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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "Do at this rate you have a salary multiple of 2.35. This just doesn't happen in general, for the same job."

I'm a Canadian that moved to the US for work - this multiple sounds entirely plausible, in fact it sounds like a conservative estimate.

In major tech hubs the multiple is closer to 3-4x.

> "Much more realistic is a 30% bump"

This is not at all realistic - I know many Canadians working in the US as developers and all of them are making well in excess of 200% of their Canadian market rate.

You're characterizing Canadian tech salaries (in say, Vancouver or Toronto) as being moderately below US standards (~30%?), where in fact they are vastly below the standard in comparable markets (SFBA, Seattle, NYC, etc). The gap is already big for new grads, but it widens even further with experience. A dev with ~5+ years of experience can reasonably triple their salary moving south.

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Being HN, you have to be careful of selection bias. I'm sure many of us know someone who left a 150k/yr job in Vancouver, say, for 400k in the valley. Or may be that someone.

But to suggest this is th norm for software jobs across both countries? The stats just don't support it.

3-4x is crazy. You make it sound like the US is crawling with tech jobs paying > 500k for mid-career jobs. It just not so.

You don't hear about senior-level jobs for $80,000 in major US markets though. In Canada they are quite common (and realistically only worth about 60,000 USD). I work remotely and I've been priced out of my own country. I occasionally take a Canadian gig and it is always about 50 percent of what I would make in USD and the client complains on and on about the cost (if they only knew).

Yup. I still have people poking me about Senior Lead Principal Architect Ninja Engineer positions and it's only been recently since those positions pop the 100-120k line in some areas.

During that time you have college grads in the states walking away if they don't get 100k as their first job in SF.

Now obviously if you take the hottest markets in Canada and compare them to mediocre markets in the US, the gap is much smaller, but that's usually not the move people are considering when this topic comes up.

Yup. I'm also canadian that also moved down the US. That describes my experience perfectly. While rent also easily tripled (from Montreal to NYC) I can say I now manage to save what I'd make gross in Canada, with a better quality of life.

Yup, exactly. I mean, I can see it happening frequently the way the person who replied to me said it. If you're in a hot area in Canada that pays decently (I think Toronto is probably not bad, I never worked there), you probably can hit 100k? Then if you move in a tech hub and you're not all that, 135-140k is possible. Then your multiplier isn't that high.

But if you were making 70-80k in Canada then hit the US and do 200k + RSUs + bonus, you're in a much different world...and it can just keep going up and up and up and up, while up north you will hit a wall much sooner.

Especially because there is an entire category of dev jobs that simply don't exist in Canada: the $300-500k senior dev roles at institutional BigCos like Google, FB, MS, Apple, etc.

And if you are making 150k + RSUs + bonus in Canada do you really think you'll get a 3-4x larger offer in the US?

Again, I'm not denying that vastly more of these opportunities exist in the US, particularly in a few locations. But that doesn't factor into the majority of tech jobs on either side of the border.

It doesn't. And the average joe isn't going to move either.

However, the Waterloo software engineering graduate who's making 150k+RSU+bonus is probably nailing a Principal engineer position at a famous american tech company in SF/SV/NYC/Boston and is absolutely going to nail big bucks. Thats some superstar material right there. The only places I've seen that approached those numbers in Canada were Canadian offices of Wall street banks. And having worked for those companies in the past, superstar engineers at Morgan/Goldman in NYC made me look poor.

And i'm far from poor.

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