Canadian Tech Is Having a Moment | Hacker News Reader

Canadian Tech Is Having a Moment

bloomberg.com

81 pointsmiraj83 comments

"Silicon Valley venture firms are hustling to Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal and Vancouver to invest in Canadian startups."

What is the Montreal tech scene like for an Anglophone?

Pretty good I think. I know many anglophones who have lived in Montreal for years, do not speak French, and get by fine.

I agree. That has been my experience...

It's actually astonishing how people who've lived in urban Montreal for over a decade speak almost zero French.

Correct, some don't make any effort (they should, come on)

Very very fun.

You don't get paid like an ultra rockstar that lives in a different strata of society than other people, but it being Montreal where rent is affordable and events like the International Jazz Fest, Tam Tams, or drinking wine in one of the many parks is free, and you move all over the island with high quality public transport, it's for the better.

However, it feels a little bit hollow sometimes and like not a lot of real tech work is being done. Lots of stuff geared towards yuppies and going to coffee shops and renting pads and shopping, not a lot of really groundbreaking stuff.

There's gaming companies (eg: Ubisoft), old ex-startups (eg: Shopify), new startups (eg: Transit), Google and Microsoft have offices here, big investment into machine learning research in local universities, etc. It's a college town... for 5 universities... in the downtown of a great city.

There's probably better places to go if you want a super prestige-track career, but I doubt there's many places that are more fun or better balanced.

Though it should be noted that Quebec has much stricter immigration rules than most of Canada.

To elaborate, Quebec has additional requirements to verify your ability to integrate into society. Here's an article that explains some of the differences:

http://correresmidestino.com/immigrating-to-quebec-still-wor...

Can you explain this?

I'm Canadian and unless I'm missing something, or just really don't understand our immigration policies, once you are in Canada you can move where ever you want.

I mean provinces, including Quebec, should have absolutely zero say as to if you can live in them once you are in Canada.

Once you get permanent citizenship, yes. However that takes a couple of years to obtain, and meanwhile there are pretty severe requirements.

(I know a few people who have immigrated but I have no direct experience with specific policies)

Permanent residency*, which is a lot quicker to get than citizenship.

It's been a long time since I looked at this, but IIRC under some visas the federal system gives you extra points for selecting certain provinces. The rationale is that otherwise every immigrant will choose Toronto or Vancouver. Under those visas, you have to be resident in the province you picked for a certain amount of time (again IIRC I think is was 1 year) as a condition of your visa. Quebec is one of the provinces where you can get extra points to get in, but only if you satisfy the Quebec requirements (which generally means French language skill or agreeing to take French language classes, I think).

Disclaimer: when I say it's been a long time since I looked at this, I'm talking 20 years or so. Things have probably changed (or I have misremembered). But it gives you some idea anyway. In my recollection, if you choose not to get extra points for selecting special regions to settle in, then you can settle anywhere you like. Programmers, doctors, nurses etc almost never need the extra points, so it's kind of moot in this discussion.

I don't know but suspect this is no longer the case, Quebec still offers the ability to more or less buy citizenship, even though the federal program was shut down. All you have to do is say you "intend to" settle in Quebec (wink wink) - they get the financial benefits, and the majority of the participants immediately move to Toronto or Vancouver, typically buying a few houses upon arrival as a store of cash. Of course, this is all "speculation", as the Canadian government deems the statistics on this sort of thing to be none of the business of citizens, who are the ones who experience the positive or negative consequences.

http://www.investorimmigrationcanada.com/

But provinces can sponsor people for immigration. I heard that Quebec is an easy way into Canada for French speakers, even if they don't want to live in Quebec.

You mostly just need the additional CSQ form to fill.

I can vouch that it is a very fun place to live; espcially compared to other Canadian cities (I've lived in 4 major cities so far coast-to-coast).

One of the best thing in Quebec is that you can buy booze in any corner groceries! And even that store will have better selection than monopolistic backwaters like Toronto/Vancouver.

Re: 'prestige' companies, Element AI seems to be becoming quite a good place. It just got a massive VC funding of C$120+ mln, and Yoshua Bengio is one of the backers!!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14557008

edit: typo + link.

Beer is usually cheap, yes. However for wine and spirits you have to go to the SAQ, where some products have really bad pricing.

FYI, you don't live like a rockstar in SV with your pay. You can buy more gadgets/vacations and afford an ok apartment. If your dual income you can afford a house! It's pretty much like new york.

That Montreal winter tho...

Most productive time of year. Can't physically go outside, nothing to do but code in the Montreal winters.

Why would anyone want that?

Difficult weather makes people bond with each other more. Adversity creates community.

Except for the extreme dryness, the mandatory change of shoes at the office (and getting there except if it's near a metro station)

Give us (TandemLaunch) a ring if you want to do "real tech". We admittedly don't spend much time in the coffee shops, but we most certainly do about as deeply technical work as you are going to find anywhere. Hundreds of people working on world-class problems in AI, CV, robotics, sensors, etc. in collaboration with dozens of top universities across the globe. You won't be disappointed :)

I dont have experience working in Montreal(only spent a summer there few years ago), but it shouldn't be too hard as an Anglophone. Its a fairly cosmopolitan city.

I'll be happy to answer any queries re: Vancouver/Toronto - which I have direct live/work experiences.

I'm from the area, not even in the city itself, and we have no issues with Anglophones at all.

You are expected to at least try to learn french, we are a bilingual bunch and expect others to be, but nobody has any issues switching to english to talk with the Anglophone coworkers.

What is the point of expecting people to be bilingual? Is it not more efficient to standardize on one language?

because, as the Quebec license plate reads, "je me souviens" (what they did).

By law French comes first in Quebec, from education, to store front signs (French 2X as large and taking center stage relative to English words), to "moving day" (July 1st is technically Canada Day), to provincal holidays, etc.

Makes sense, a few million Francophones hemmed in by hundreds of millions of Anglophones -- in order to preserve the language and culture measures need to be taken to ensure that future generations carry on the fleur-de-lis.

Je me souviens/ Que né sous le lys/ Je croîs sous la rose.

I remember/ That born under the lily/ I grow under the rose.

Thanks, you'll get varying responses depending on who you ask. It's definitely subject to interpretation and has probably held different meanings over time.

The quoted line prompted me to check out the wiki page on the phrase[1], interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_me_souviens

That one language, in Quebec, would be French, so.... be careful what you ask for.

Is French as the language of common exchange something to be scared of?

If you make an effort people will welcome you with open arms :) Montreal is lovely.

I'd really like to see some comparative historical coverage of the development (and fall) of US technology hubs. There's been some recent discussion, but I can think of a few:

* New England, 19th century. Early manufacturing and milltown works, first water-powered, later steam.

* Late 19th century industrialisation. Edison (New Jersey), Bethlehem and U.S. Steel (Bethlehem and Pittsburgh, PA)

* Early 20th century: Detroit

* Mid-20th century: Rochester & Buffalo, NY, Boston / Route 128, Research Triangle Park / NC, Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, Santa Monica (RAND).

* Late 20th / early 21st: Seattle, Boulder, CO, Austin, TX, and of course, Silicon Valley / SF-SJ corridor.

If anyone has some solid recommended reading, I'm all ears. Or eyes.

Brain drain will continue until compensation in Canada rises to match compensation in the US.

Let it drain if it has to. We don't need a hyper-saturated VC market.

That doesn't make any sense. "Brain drain" is when your technologists leave (often going toward a more "hyper saturated VC" geography).

What is left behind is the same amount of VC dollars but fewer technologists to build things. Which leads to more "saturation" all else equal.

If you don't want the same SF Bay Area level of VC-funded craziness, the answer isn't to "let it drain" all the technologists out of Canada. The answer is to keep them home and have them build awesome stuff and profitable companies in Canada. (With a more sustainable / reasonable amount of VC funding.)

A good way to sell that is to focus on all the things BESIDES Bay Area VC $ that Canada offers: lifestyle and values, visa / immigration ease, outdoor opportunities, land/house purchase prices (well, outside of a few spots), political stability, and strong support for local champion tech companies.

But just saying "let it drain," ugh. That's terrible. Brain drains really are one of the nastiest things that can happen with semi-porous borders. Very harmful to a region when its technologists (or whatever other highly educated bunch) leave en masse.

What I'm saying is if the only way to retain the top-top talent is to pay outrageous, unsustainable wages, then it's better to let someone else take that hit and instead focus on making the best with what's left.

Talent is a renewable resource as well. It's a fact that every year students graduate from university. If the market changes and Canadian firms can pay more competitive wages, either by getting more money or because Silicon Valley implodes, everything will sort itself out.

Canada is just one country in a world of much bigger countries. To think we could retain 100% of our top talent is to over-state our importance. We should let some of our best and brightest go work abroad. We're not sending literally everyone, after all.

If you factor in health care costs, housing costs, maternity leave, etc. Canada is a better deal. Our political climate isn't as toxic either.

Sources?

when you consider that healthcare and decent maternity leave are generally included in any reasonable tech salary and that housing in toronto and vancouver is quite pricey the salary differential of 1/2 does not make up for it.

I wish it did...

A quick estimation [1] shows that a $130000 salary in the US is equivalent to around $105k / 139k CAD. There are some of the top companies in the SV who pays this as base salary, is is there 139k CAD companies in Montreal? What's the highest base salary for the local Netflix/Google/... of Canada?

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$130000+in+San+Francis...

I've done those sorts of calculations before and that aligns with roughly what I figured out at the time.

Canada is an amazing deal for US companies to open remote offices and save 50% of their employment costs. Forget the numerically lower salaries - factor in the dollar difference (20-30%) then factor in healthcare savings.

Plus we speak English and share a lot of cultural similarities, and the time zone difference in Toronto is only 3 hours. Why more companies aren't doing it I just don't understand.

Brain drain is effectively a form of arbitrage in the labour market. You end up with a single market on the supply side and multiple markets on the demand side. All the highly skilled individuals on the supply side gravitate towards the high end on the demand side. The cheaper developers that a US company could hire in Canada are of the same skill level that they could hire in the US by lowering their hiring bar. There's nothing to gain by opening an office in Toronto that isn't equally valid in lower cost areas of the US (e.g. Florida).

Side note: Silicon Valley is not the center of the world. Neither is Toronto, for that matter. Toronto is in the same timezone as New York. Plenty of larger US software companies based on the West Coast have an office in New York. IBM's HQ is even in a NYC suburb. Detroit and Boston are other good candidates for satellite offices with less legal/tax related headaches compared to Toronto or Montreal.

You're assuming that every high quality dev follows the money down south. My experience is that there is still plenty of high quality developers and admins here in Toronto who, due to circumstances, can't move down or simply choose to stay for reasons that aren't money - usually quality of life.

By offering above-average local salaries, it is very easy to hire these people. I know because I've done it.

As the others are saying, there are a lot of features to life in Canada which aren't made up for by a $20,000 difference in salary. It isn't perfect but consider for example the 2017 world happiness report:

http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017...

Page 13 shows the world happiness ranking of Canada at #7 and USA at #14. After a certain point a bit of extra money isn't going to buy significantly more life-happiness.

Of course - I hate to argue against higher pay in Canada - but it is far from the only factor.

What about a $200,000 difference in salary?

It depends where you start. Now, I typically don't see $200k salary differences but there might be some.

If you browse Amazon, Google or Facebook in h1b databases for San Francisco or Seattle you see a range of roughly $130k to $160k. With outliers of course.

If you peg that against $100k - $130 in Toronto you're going to ask yourself what portion of that increase is eaten by rent? Car? Commute time? Overtime"work culture"? Health Care? How far do I want to be from my parents? Do I want my children to grow up American? Am I a visible minority? Is the job in a region which is accepting of visible minorities ... or is it like Kansas where an Indian engineer was shot while being told to "go home"? http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/us/kansas-olathe-bar-shooting-...

I'm not sure how many tech workers are really worth $200k MORE in the US but I'm certain that some of them went to try it on. If someone was worth $200k more in the states might they be able to say "how about $100k more and I do it from here?"

I also suspect some of the big names are looking at coming back. Recent rumbling about Toronto becoming an AI center of excellence might hint at a certain UofT professor that we lost a few years back getting an itch to come home?

h1b databases

Canadian engineers get TN visas, not H1Bs. TN visas give way more bargaining power to the employee.

But the salaries they publish in h1b are done so to prove that they are not doing a job cheaper than a comparable American citizen could. The expectation is that h1b's statistically represent the normal curve. (Or are higher)

I think it should have a good representation of expected salary.

You make much more than $130k-$160k as an engineer at Amazon, Google, and Facebook in San Francisco or Seattle. H1B salary data is salary only, but stock and cash bonus are significant on top of that. At senior level, $240k-$300k for a dev is common for any of those companies. Growth beyond "senior" level to make $100k+ more than that is also not uncommon if you're ambitious, because the large tech companies have career ladders which supports the progression.

Re: your other points.

Health care is likely on par or better in the US for engineers working at Amazon/Google/Facebook (granted, you're SOL if you lose your job, so this has value; in the USA you're entitled to buying your last job's insurance for a period of time after leaving and getting the same coverage, which is probably enough to tide you over in a hot labor market like we see now, but this may not always be the case).

Commute time varies. A software engineer in Toronto can afford to rent somewhere with a good commute, and rent is reasonable for how good of a city Toronto is (the new rent control rules seems likely to privilege current renters by having future renters subsidize artificially below market rent, so it's very possible Toronto rent will climb significantly in the future).

But even if you're paying double the rent in SF (or similar rent in Seattle), the pay still puts you ahead. If you want to buy in Toronto on a software engineer's salary somewhere with a good commute, you're already priced out unless you're looking at condos (you're on the verge of being priced out in SF too, it's Seattle which is the standout here). Hopefully that'll change with years of continued wage growth and a decline in the value of Toronto property.

That doesn't negate your very valid points re: work/life balance, inclusion, and culture (though I think the American west coast is closer to Canada than you give credit). But IMO, if you're able/willing to get one of those sorts of jobs in the US, you have more/better options than in Canada.

So then it comes down to what sort of financial/lifestyle sacrifices you're willing to make to be in Toronto and what sort of familial/cultural gains you get in the process. It's completely valid to prioritize that over money, but arguing the pay is close after factoring in cost of living is disingenuous and problematic. I hear a lot of Canadian tech employers (and, amazingly, employees) use this reasoning to justify lower salaries.

I agree pay isn't the only factor, but country-wide averages of happiness are probably misleading here. The US average includes both very happy and very unhappy areas. In particular the US has areas that are really suffering, in ways that are rarer in Canada. And those areas are probably not relevant in this discussion which is about tech workers.

I'd be surprised if the average tech worker were happier in Canada than in the US - but I could be wrong of course.

$20K More like $100K difference for an average developer or senior tech.

I see job postings in SV in the $150K-$200K range all the time. Top dollar here in Toronto is $100K-$120K, Canadian. So chop 25% off that.

But add in the increased housing costs & commute time. I'm not sure if there are additional concerns about health insurance (though California has recently passed single payer)

I don't typically see $200k salaries but expect $130k to $160k is typical.

With $110k in mind in Toronto a $2500/month net increase in rent immediately knocks off $30k. So we're looking at a salary difference between Toronto and SV of $10k (pre exchange, when compared against $150k).

Now there is an exchange rate... so you might get back to a $30k increase in the USA ... but there are dozens of other factors too. If you have a Muslim sounding name or colour to your skin do you want to send your children to school there?

There are factors which overrule the difference in salary.

> (though California has recently passed single payer)

No, it hasn't. (One house of the legislature has sent a bill which aims to create a single payer system, but which is not complete or implementable to the other house, largely to avoid procedural rules that would have forces starting at square zero if it wasn't passed out of that house. If the other House does the hard work of actually amending that skeleton into an actual single-payer bill that it passes, it will still have to go back to the first house and be passed there again, and then be signed by the Governor, before California will have passed single-payer.)

Maybe Trump will end the TN visa. Boy, then you'll see the canada tech scene - especially Vancouver, blow up.

Or the L1 visa

Yeah sometimes I wonder if Canada anticipated the massive brain drain the TN visa has ended up being. It would be ironic if Trump shut it down.

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Calgary's a city to keep an eye on too. Companies like IStock photo and SMART were built here. And now Benevity's a big up and comer.

That's good to hear, I have some Swedish friends that are looking to move to Calgary in the next few years and were worried about tech job availability.

Also RocketSpace will be opening their first Canadian office in Calgary. The local government is starting to push for a bigger tech industry and add diversity away from the oil/gas industry that has dominated the city. Also the climate isn't so bad with plenty of sunshine and warm Chinook winds occasionally during the winter.

What is the tech scene at Halifax, Nova Scotia? I am landing there in a few weeks and have been researching about it for a while. I could not get much through the Ask HN[0] post I submitted a while ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14428966

I'm always weary of "having a moment" stories. It often means the author is going to try to string together unrelated events into a narrative.

Yeah, using a pretty tired and trite phrase like that doesn't bode well. To be fair though, the titles are often not written by the writers themselves.

Montreal is really hot in AI/data science. U Montreal is arguably the top research university in deep learning at the moment, and McGill and Concordia also have good CS departments.

The IVADO (a cross university data science institute in montreal) recently got a $93M investment for research and promotion of data science in Montreal.

Well at least the "X is the next Silicon Valley" angle is original.

Eventually tech will find a way out of the money black hole of CA. You can be weary of these stories but eventually there will be snowball that rolls far enough to become big enough to be worth caring about.

Seattle is it. Thriving ecosystem and lots and lots of building.

Like New York, Chicago and others there's significant risk on being on US soil now.

Clickbait, vapid article.

Canada will "begin to have a moment" when a $20bn exit spawns a legion of millionaires happy to become VCs.

Except they probably wouldn't want to become VCs since they don't see many successful VCs around them, there aren't many big exits, and there isn't a huge startup ecosystem.

Chicken and egg problem.

Canadian government should get involved with a billion dollars a year pumped into the startup scene via seasoned VCs that only see a dime if there is an exit or an IPO.

Toronto is a major Bitcoin hub.

Toronto also has a vibrant Etheruem presence as Vitalik grew up there and started Ethereum while living in Toronto.

The trick is to ensure leadership is strong and coherent, preventing implosion from within, and maintain salary growth to keep the workforce healthy.

Really wish they would go to London Ont, cost of living is still relatively cheap and it would be good for the city.

CTRL+F "OpenText" 0 results CTRL+W

I assume they mean the startup scene. OpenText are great, but they were founded pre-dot-com...

Ok, then SOTI. They just cherry picked companies to support their point.

Who? Are they like Hummingbird or that lawnmower company Mike and Ted founded?

Canadian trivia: It has been said by many that Mitel stood for "Mike and Terry's Lawnmowers". When they left Bell Northern they weren't quite sure what kind of company to make -- just that they wanted to make their own company. I actually went to a dinner and was fortunate enough to sit next to Terry Mathews. I asked him if it was true and he declined to answer, so I'm still not sure :-)

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