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Comment by jruroc | Hacker News Reader

|$250k/employee

hmmmm

You're forgetting about their health insurance, retirement, unemployment taxes, etc. I'm sure they get some tax-relief being a non-profit, but still, high end computer scientists are expensive.

Open source projects aren't really volunteer/spare-time/garage efforts anymore. The Mozilla and Apache foundations are pretty big organizations. A lot of projects are also run by for-profit commercial players like Redhat and Canonical.

They should consider running the service in Canada, where software engineer / programmer salaries are a third of that

or 90% of the US that is not SF/Silicon Valley

But they'd still be competing with Silicon Valley for top-end developers, who are going to be asking for a salary equivalent to their skills. You might save a little once you factor cost of living adjustments, though you'll also have to offset that with increased difficulty in finding the right person.

Folks who know security well enough to do this correctly are rare. You don't want to farm out critical X.509 infrastructure to the lowest bidder.

What do Verisign, RSA, Comodo and GlobalSign have in common? Not being in SF.

I didn't say you had to be in SF. Just that you'll be competing with SF for talent.

A follow up tweet clarified that it was 10 people and not eight. But even that is a pretty high cost per employee I agree.

But the question is: Can you get a team of engineers that have the ability and crypto know-how to build something like Let's Encrypt in Canada for 1/3 of the salary?

probably not. the best canadian coders are already here in the US.

Says who?

Says a Canadian who lives in the US who overgeneralizes.

It's not entirely true, but its way closer to the truth than you'd admit.

I mean I am a Canadian who lives in Canada and I disagree. So that's why I don't get your argument? I know plenty of very skilled people here.

But you gotta admit a lot of recent grads end up leaving. I'm another Canadian who left given I was offered doubled my salary in one move.

But isn't the cost of living also higher and you have medical expenses and things? Are you actually taking home double as much, or does a lot of that extra have to go to living expenses that you wouldn't have in Canada?

I do take home a lot more than I would in the Canada. Cost of living in the US isn't 2x Canada but salaries for tech jobs are (And keep in mind that was a while back, it's now more than that). Health is covered by my employer, I pay nothing directly for it. (Definitively not the majority of cases, most people have some amount of contributions to it). But if I had stayed in Quebec I'd have been in the top bracket and paying a huge chunk in taxes. Even as I live in a state with high social programs (MA).

So to conclude, if you are in a field like tech, medicine, finance you will be significantly better off in the US than Canada. Other fields with similar income levels between Canada and the US I'd say Canada will offer a better standard of living.

The cost of living is higher. Medical expenses aren't really a thing for recent grads, and good medical insurance limits your outlay. Normally most people with solid insurance and serious health concerns will max out at a few thousand dollars a year. And for the kinds of jobs we are talking about, that isn't a big deal.

Anyways, I'm making way beyond 2x as much as I ever could have in Canada. Also I get to work on world class tech, with world class people. And when I changes jobs, I don't have to take major compromises. There are way more high quality employers in the bay area than anywhere else for technology!

I think it was kind of a joke with some seriousness to it. It's really easy for Canadians to move to the US to work. So a large chunk of the highly qualified Canadians do leaving less in Canada. Canada suffers a shortage of highly qualified people in many professions. For example medical professions have it really hard given doctors moving to the US can make multiples more than in Canada.

And that's why all almost all the software engineer / programmers leave.

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