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Comment by altotrees | Hacker News Reader

My uncle is an engineer in Toronto, and often speaks positively of the startup scene in parts of Canada. I know Waterloo loses quite a few grads to the Bay Area and other major U.S. cities, but haven't some companies actually relocated to be closer to the scene there? I am thinking Pivotal Labs and Google off the top of my head.

I am genuinely curious on your take, since you seem to have direct knowledge. I have seen many people say things in the same vein, but also hear positive things from people in Canada and outsiders as well.

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I can speak a bit for western canada; Vancouver has seen many of the larger/top companies open offices: Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. so plenty of jobs to be had there. I live in Calgary and have seen many peers move to Vancouver for better job prospects.

Re: SRED credits - I've been a part of the application process twice. Documentation can be a bit cumbersome, but not much more than 5 minutes summarizing the weeks work in a spreadsheet (for each employee), and tracking their hours spent on related tasks. Add in source control and the numerous artifacts that software devs come up with, means low amount of effort for high payout. And by high payout, I'm talking 1-2 devs salary in a 10 dev shop. We also hired a consulting company that specialized in SRED applications which saved us a ton of overhead. Cost 10-20% of payout, but was worth not having to deal with the application and/or any audits had they occurred.

>I live in Calgary and have seen many peers move to Vancouver for better job prospects.

Where do they live? Even a crack house in Vancouver costs $1M. Vancouver has probably some of the most expensive real estate in the entire world now.

One friend is in a townhouse in North Vancouver. Rented for a while, then bought. Real-estate is stupid silly there. I've also heard talk of people moving to Victoria as an alternative.

SRED is impossible to get, and has been for several years. We make novel manufacturing plant floor technology that is sold inside and outside of Canada and seen as unique IP. Getting SRED is harder than building the technology, so we just gave up. I would gladly trade places with an American running away from Trump, to escape Liberal^2 here in Ontario. Google "Ontario Sunshine List" if you want to see our California-esque problems with government misinvestment.

SRED is annoying, bureaucratic, slow, comes with painful audits that can delay payments over a year, breaking your company if you're relying on it, requires all your engineers to keep detailed log books, et cetera.

But I've been in a few different startups in Canada, and they've all successfully received very significant SRED payments. Having the government pay a huge chunk of your engineering payroll has been a key part of the success of some of these companies.

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