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Comment by greggarious | Hacker News Reader

I'm an American, so take what I say with a grain of salt... but maybe part of it is that Canada has a small population but a large land area.

There's basically four major cities a Millenial would consider: Vancouver, Toronto, Monteal, and Ottawa. (And I've heard the latter crapped on even by Canadians.)

Montreal is lovely, but if you're an Anglophone.

Compare with the United States: New York is a large city, but I could live in Philadelphia if I wanted to go slightly cheaper. If Seattle is to expensive, there's Portland.

It seems to me that basically everyone who wants to live in the "big city" seems to either cram themselves into Vancouver or Toronto. (Ottawa didn't seem to have the level of bustle I'd expect for a capital compared to say, London or DC)

So basically, the TL;DR is people in NYC or SF choose to be there. You basically pick a climate, then pick a price range.

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There's possibly a couple of other cities. Kitchener-Waterloo (which is close enough to Toronto) and maybe Calgary. KW has the University of Waterloo which has spawned a number of companies including Blackberry, although SF (and Microsoft in Seattle) have been luring people south. Google did start an office here, though.

I've lived in Ottawa and it's big selling point for me is the various national museums. I used to love going to the National Art Gallery simply because of its architecture, but I did see an excellent retrospective on Escher (including a presentation by a guy who tried to take picture of places where Escher did drawings of) and one on Renoir's portraits. Skating on the canal is pretty big in the winter in Ottawa. A friend of mine commutes to work by skating on it. You're right in that it's not as busy as London or DC, though. I consider that a plus, but that's just me.

Montreal is beautiful, but you'd better learn to at least attempt French as you'll be treated better by the shops and restaurants for it. Other pluses are: the jazz festival, the comedy festival, and the F1 race. My sister and her family moved there in January as their jobs in Toronto were being phased out.

What is holding people from Vancouver off to move to Portland?

Social services like health care, I'd assume.

It's not as easy as you'd think to immigrate from Canada to the US. (Especially since it's difficult to be considered a rockstar ninja whatever if you went to a very good school like University of Toronto instead of Stanford)

I do know. I've been trying to find a job and I have an Engineering Ph.D. from University of Waterloo which is considered one of the best in the country. Companies in the US often hire from UW (Microsoft has traditionally been a big hirer), but I'm overqualified in one sense, but I don't have the work experience people want.

CS PhD in Engineer? If interested in Seattle, there are new hires for phds at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook. Lots of other companies would hire you, but those places hire lots of new phds. Mine was a top 30 us, so basically invisible, and I had lots of companies trying to hire me.

Not in CS, it was in Systems Design Engineering. My Ph.D. was more mechanical than anything. My Master's had a big CS component as I was affiliated with the computer graphics lab (my Master's co-supervisor was part of the lab until he retired to look after his wife). I did most of the numerical CS courses and all the CS computer graphics courses.

There's not much call for my particular skill set, unfortunately. I interviewed for a position in Google X, but it was a very strange interview and I didn't get past that, despite giving a very thorough answer for the pre-interview problem they posed.

There are lots of non-cs majors programming these days. I sometimes meet people who are sharp but lacking in some fundamentals. If you are having trouble getting a job, I encourage you to make the investment to get a masters in CS. You already have most of the work and I'm sure that sounds terrible, but that would catapult you into being incredibly employable, instead of being irritated at near misses. I know a lot of EE who ended up as devs, but that's a hard thing to do as a start.

I was co-supervised by a professor in CS for my Master's degree and during my Ph.D. I did most of the CS numerical programming courses (and I did most of the computer graphics courses during my Master's). There won't be many CS courses for a Master's degree that I'd be interested in. Plus, I'd be forced to take a number of undergrad CS courses just to meet their requirements.

A big problem I have now is that I'm overqualified for a lot of jobs. Getting another grad degree probably won't help. To be honest, if I was to get a CS degree, I'd probably go straight for the Ph.D. instead. There's some things in computer graphics I'd love to explore. Unfortunately, the prof I'd want to supervise me left and is now working at Intel last I checked.

Why don't they form a partnership like the EU is? Who is the opposing factor?

As a German I think it is beautiful that moving to Austria or Switzerland is basically the same as moving inside Germany. Depending on where you live, the cultural differences inside Germany might even be higher.

After that there are the English speaking countries, with a low language barrier, then the countries with very high English or German fluency (Netherlands, nordic countries etc.), which would make it easier in the beginning and the South, mostly chosen by the elderly to go on permanent vacations.

When the East keeps growing economically, it might become another great option, even for people without global customers. There are some culturally interesting cities with a good standard of living and dirt cheap prices.

I would advise Americans and Canadians to create something similar, it is great.

There is a big culture difference.

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