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Comment by brilliantcode | Hacker News Reader

...and Vancouver, BC doesn't even show up on the radar because our average is roughly $53,000 USD / year.

Might wanna consider outsourcing here. Same time zone as SV, similar culture, speaks English, tight job market means loyal workers.

source: https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/vancouver-software-develop...

USD/CAD as of today: 1.31

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There's a lot of upside for an engineer to work for a US based company from Toronto. Or for a US based company to hire someone from Toronto. Same with Vancouver.

I'd seriously consider that, but nowadays there's a significant risk that an abrupt anti-outsourcing executive order might put you out of work.

There are some good devs there too - maybe that is what made it an attractive choice for companies like Facebook before.

Facebook did it to get around visa issue to attract non-Canadians from Europe and abroad. Microsoft does it too.

I work in the same building as Microsoft in downtown Vangcouver and I always hear a lot of foreign languages being spoken on the way up-Russian, Mandarin etc. I don't think they've been in an English speaking country for very long which makes me suspect they are doing the same thing as Facebook.

As brilliantcode mentioned, Facebook, Microsoft et al are using Vancouver as a visa staging ground for people outside of North America. Most Canadian software engineers can work in the US on the TN (which doesn't have a cap like the H-1B) so they don't have visa issues. They bring them over to Vancouver, basically training them there, and once they've worked there for a year, they're eligible to use the L-1 visa, because it's considered an intra-company transfer, so they can move them into the US.

The Vancouver offices are not an investment in the Canadian tech industry; they're just taking advantage of our more lenient immigration laws and the convenience of the city being geographically close to San Francisco. Waterloo and Toronto seem to be taken much more seriously as remote engineering offices for American companies (possibly because of the universities and amount of tech talent in the region).

It's kind of a shame though. Vancouver is a beautiful city, conveniently located, and there's no good reason why it couldn't be Silicon Valley of the north. If they could just figure out how to make it more economical to live there for software engineers (i.e. cheaper housing and higher salaries), it could quickly become a booming tech hub.

As a Vancouver-based software engineer that graduated about a year ago, I really wish I hadn't looked at this post...

The fact that they didn't even bother listing Vancouver, BC speaks for itself.

I don't like the situation but how can we possibly have a sustainable tech scene when rent/housing cost is rising while our wages have stagnated since the early 2000s...

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