New institute aims to make Toronto an ‘intellectual centre’ of AI capability
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Plus I spend less than $1K USD/month on rent here in Seattle (live with one roommate), so cost of living is pretty much the same - especially with food being more expensive in Canada.
[1] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-americ...
A more realistic model for most high-income earners that accounts for savings/investments would heavily favor higher salary+COL regions.
For a simplistic illustration of this using the same numbers, if you spend 100k CAD a year and make 200k CAD, you can save 100k CAD a year. If you spend 150K CAD (50% higher COL) and make 312.5K CAD (equivalent to 250K USD at 1.25 exchange rate), you'd save the equivalent of 162.5K CAD a year.
Personally, my backup plan is to retire to Bulgaria based on SF savings ;)
There is still plenty of inherent value in accumulating wealth at a faster pace though.
The currency basically negates any cost of living difference. Toronto is expensive as fuck (as most major cities are now).
Let's do some numbers. According to glassdoor an average salary for a software engineer in San Fransisco is 110k USD. A single bedroom apartment in SF goes for 3500/mo on average.
In Toronto, according to payscale the average software developer job is 65k CAD, though let's also consider 80k because it's not hard to get that at a decent place if you have several years of experience. A single bedroom apartment right in downtown can be had for 1,600/mo CAD. Assuming you are living where you work and not doing something like living in Toronto earning a US salary, your buying power with left over money is likely to be similar.
SF, after taxes (21%) gives you 86,900. Taking out rent, you are left with 44,900. Toronto at 65k is taxes about 25%, so you are left with 48,601 and after rent you have 29,401. But, if you get 80k, then you are taxes 26% and after rent get 39,461 left over which starts looking a lot more comparable.
You're also forgetting that Toronto does not reward being a good developer. Your salary is capped way too early compared to America where you can easily go above 200k+ total compensation. Not to mention networking, getting technology for cheaper (in general), exclusive events, etc.
It's not even close to comparable despite recent propaganda to show otherwise. Not unless you're a below-average developer, in which case, it is better to be in Toronto.
Source: Born and raised in Toronto. Ran the numbers a bunch of times trying to convince myself to stay. Money won out.
The Vector Institute will offer salaries comparable to top global industrial AI labs. Also the Canadian industry appreciates the value a good data scientist and knows the talent war is global.
Scroll down to career opportunities. The research scientist position is advertised as being competitive with industry labs.
Just so we're clear, top ai pays like $250k USD for entry level with no real cap, but senior staff can easily take home $500-900k
and yes, people are taking home that kind of money.
Many more are sticking around because they want to be part of this potentially world changing field, and because you can always find uses for more money.
Good Canadian companies offer a maximum of 120k CAD entry salary if you are very experienced, that is 90k USD and taxes are pretty high in Canada. It makes no sense for me to accept work here, thankfully I know a couple of uncommon and old school languages that have kept me employed as a remote developer.
Many things are more expensive because of the weak dollar.
Dental, prescriptions, eye tests, rehabilitation and physical therapy, hell even an ambulance ride - all NOT covered by the Canadian "universal" medical system.
A more useful comparison would be the 'effective tax rate', which of course varies by individual situation but can be done for some archetypes. This would allow you to consider additional deductions such as the mortgage interest deduction, which shouldn't be underestimated.
At ~170k USD (220k CAD) in Ontario, you'll be hitting the combined top marginal rate of 54%.
It's true that California+Federal will be within a couple points of that at their top marginal rate, but that's 1m+ in California and 400k+ federally. So you won't even be within spitting distance until 400k+.
In California at ~170k USD you'll only be paying a combined marginal rate of ~37%, which is a huge difference. The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+. And although payroll taxes are a bit more in the US AFAIK, Canada has higher sales taxes and lots of other hidden costs (e.g. much higher gas tax, more expensive consumer goods due to import duties, etc.).
> The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+.
I'm not going to do the math for a specific example though, people should do that themselves.
I currently work at a startup in SF making almost three times that amount.
Montreal is touted as an AI centre and has cheap land.
I left Toronto for the US in 2015, and my compensation increased by 3-4x (currency conversion taken into account). I have been working for large well-known US companies in both cities.
The economy can absolutely support those higher salaries. The fact of the matter is there aren't many jobs of that nature in Toronto right now, but if there were, I don't see reason to think the pay couldn't be competitive.
Edited: Granted every time I've worked in the valley, housing has been exorbitant, but still makes it worth my while. The most I've seen people pay in SF has been ~2k if you don't want to share a room.
Believe it or not, one day many people decide they want to have kids. To send them to a decent school in the U.S. costs money. I've seen $10k for K-12. That's 13years of $10k per child. So 3 kids = $390k U.S. That's $U.S. dollars and after taxes.
Then there will be a day where you get laid off. The AI/ML industry will suffer a downturn at some point. In the U.S. your severance will be tiny (?2 weeks salary?), whereas in Canada it will be a minimum of something like a month plus 2 weeks per year of service - but often much more than that. So 10 years of service will be provide 24 weeks.
Vacations - in the U.S., 2 weeks seems common, but many Canadians enjoy 4-5 weeks of vacation.
Then there's the increased crime and violence. Guns in particular. In the U.S., if you want to be as safe as Canada, you need to live in a gat ed community. Those ain't cheap.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is it not the purpose of taxes to fund these services. I actually had to pay Canadian income taxes this year in addition to US taxes, even though I had no income in Canada. I totally understand and accept this as it helps maintain everything that is great about where I live.
I'm not seeing how valuing an Engineer less solves the issue of funding social services. If anything a higher income for an Engineer would mean that they would be paying more in taxes to also fund those services. Does an Engineer in Canada not provide the same financial benefit for the institution where they work, compared to if they were to work in the US? I feel like there are set income brackets that companies have established that have not been modernized to adapt to the changing marketplace. It just so happens that being a competent Computer Scientist is a valuable skill at this point in history because of the potential upside they can provide for a company and companies are not acknowledging this.
It's very important to do the math to understand the upside of going to SV and equip yourself appropriately for negotiations.
If it wasn't so hard to emigrate as an average America, I'd live there in a heartbeat. They do have a really good working holiday program for people in Asia and some parts of Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/move-to-canada...
The brain drain from the GTA and Southern Ontario has long been real. But alternatively, many people move from other places to Toronto. What makes it difficult for new grads and industry veterans from keeping shop in Toronto is that the mobility and learning experiences aren't there. There are a limited number of high-tech jobs here and anything else is likely in the medical, law, finance, or even media world. In that sense, I wouldn't even classify tech as a second-class citizen so much as being far down on the totem pole.
I partially wonder if the general inferiority complex of Torontonians/Canadians has created this effect. Because the city typically lusts for things from other places (such as SV or NY), it never develops its own reputation and chooses to be itself. Because of that, tech has never developed an identity because all of our tech talent chooses the shiny opportunity granted to them by some company because it's "from Silicon Valley". Just think of what the tech ecosystem would be like if all Torontonians simply stayed here.
For instance, I often posit what would have happened had the ML/DL community had stronger partnerships with AMD as opposed to building everything with CUDA/NVIDIA. AMD, afterall, is just up the street from the University of Toronto in Markham. A symbiotic relationship could've been built with Hinton's lab.
Yes, the investment community has a broader effect on the startups within the city. But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
Sorry if my comment read that way. I was only critiquing the one line, not the entire post.
> But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
I think you are getting cause and effect backwards here. In my experience, there were plenty of tech employers in Toronto, just not for the really interesting & challenging stuff. For example, IBM has had a very large presence there for decades, but twenty years ago the coolest software project they had going on up there was the Visual Age IDE's. Alias Systems was a big deal back in the day, but even that ended up being bought up and by Autodesk...
Fix that, and startups will flourish.
From: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md
You can still find tons of 1+1 units in the city for under $2000/month which is the same as it was 3-4 years ago.
I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let them all live there and keep it affordable?
The centralization of most jobs to a handful of urban centers is the largest and most powerful force driving this spike in prices. Jobs are flying out of rural areas and less populated cities. It increases prices, making it very difficult for a newcomer to buy in the area, let alone rent. It creates pockets of areas that reap the benefits of globalization, creating a very stark contrast between areas that benefit from it and that don't. And all this is just so that the corporation benefits from the concentrated, highly technical labor pool.
The foreign investor cap should be easy to implement, but because our government is broken, it won't happen. There are lots of ways this could be addressed, with property taxes of unleased housing, taxing of a third home or beyond, and probably lots of other things smarter people could think of.
The artificially low housing inventory is difficult because that stems from local government more than anything else. Fixing this might take state laws to be passed since locals will have an incentive to not have new properties made.
Again, the centralization of the remaining jobs is the biggest factor in my opinion. It really needs to be addressed since it negatively hurts our society, but I don't know any other ideas on how to fix it without increasing demand for lower class labor via protectionism. That would drive companies to look to rural America for cheap labor vs Mexico or China which would weaken the requirement to live in an urban center, but obviously that would be very costly to our economy. If you have any other ideas on how to fix it, I'd definitely read it.
So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers? Say I own a tech business how do you convince me to move my company to Barrie for example? I now have the difficulty of finding local talent or convincing talent to relocate to me or deal with a very long commute. Where is the benefit for me? Network effects are real.
Besides this Toronto already essentially has a number of business cores that are distributed. You have the financial district, Young/Eg, Sauga, Markham, Vaughn and those are just the biggest ones.
None of that reduces demand for the core though because it is the most appealing place to live for most young people.
That's the tough thing. The only solution I can think of, protectionism, will be very rough on employers. The lower and middle classes would thrive, but corporations that previously had massive profit margins would see those almost disappear, especially after unions form again.
Obviously this would be very expensive, but I really fear that if we don't do something, our country will end up politically and socially unstable. A country with millions of minimum wage workers and a handful of rich-only cities is bound to have troubles.
As far as Toronto's housing inventory goes, I don't know enough about Toronto to comment.
Like what concrete actions would you take?
That's the hope anyway. If you see any blaring flaws beyond the fact that multinational corporations would suffer, please let me know.
Besides with the increase in automation the types of workers factories will need in the future will be high tech as well.
Thank you for this post. This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to get.
Thank you as well. It was a good one for thinking about stuff even if we disagree on the basic idea. :)
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...