepting the most refugees" as a moral calculation, nor something that should be a competition. But if you want to keep score I guess the U.S. is now 28-1 since 1980. Go America!
"The US is the world's major recipient of new asylum applications, registering 254,300 applications in 2018.
Canada was ninth on the list of new asylum claims with 55,400 registered in 2018, behind the US, Peru, Germany, France, Turkey, Brazil, Greece and Spain."
Jeez only 9th? Worse than Peru?
"An influx of asylum seekers crossing at the US-Canada border has become a political issue after approximately 40,000 people "irregularly" crossed into Canada between 2017 and 2018."
Why is this an issue for Canadians?
"
Canada currently is struggling with a backlog of almost 74,000 asylum claims with applicants waiting almost two years for a hearing."
Other relevant facts from your article.
But hey, the U.S. is bad because that's what the news says.
America historically greeted refugees with kindness. This changed significantly with the new administration in 2017.
The US Asylum backlog jumped to 340,000 - up 10x since 2014. Certainly some of that is due to heightened applications, but a lot is due to antiquated systems in USCIS and political changes.
I’d also note in the Syrian refugee crisis, that Canada punched high above its weight in resettlement, far beyond the numbers the USA accepted, for a country 10x smaller.
With global warming and conflict on the rise, we are about to see over a billion people displaced over the next 50 years. In prior eras, the US would have led global efforts to manage this in a structured, humane way. But lately the US has preferred dismantling the global order and institutions it created after WW2.
> we are about to see over a billion people displaced over the next 50 years
Yes. And this is worrisome because stable countries won't be able to "let them all in" (sorry not sure the best way to put that). Long-term it's going to be more sensible to stabilize unstable countries.
Canada also runs separate refugee immigration program. Also: the advantage of not having too many illegal immigrants coming through the border and having to make decisions when they and their children put roots in the country.
The US has so much land and so much economic capacity to add people (most of those people are already in the economic system so the US will have more trouble removing them than legalizing them) that the current illegal immigrants are not an issue at all. The US obviously needs to get better control of the borders (which it has for the past decade) but the only sensible, economically effective and not to mention humane way to deal with people already here is to provide them with legal status so they don’t remain an unprotected and therefore cheaper competitor for jobs.
Lol. Maybe a similar culture to some parts of California or Washington, and that is a stretch, but Vancouver is very very different than "the United States". Live in both for a while and all the little difference (the guns, health care, government, police, civil-military relations, the environment, land use, education etc) add up to markedly different approaches to life.
I think anyone who had spent time living outside of North America will recognize that the cultures of Canada and the US are indeed nearly identical. Especially in the context of this thread, which is about the workplace.
Whoa definitely can't agree. For example, Canadians are much less likely to be rah rah about something they know doesn't work. And they don't have anywhere near the level of 'just world' philosophy. As a foreigner to both, I see massive differences.
Strongly disagree. The difference between somewhere like Vancouver and Seattle is much smaller than the difference between somewhere like San Francisco and Tulsa. Statement is plenty accurate.
I'm an American living in Canada and I'd agree with this.
San Diego was far more different than Austin, TX, and considerably different than Ithaca, NY.
I'm still legally a WA resident, and having done a lot of time around Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, and Vancouver, I can tell you there are a lot of similarities. Seattle doesn't have the Aberdeen Mall, but in terms of attitude there isn't anything you can't find in Seattle.
Once you get out of the city, guns, religion, and skepticism of the urbanites is just as common as in the US -- standard Urban-Rural divide. Hell, even the "fly-over" provinces are conservative, just like in the US.
It seems you're insinuating that Alberta is somehow more (U.S.) 'American' than the rest of Canada.
I have lived in Alberta for over ten years, and though culturally distinct from the rest of Canada (as is every other province I've spent time in) Alberta's brand of rugged individualist / conservatism is still very Canadian.
And though we may look very different to the urbanites of GVRD (Vancouver and surrounding) and the GTA (Toronto and surrounding), you'll find many more similarities between us and those living in rural Canada with resource-based economies, like the people living in B.C.'s forestry-dependent areas, the northern prairies or NorthWest Ontario. The difference for us is that we have very vocal, oil-industry-controlled politicians and a population that is immediately suspicious of any time an easterner tries to tell us what to do.
Sometimes the easiest way to see our distinctiveness is by contrast - immediately evident when crossing over to even the closest border states.
I love Montana and its people, but boy do you know you're not in Canada anymore - roadways lined with advertisements; cops everywhere you look; huge rich/poor divides; razor wire, visible drug problems and ghettos in even the smallest cities; and a love of all things military.
All that to say, there's far more to being Albertan than oil, guns and god, and those three things don't make us a 'murican.
Agreed. I lived in the us for five years, it was a shock. The big thing for me was the guns, the constant militarism. Albertans might own lots of guns but they don't take them to pizza hut. And cops everywhere. I was in seattle recently and counted 8 different TYPES of police car on a quick 4-block walk between buildings. Not car paint jobs, different types of police. ICE, fed, state, local, atf... America seems to have more police than not. Canada, all of canada, doesn't feel like that.
No I'm insinuating that the values the commenter encountered in vancouver vis a vis guns, police, armed conflict, etc are not representative of canada as a whole and change from province to province and even between say vancouver and the surrounding rural areas.
Vancouver is especially different from the rest of canada than most canadian cities. Its like using Portland to characterize the entirety of America.
Yes. I have lived/worked in Alberta many years, and am scheduled to go back soon. But i didnt say Canada /= the united states. I said Vancouver /= the United states.
I, too, would accept "similar culture," but it is far from "nearly identical." I say this as a Canadian who lived in the United States for several years.
...we've been having these kinds of headlines from local media outlets pretty much everywhere where FAANG have created/expanded presences. -- But it seems to me that these companies are extremely centralized and only decentralize to the extent that it is unavoidable (e.g. distributed data centers for reasons of latency) or that it captures special opportunities (e.g. Apple expanding in Munich right now, but doing only hardware and chip design work in what seems to me like a play to pick up talent from competitors like Infineon)
Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley.
How is opening 5000 new jobs in Canada a sign that Google is "extremely centralized"? In regards to your Munich example, what exactly is the issue with that? If there's a large amount of talent in some area why wouldn't you want to try and compete for it? Anyway, I have a good feeling that office will grow soon, there's plenty of non-hardware and chip design talent in that area :) You do have to start somewhere though. I will also make an educated guess that Google isn't hiring just junior people, and even if they were, they would grow into more senior roles anyway.
5000 new jobs is not what the article is saying, but capacity to grow to 5000. I don't know how many they have now, and creating capacity to do something is not the same as actually doing it. Also, to put the number in perspective: 5000 would be only 4.3% of their global workforce, and my guess would be that Canada must actually be one of their biggest non-U.S. presences. (London also has a strong one for Google).
I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with these companies expanding their presences outside the valley. (I would very much welcome it), only that we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized. Maybe real estate prices and competition for tech talent will eventually force them to properly decentralize. But I could also see a scenario where those companies could put their might into play to overcome that resistance-level and allow them to continue growing while remaining centralized. It's simply too early to tell which way this thing is playing out.
> we're not seeing enough of it right now to contradict the notion that these companies are still very much centralized.
What are you basing this on, and what would be enough ?
4.3%, if indeed happens that way, would be a substantial portion. They already have significant presence in NYC, Seattle/Kirkland, London, Zurich, LA, Hyderabad, Dublin, Tokyo, Austin, etc. A few thousand here and a few thousand there add up quickly.
The numbers in the article are country-level, and you're responding by saying things about cities. NYC, Seattle and LA are all in the U.S. They're centralized inside the U.S. at the city-level to Mountain View. They're centralized within the English-speaking world at the country-level to the U.S. They're centralized globally w.r.t. language communities to the English-speaking world.
You have no basis for your comment, no numbers, sources etc. Zurich, London, Tokyo all have very senior levels and many important teams. Canada is growing to those levels as well. Do your research before burying a hatchet.
Many 'mostly engineering' companies, including Google, have had and do have entire offices for specific non-engineering roles, such as marketing or whatever, anything which isn't seen to be needed to be in the same location, or perhaps there's a better 'hot spot' for, say marketing in NYC and engineering in SF.
"This information is most likely buried in Google’s annual report — the last one I could dig up is their 2015 fiscal year end report. According to the paper published by Google Inc and Alphabet Inc, there are 61,814 full-time employees with 23,336 in research and development."
Bear in mind R&D isn't pure developers. It also includes QA and project/program management roles.
He cites numbers from Google's previous financial reports (likely to be valid) and then adds a guess of 45% at the end (less likely to be valid). If you want to believe the guess, well, that's up to you.
Google has been decentralized for a long time. Seattle, NYC, Zurich, and London are all big offices that are at least comparable to Mountain View, not to mention a bunch of other smaller but very serious offices.
Facebook, Google, and Apple all have large or rapidly growing presences in Seattle. It does the real estate market and traffic no good, but it is what it is.
You can’t just include Seattle (Fremont), you also have to consider Kirkland, which is much bigger than Fremont. They are building (or have built?) a new larger office in South Lake Union (5 buildings), I’m not sure if they will be consolidating Fremont but I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to consolidate Kirkland.
Altogether Google employs 4500 in the Seattle area, and that number will increase substantially when south lake union comes online. And of course, Google will just be a small presence compared to the other craziness in South Lake Union (Amazon being the biggest, but also Apple and Facebook having large presences).
Now, 4500 in Seattle, 4000 in Zurich, 3,500 in London, 7,000 in NYC...that easily approaches the 23,000 in Mountain View.
The Kirkland and Fremont offices are only 12.4 miles apart. When they move to South Lake Union, they'll only be 9.8 miles apart (and a much better freeway connection).
> I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley
This doesn't sound right TBH.
Most junior people are actually in HQ, because HQ has head counts and can offer to train them, while satellite office won't have so many HCs and usually there to snatch up experienced developers.
As to promotions to higher level, yes HQ are definitely better, but that is only because it is HQ, so critical decision is made there naturally.
Yeah, I've noticed a recent exodus of mid-level and senior people out of the Bay Area and to the major satellite offices in the US and abroad.
The traditional wisdom is that you should work from HQ to maximize your career advancement, but I think many people are weighing this against the untenable housing situation and realizing it's not worth it.
Also, San Francisco was considered a fun alternative to living in Cupertino or Menlo Park or Mountain View, but the city just keeps going further downhill. Junior employees likely have a higher tolerance than senior employees for the quality-of-life issues you deal with in San Francisco.
Here the engineering office is in Waterloo while Toronto is sales/marketing/administrative. Toronto certainly counts as a major city (3rd or 4th largest in North America depending on how you count).
> Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley.
As a tech worker in Atlanta, I find that quite the opposite is true. People tend to career-(s)hop out in the valley and don't stay at the same company for long.
In Atlanta people tend to stay with the same company for years and grow their role and influence. As such, the SF headquarters tends to put its most important pieces in its remote offices.
I also think SF sees a lot of products spun up as promotion vehicles, whereas remote offices tend to think long term with long time horizons.
Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of Infineon and a whole ecosystem around it (business partners, educational opportunity, etc.) means that Munich has hardware talent, and despite Munich being the most expensive and high-paying city in Germany (next to Frankfurt), salaries are still low, and real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley. That's what I mean by "special opportunity" if you look at it from Apple's point of view.
>real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley
Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point.
You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries.
Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have multiple friends who moved there to work in engineering after graduating and they're starting to move elsewhere once they enter their 30s because they got tired of living in shared apartments(WGs) and realized they could never afford to buy anything worthy of having a family unless you're lucky enough to get into an executive position at a top company since ICs there aren't valued as much as they are in the valley so their salaries stay low and job hopping for better pay is frowned upon.
First off: I have lived & worked in Munich and done exactly what you describe (now live in the countryside working for a remote company) but it is still only a minority of people who [can] do that. It is certainly not the case that everybody is doing it. The ecosystem is alive and well.
In my various data sources tracking job advertising, Munich has been and continues to be where almost all of the interesting jobs are based in Bavaria, and I'm not seeing falling real estate prices at all.
> Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany
I'd argue that in many ways it is worse than the Bay Area in the sense that the pay-differential, though in existence, is not nearly as pronounced. Stack Overflow keeps pestering me with emails about jobs that it has classified as "high pay jobs" for Munich. The salary beneath those job ads is usually something like €80k/year before taxes (which are extremely high in Germany). This must seem like a steal to a company like Apple. And this is in a city that has one of the best technical universities on the planet, an extremely vibrant engineering scene, and offers a better quality of life than the Bay Area at lower prices to any senior Apple executive who might want/need to move there from the Bay Area. -- My initial statement holds in that this is a "special opportunity" for Apple, that must be worth capturing for them.
I'm saying TAXES are extremely high. Getting paid €80k/yr before taxes in Munich is a bad joke, but is unfortunately where the market is. Many people are living that bad joke. -- Stop disagreeing with me, please, when there really is no disagreement here.
By working for a remote-only company that's based out of the U.S. but allows people to live anywhere they want globally. Whenever I get contacted by a German-based headhunter working for a German company, I tell them that I'm perfectly willing to talk, but only if it's going to be a remote position and that they (the headhunters) need to do more to educate their clients on the benefits of remote. -- But I might as well be talking to a wall when I do that. It's just not happening.
I've found that German-based companies are perfectly willing to pay 2x - 3x for an onsite freelancer than they would pay for an onsite employee, but they just don't do remote.
Since U.S.-based remote-only companies don't pay nearly as well as U.S.-based companies doing onsite - in my experience[!] -, this means that I could actually be earning more by doing onsite freelancing for German companies than doing remote for U.S. companies, but if you factor in the time & money for commuting and the increased cost of living from spending a lot of time in the cities where German companies offering interesting opportunities tend to be based, my disposable income/rate of savings, purchasing power, and quality of life are actually all better by doing remote.
That matches my experience with recruiters in Austria exactly where if you ask about being allowed to work remotely, most will give you a look like you just insulted their mothers.
The thing about recruiters you gotta keep in mind is, they're not your friends and they're not here to help you land your dream job. You're just a meal ticket to them and they just want to find some sucker to quickly fill the position as they're in competition with the other recruiters so whoever gets the position filled first gets paid, the others are left hanging. If you start making demands that the employers don't want to hear like remote work, they'll realize you're not a sucker and they won't get their money with you so they'll drop you as a candidate all together even if you would be a great fit for the position.
My question to you was how to you proceed to find good remote jobs? Linkedin? HN? Any advice is appreciated. My email is in my profile if you want to go private.
According to the UBS Real Estate Bubble Index 2019 [0], Munich is the city with the highest property bubble risk...So your perception of "Fells like a place with Bay Area prices but without the pay" holds some truth.
Why is job hopping frowned upon ? I mean this seems to be some ploy to prevent workers from increasing their market value. It seems weird that salaries are shit in Germany when in fact the country touts itself as one of engineers.
It is a ploy to keep wages low and unfortunately it seems to be working as most employees have bought into this belief that nobody will hire you anymore if you job hop every 2-3 years, at least in traditional German engineering companies, although it might be more lax in Berlin's hip software scene.
Germany is indeed a country of engineers, but poorly paid ones.
The dollar is likely a factor, as you mention. But from their list of cities only Toronto has a crisis of home affordability. Montreal is still within sane levels and Waterloo is not too much worse.
I live in the Waterloo region and affordability is questionable. Not terrible for most tech workers, but definitely not great for the "working class". All of Canada is in a serious housing bubble, but definitely worse in Toronto and Vancouver.
Rents in Montreal are going up but still no where near Toronto level. Cost of living is lower too on many levels. Of course it depends on the area but generally it's reasonable.
You can live pretty comfortably on a 75k salary and lots of people in the tech sector make more than this, infosec paying even 6 figures in some places.
I recently turned down an offer from Google for a job in Sunnyvale because even though I might have been paid twice as much, I knew the cost of living was much higher and quality of life probably not as good.
Montreal has a crazy-low cost of living for what is otherwise a fantastic city. Been there three times now and all were grand.
Part of it is that QC has crazy high taxes, which drives down demand and keeps the big money in VAN or YYZ, and also that there are a lot of open / in demand jobs in the QC. They offer decent salaries -- but they want people who are bilingual or purely Francophone. I get weekly notices from LinkedIn for Data Center Mgmt roles around MTL -- HydroQuebec = cheap power and therefore cheap colo -- but I don't speak enough French.
I'm curious about the salaries and potential for career growth for software engineers with 5,10,15 years of experience in Canada. Levels.fyi is handy for the US salaries but not so much for Canada.
Fwiw, I am a foreign grad student currently happy with the lifestyle in Canada. But I'm wondering whether I've made the right career move moving to Canada.
I would imagine a lot of this is de-risking the issues surrounding the nativism in US politics. Canada is a good nearshore location. I presume visas for foreigners are considerably less problematic.
I'm in Sydney and we see Amazon do a lot of recruitment sessions here.
The most interesting takeaway for me is that never talk about 'super evilness' of FANG etc when discussion is about salaries. Instead berate companies which have no worldwide ad money pouring in for not matching the otherwise evil companies.
The best thing that could ever happen to Canada would get rid of that god awful TN-Visa. TN - Talent Nuke. Completely sucks us dry of people moving to the US.
Alternatively, if wages were competitive in Canada (even considering cost of living and health care) there would be no reason to move. Personally, I'd much rather be in Canada to be near my family but I'd be making 1/2 the wage and have less talent to learn and grow from.
Yes there still would be: weather. There's literally no place in Canada that doesn't have a generally unpleasant outdoor experience for at least half the year. I say that as a proud Canadian. It's honestly the main thing holding my family from moving back. My wife is from Vancouver and hates snow. I'm from Calgary and can't take rain (I did 3 winters straight in Vancouver promising myself to never do another until I finally got out). We've been looking for somewhere in Canada and we can't find a solution.
It may sound small but it has a major impact on our happiness, energy levels, and overall well-being.
Toronto has none of Vancouver's rain and almost none of Calgary's snow. I wear running shoes for all save maybe 3 or 4 weeks of winter. -15 is considered a deep freeze and happens about 3 times per winter. What are you waiting for?
After many years of visiting Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal yearly, for more than a week at a time..
Toronto is not perfect, it has some of the worst weather in Canada. Summers are too hot (due to humidity), and the winter is cold and windy (due to humidity).
It’s not much different than most places in Canada but the lakes add a bite to the -15 to make it feel like the rest of the country (save Vancouver). The rain is brutal in Vancouver, but can keep you busy like cold does in the rest of Canada. Canada’s winter months are synonymous with precipitation, and you might be surprised to find where the most sunshine is.
Most of my friends from Toronto rarely or meaningfully ever leave Toronto to have an informed opinion of all 4 seasons nationally.
Commuting time takes away years of waking living time in GTA and GVRC unless you live downtown, except many startups are leaving downtown for affordability and keeping their people happy. All of this can be balanced away if you get other things that are worth it, including market size relative to Canada.
There are a few entrepreneurial pockets like Waterloo, and even Kelowna that are worth paying attention to. I don’t live in any cities listed here but travel often instead.
My wife is a UofT grad, so spent 4 years in Toronto. That's where her snow feelings come from – she still tells stories of marching to class in -20C and snow. It may not be Calgary, but it's not California either. Maybe we're wimps, but such is the situation we find ourselves in!
Maybe we'll be back some day. Toronto is the most likely.
On topic for the parent – we're both Googlers but right now Google has no tech employees in Toronto proper (it's all sales and marketing). Waterloo is the only product/eng office and that's a tough commute. I'm not sure if that is changing with this announcement.
That isn't true. Downtown Toronto has multiple Google engineers. I know one in brain and one in cloud. One has been in TO for ~2.5 years, the other for 1 year. As far as I know the only way to get into the office is by special permission. One of them only got their role because they said they were quitting due to the waterloo commute.
Fwiw I'm a Canadian that just signed a Google offer to work out of downtown SF because I hate the winter too. I think people care more or less about the weather based on their hobbies / interests.
It absolutely is true in actual practice; unless you're some unicorn ML researcher all our engineering talent is in Waterloo (or Montreal). If it was possible to work in Toronto I wouldn't have had to have sold my house and moved my family years back.
We do have a rather comfortable bus which runs from Toronto, if you don't mind the 2 hour (each way) commute.
(The company I worked for was bought by Google back in 2011. We had people in NY and Toronto; all our Toronto people were told we had to move to Waterloo and that was that. Most of us have stayed @ Google but for some the practice of having to rip up their entire lives in Toronto to move wasn't ideal and they left.)
The number of engineers at Google Toronto is so small that they're the exception that proves the rule, though. For all intents and purposes beyond some very special cases (and the Hinton stuff) you can treat the site as having no engineering.
That is not what I understand it to mean -- rather, the opposite. That is, finding an engineer at the Toronto office is so improbable that it is remarkable, hence you are reminded that it is normally an engineer free zone.
There are some idioms that do mean it is unexceptional. You might be familiar with the Pratchettism "Million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten."
Huh? Toronto's weather is all over the map. One second its -17C, next it's flooding, in the summer 35C+ happens on the regular. Toronto has crazy weather.
I still don't understand the pay rhetoric in Canada. I live in Bangalore, and I make more or less the same pay as in Toronto for nearly 1/5th the cost of living.
Why are salaries so low in Canada ? Now at least owing to the US immigration fiasco, more labour should move in and salaries should technically rise - but I don't see that happening. Not sure why.
Competitive salaries on par with California or even NYC will have a dramatic impact on the influx of immigrants.
Unfortunately top talent that wants a higher salary over all else emigrates to the US. Those of us that remain are in a lower bargaining position. And there's a steady stream of immigrants.
Also the quality of the work here is mostly miserable. There's not a lot of interesting stuff.
Things are better if you can find something outside of Toronto where the cost of living is ridiculous. One advantage of the Google Waterloo office...
Half is pretty generous, for mid/seniour developers it starts at a quarter and gets worse.
I was looking to move because I like colder weather/climate change related reasons and I had one recruiter tell me "You can't possibly ever make that much, that's CEO pay!".
Several Bay Area companies are opening/expanding offices up here, especially in the last year. I've joined one of them and I suggest you start looking around. At least in Toronto.
IMHO when education is subsidized by public funds (which it is here), those funds should have to be repaid if you're leaving the country within a certain number of years or before you've paid some amount in income tax.
In New Zealand, the government funds tertiary education with a zero-interest loan. If you move/work overseas, it becomes a regular loan with 4% interest.
It gives some pressure to stay in NZ, but in reality, talented engineers can get over double their salary abroad.
That would also create more incentives to simply do one's education south of the border, rather than risk being shackled by government efforts to halt one's movement.
People are eyeing the salaries they can get with that education. I can see plenty of people willing to swallow that cost in exchange for not having the government tying an anchor around their legs.
I moved to the US from Canada on a TN. I would've liked to stay where I was but the local job market wasn't great at the time. At the time I viewed it as temporary. Now I have no plans to go back. I'm making twice the base salary and I'm in an area with a significantly lower cost of living.
The TN wasn't responsible for my leaving and it isn't the reason I'm staying away.
You actually just proved the opposite: your TN was the thing that got you a job paying 2x as much, gave you your foot in the door and exposure, and some time to establish longer-term plans.
Without the TN it's likely you may not have been hired because it's not worth the effort for most companies: T1 is easy, then once you're in they can process it more.
I needed to relocate or switch to a different industry. The option to relocate to the US was partly due to the TN. However, there would have been other options I could have looked at both domestically and abroad. There are plenty of countries with relatively easy immigration for people in the tech field.
From a classically liberal perspective, it would seem like an argument for TN.
i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'.
But from almost any other perspective it's not.
TN visas are mostly 'one way' - to America. It's an opportunity to suck out the best talent (the fruit of public education) for no cost.
Without real reciprocity, there's no benefit to Canadians who wouldn't use the opportunity.
Shockingly, neither government really keeps that much data on TN. Our incompetent governments have really little insight into what works and what does not. A TN is a 'stamp on your passport' that you get at the airport, it should be more centralized.
An easy solution to the asymmetry would simply be to make it '1 for 1', i.e. one American goes to Canada for every reverse.
I don't believe these are 'national/communitarian' vs. 'liberal' arguments, there's many situations we can have our cate and eat it.
TN visas have reciprocity. Americans in those fields can also go and work freely in Canada. However, when you factor in the difference in compensation it makes sense that more Canadians move to the US than vice versa. Big tech companies opening offices in Canada may shift that balance. I know I'd rather live and work in Vancouver than San Francisco if I was being paid the same amount for both.
One of the reasons for the imbalance is that the Canadian dollar has traditionally been weak compared to USD. Since a large portion of the Canadian economy is based on exporting natural resources this is an overall good thing for Canada to have. Balancing all of the competing interests in a national economy is hard.
From talking with people I know who are still in Canada it sounds like the FAANG companies expanding there presence is starting to fix the wage disparity for tech workers. Without the wage gap there is less incentive to leave. I'd rather just let this continue than rely on some knee jerk government intervention that is likely to have unintended side effects.
I understand what you're saying, but I believe that the nature of the liberal argument ultimately boils down to some kind of personal self-actualization.
The popularisation of almost any liberal policy usually takes the form appealing to the choice/freedom/egoism of the individual. Sometimes in a crude way.
I should have used the third person impersonal 'one sees' not 'you see' as I didn't mean 'you' of course.
Are you proposing tech version of Iron Curtain? I think the best solution for Canada is to try something that attracts the people rather then have them seeking greener pastures. Otherwise they'd leave TN-1 or not.
I think companies like Shopify are destination companies to work for in Canada. Ottawa is not a destination town for most, but people seem to be willing to move there just to work for Shopify.
Allowing to park people and outsourcing is not a tech boom.
Different mindset, different understanding, different risks, limited upside at the end. A country on salary.
Cheap? These Canadian cities? The cost of living is insane and tech hiring competition is already intense. It’s not going to be cheap to hire anyone there.
Software engineer salaries are significantly lower than in the US.
> The median Canadian “Software Engineer” salary is CA$72,000. The median US salary is US$91,000.... The cost of living in Vancouver is about 4.8% higher than Austin. While the median Software Engineer salary in Austin is 40% higher than Vancouver when accounting for the exchange rate.
As an aside, I passionately hate that graph. It implies that Canadian tech salaries are abnormally low. I wish it was either showing just the US, or included more countries than just US and Canada. Had they included London, Sydney, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc. in the graph, it would have showed that Canadian salaries are in line with and towards the higher end of world salaries except US, and that US salaries are a huge outlier in the world stage.
I'm a Canadian working for a US FAANMG company, and I've been based out of both their Canadian and European offices.
I make way more in Vancouver than my peers in ANY European office (which include Zurich, London, Berlin)
And those places are more expensive than Vancouver (not counting buying real estate which is not relevant to me as a renter)
But of course I'm keenly aware that I'd make 30% more in Seattle, and 50% more in Silicon Valley.
Does it bother me? Not really. I've been to those places and I would take the lifestyle quality of both Vancouver and Canada over any part of the US. Plus these days, I don't see a way of living in the US, and not feeling complicit in all the evils of the country. Not without radical participation in trying to destroy the system from within.
And despite what people say about the similarity in work culture, it's more reasonable in Canada from sick leave to vacation, to day-to-day expectations of work-life balance.
Sure you could add other cities, but the result of the graph is the same for Canadians. We are getting absolutely hosed on salary considering that nearly everything (minus housing) in Canada is pegged to the US dollar. It makes it really hard to attract talent when someone looking for a job could move 4 hours south and make 50-100% more money to have more purchasing power. Other countries being similar to our level doesn't change this fact, they are also being screwed over in purchasing power, but they at least have some insulation from being directly dependent on the US.
> nearly everything (minus housing) in Canada is pegged to the US dollar
This is another persistent myth I wish would die. For example, between 1998 and 2018 (a recent 20 year period for which data is readily available), USD/CAD exchange rate has been as favourable as 0.989 CAD per USD and as unfavourable as 1.570 CAD per USD [1], approximately a 59% difference between the highest and the lowest.
During the same period, purchasing power parity has only fluctuated between 1.185 and 1.248 CAD per USD [2], only a 5% difference between the highest and the lowest.
Contrary to the popular online belief, Canadian currency is not a proxy that is only good for exchanging for USD to buy good and services. It is an independent and strong currency on its own.
And that’s including our healthcare and other social services. That ~$2000 CAD goes a long, long way and I’d rather have it doing what it’s doing than gain it for what I’d lose.
And the marginal rate is not what you end up paying.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. In my example the $2000 CAD paid in Canada to taxes at the same income in Ontario versus California goes to fund one of the worlds highest ranked public education and healthcare systems. I’d call that a meaningful impact.
Healthcare is paid by the province. Take 42% of the province taxes only. Maybe $190. Most of the tax paid is federal. That means more of the $2000 goes to the military.
Still think it's a good idea? A lot of health related causes could use the remaining 2000.
And my 2000 figure is the difference you pay when making an extra 10,000 at the 100,000 level.
Marginal tax gets above 50% pretty quickly. For example Ontario takes a bit about 200k a year to get >50%. For average tax rate yes you’ll need a lot more. 800k a year gets you pretty close at 49.1%. Sounds like a lot but that’s “only” 600k usd at today’s exchange rate. High but in the ball park of a staff level engineer at Facebook or google.
I mean, you are technically correct. If you earn more than approximately 800k in Quebec, you would pay about 50% of your income in taxes. But how many people earn remotely that much? Is this really a concern for us mere mortals?
Average tax of 50% is pretty hard to hit you are right but I was more pointing at marginal tax rate which is what most people refer to when they say Canadian income tax are high. Just check the CRA tax brackets and add in the Revenu Quebec tax bracket for instance.
Fact of the matter is good talent can choose between Canada and the US, and it's pretty easy for a Canadian engineer (especially early in their career) to move to the US to work. The US is close to Canada geographically and culturally so of course it's going to be the logical alternative. Especially when the pay is so much better. Of course no one from Vancouver or Toronto will move to Sydney or Berlin for best-in-class career prospects. You go to the USA for that, so long as you're willing to stomach the environment.
That’s just less than astronomically expensive not cheap. If they were after cheap they’d go to Berlin or London - that’s cheaper than Canadian cities for cost of labour.
Each company faces different constraints, and in particular there can be downsides going to Europe that don't exist for Canada, e.g., language, timezone, regulations, travel costs, culture.) A sandwich in Ohio is reasonably called "cheap" when I've been living in NYC, and I don't feel the need to say "but it would be really cheap in rural India".
Yes cost of living is insane but market rate salaries for top tier software developers in cities like Vancouver or Toronto is 40-50% cheaper than Silicon Valley.
Part of the reason for this is that the Trump administration has made it very hard for Canadians working for tech companies to visit the US on business. I have friends who used to frequently and freely travel between the two countries for meetings, and now they all have corporate policies forbidding it.
As is always the case with protectionist policies, the country imposing them experiences a net loss.
I would say this is totally false. I am working for Canadian office of US company and travel to the US on average once a month for meetings. Doing that for 10+ years and if anything I noticed I get fewer questions at the US border lately.
As a new grad myself, I am in this situation where I get offers of >120k USD if I move to SV with a growth potential (both in technical and financial terms) far better than what I can get here. In Quebec (where I live), I saw most of my peers stay around and accept salaries ranging from 65k CAD to 80k CAD (50k-61k USD). From what I know, an average senior can expect 120-130k CAD in Montreal. The only way to make more is by being a consultant, which is why you see a lot of them around here (for better or worse). I would feel a bit guilty to move to the US right now considering I got basically a free education and I do want to contribute back to society.