Google Raids Threaten Canada's Lead in Artificial Intelligence

The Lower Mainland is a pretty big area, the farther away from Downtown Vancouver the lower the rent is. I rent a small 3 bedroom house in North Delta (about a 45 minute drive to Downtown, no traffic. An hour if I park and take the train in) and pay $1550/m plus utilities. The house we're in sold for $510,000 in November 2014. It's very difficult for any single family to purchase even a small house. The vast majority of the houses being sold where I live are being bought by Indian/East Asian families who will buy the property, tear down the house, build a massive multi-tenant home, and have 2-3 families living under the same roof. A ton of property is also being purchased by people who will get their Canadian residency, buy a bunch of property, but still live in China. The property is bought as investments and left empty. There are area's downtown that are full of 20+ story residential buildings but yet the streets are deserted since nobody is actually living there. Super strange. Everyone who I know who's purchased recently is either buying townhouses or condo's (which are both still going for a minimum of $350K for 1-2 bedrooms).

Rents aren't as bad as the bay area (still awful) and the skytrain makes getting around easy. Most people just don't live in Vancouver proper.

As for why, there isn't enough upward pressure. Vancouver is at least getting a few of the big companies, but they really need to get some big tech in sucking up talent to drive some competition in salaries. Currently if people want money they head south, those who stay are in a market where they can't command the big salaries.

> Why?

Total guess, there isn't a critical mass of companies whose owners, executives and shareholders are missing out on billions in profit because they can't find enough sw engineers.

Said another way (a guess again), developers are not rare enough for current demand.

Rent is nowhere near as bad as the Bay Area. For example one could find a brand new apartment in Mount Pleasant (Essentially Vancouver's Mission) for less than $1500.

However recently the vacancy rate has dropped to near zero, even though new condos are constantly being built, so the problem is actually finding a place. Accordingly rents are rising substantially.

http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2015/12/16/vancouver-...

Just happened to see this article today talking about how much real estate costs in various area's of Greater Vancouver: http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2015/12/metro-vancouver-real-esta...

Only anecdata, but...

Back in 2010-2011, everybody I knew in Vancouver was earning ~45-60k after graduation (With multiple semesters of co-op experience). No stock, no bonuses, maybe a bit of RRSP matching. I was an outlier at ~95k CAD (At an investment bank).

Eight months later, I got an offer from Google for ~180k USD total comp.

Since then, only three people from my school that I know have broken 100k CAD - one of them works for Amazon, one of them worked for SAP for a decade, and one of them gets paid in USD.

The cost of rent in Vancouver is not as high as SF, but the cost of home ownership may as well be. Single-family homes at a 40-minute commute are north of half-a-million, and a home in Vancouver proper will run you more then a million.

I hear things are better out east, but I don't want to spend a third of my life living in a frozen hellscape.

I'm in iOS dev.

> "I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids)."

I hear this a lot from Canadian colleagues who stay in Canada, and I dunno, it always irks me a little bit.

Increasing your wage doesn't necessarily entail longer hours or fewer holidays. It seems like it's a popular perception in Canada to imagine all US jobs as some kind of hellish sweatshop where you're chained to your desk all day in exchange for more money - but in reality the spread of job quality is the same here as it is in some place like Toronto or Vancouver. You will find the same shitty sweatshop jobs and you will find great jobs - the pay increase seems entirely orthogonal to that. The market rate is simply higher - much higher, across the board.

My take home in Seattle is ~2.3 times what I made in BC. That's not including stock and bonuses either.

Granted my rent has gone up by a factor of 3.5, but after paying rent I've still got double the money leftover. Other things are cheaper too.

Now of course there is a couple years experience vs when I was in BC, but I would still probably be close to double.

> "hellish place like NY"

As opposed to what kind of place in Canada? NY was pretty awesome the last time I visited.

It may be accurate, but the number is meaningless for this purpose. Cost of living varies within the US by far more than that, and I'm sure the same is true of Canada. You'd have to look at the actual cost of living in the location a person is moving from and to.

Canada has 2 tech hubs; the Greater Toronto Area, and Vancouver. Maybe you can count Montreal? In any case, the cost of living is very high in these areas, especially Vancouver. This is primarily brought on by a Canadian law which allows foreigners to purchase property in Canada, so wealthy Chinese are buying up property and using it to store wealth.

In both Toronto and Vancouver, the public transit is abysmal and, in my opinion, 20 years behind what the population requires. So you NEED a car, and for Toronto at least, the insurance will kill you due to Ontario's "no fault" law.

Our power infrastructure is crumbling as well. There was one point this summer where our power rates were temporarily jacked up by something like 300% due to an issue at a nuclear power station. A bad case of NIMBYism has delayed a gas power plant in the GTA, and the public company which manages power generation (Hydro One) recently sold a 60% stake to private investors. There is wide spread fear that the costs of power are going to skyrocket in the near future.

The US has tech hubs all over the country. Houston, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and those are just the big ones. If living in the "core" of these cities is too expensive, it is quite feasible to live on the outskirts and use the public transit to commute into the city. San Fran is a bit of an exception to this, as I understand it, though.

I guess my point is, is that I have many many options in the States, whereas my hands are tied in Canada.

Cost of living is much less in the US than Canada.

>But are goods and services in Canada correspondingly cheaper.

Only if they are made domestically without imported inputs. Currency depreciation lowers your standard of living and increases cost, it doesn't even make domestic goods more accessible - it only makes them cheaper compared to the imported alternatives - the only exception being if you earn money in foreign currency - in which case you are being stimulated as exporter.

I doubt any of those is cheaper considering all the tax differences - for a young/healthy developer - health insurance will probably be a part of the package as well - the only exception would probably be housing which can vary.

No. A ton of Canadians close to the border regularly cross the border to buy goods, including groceries, gas, and electronics. All of which are typically substantially cheaper even if it's only a 30 minute drive away. The Canadian dollar is doing terribly right now, so it's not as beneficial, but even but even though our dollar is only at $0.72 you can STILL save a bit of money after the exchange rate.

Services tend to be significantly cheaper. (Cell phone plans, taxi's, ect.)

In the GTA, the cost of gas is $1.00/L ~ $1.30/L over the past year or so. I converted the cost of gas in the US a month ago when I was visiting family (in the Detroit area) and it came to ~$0.70/L (also converted between USD and CAD at the time).

Edit: I recall the cost being 2.09 USD/gal which currently converts to 0.77 CAD/L according to Google (Search for "2.09 USD / gal in CAD / L")

No. I would say goods are either the same or more expensive.

I remember coming to the US and being shocked you could buy a pair of Levi's for $30 when they were closer to $70-80 in Canada.

When the Canadian dollar was at par with the US, there were a ton of Canadians going south to buy cars. Before hitting par, the numbers made sense (convert US price to CAD and you get pretty close). Once it was at par you could save thousands of dollars buying a US car and bringing it across the border.

This "third wave" isn't really AI, it's more "Machine Learning". Watson's question answering service is basically an ensemble of statistical methods, like everything else these days.

As I understand it the older expert systems tried to use rigid true/false rules.

Modern systems use probabilistic models which are much more flexible.