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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can make an apples to apples comparison of salaries between Canada in the US.

Why not?

Health insurance amakes an apples-to-apples comparison difficult.

Sure, but even if you count $1K a month for health insurance, it's still hardly competitive. Even at $2K they're only starting to get close. And from what I see, $120K CAD is basically the absolute top you're going to get as a very experienced dev.

I think that depends on the specific skillset they are looking for. In the systems software industry $120K CAD total compensation is about half of what a Senior Staff makes based on what I've seen.

Generally speaking, people need to start being more proactive asking for raises and switching to higher paying jobs if we want compensation in the GTA job market to improve.

This is part of the problem. Canadians are generally more complacent and have a lower tolerance for conflict compared to Americans from what I've seen. (I'm Canadian)

I can't speak for other regions, but for Vancouver $120k CAD is about the upper end of the middle. Most truly senior developers in the $150k-$180k range.

I'm just going off of what senior folks have told me in the Toronto area, for banking, or at big employers like AMD. $150-180k makes it far more reasonable, and if I had seen hints that offers would be close to that, I would have moved back to Ontario years ago.

This is very different from what I understood about Vancouver tech jobs. Do you have concrete examples of positions/companies that pay this?

Senior positions at EA, MS, and Amazon all pay at that level in Vancouver. That's what I was making as a TD at EA 7 years ago -- wow I can't believe it's been that long. Pretty much everyone in my peer group has a base salary in that range.

The problem in Vancouver is that it often feels like any PHP jockey with 3 years of industry experience is called "senior". This doesn't happen in other market's I've experienced. It happens here because the Vancouver talent pool is very shallow. We have a very wide base of low skilled juniors and intermediates with a very narrow point of experienced senior engineers. There are far more juniors than there is demand for juniors so that pushes down salaries. Conversely, there is a lot more demand for seniors, real seniors, than there is supply in the local market and that pushes up salaries.

It means Canadian salaries ought to be much higher since they aren’t paying health insurance for employees. It makes zero sense: US employers pay salary + health insurance. Canadian employees pay salary.

So it’s backwards. Canadian salaries should be a lot higher to reflect that they have a lower total employee cost.

But they also have the Skilled Worker immigration program that takes in people with specific skills and fast tracks them to a Canadian permanent residency (with higher priority given to people with job offers in hand.) Thus, they are able to attract talent from the rest of the world. I think that might help keep things low too, perhaps? Probably balanced a little bit by all of the Canadians who leave for the US searching for higher salaries?

I was wondering this too, and would love to hear the parent's reasoning.

One difference I can think of is that Canada has Universal Healthcare. Maybe the compensation system differs because Canadian companies can pay <Salary> and US Companies have to pay <Salary + benefits>?

(I mostly see people here on HN throwing salary numbers around, not total compensation. Also, I wonder if having the government handle benefits would make it easier to pay more (since companies don't have to pay benefits) or less (since companies just pay the government to do the benefits). )

If that was the case, Canadian employers should have the upper hand in competitive salaries, because they don't have to cover healthcare, and corporate taxes are also cheaper. This happened in the auto sector, where Canadian plants have enjoyed a few decades of favoured status compared to American plants due to lower employment costs. That's now changed since the UAW has caved in so much to the automakers and workers in the U.S. South will work for peanuts, on top of state government offering massive subsidies to attract new plants.

What happens is simply that many Canadians like Canada and don't want to move south, and the Canadian economy is poorer than the American one (in particular, there is way less VC investment per capita), so companies have less money to fight over developers, and many developers (like myself) are content with this market.

The one reason that occurs to me is the different expectations for social safety nets, which most people I think ignore when they are youthful and/or healthful. In Canada, losing one's job (sometimes following a bad health diagnosis) will not likely condemn the person to bankruptcy and worse. It was stunning to me how different Canadian society is compared to the US when one digs just below the surface. In some sense, the analogy that occurs to me is riding a motorbike (US) to riding a Camry (Canada) - the former is thrilling, full of freedom, and 'bad', until you get in an accident.

I agree that Canadian employers can totally up their hiring game by upping the miserly salaries but they could emphasize the social differences between Canada and the US to attract risk-averse/future-focused candidates.

It's about the personal calculus. It's easy to move to the US for work, if crap really hits the fan they can move back. The actual likelihood of that happening is minor, and if your young then it's rational to live in the USA for a 10-30 years and save up the huge compensation difference. If you stay long enough to reach 65, then you'll have medicare, and you can pocket the lower cost of living difference too.

Also employers pay for your medical insurance with pretty good plans, if you have a medical issue your paying at most ~$5k and $3k/yr for family medical insurance.

So universal healthcare isn't a good enough reason to not move to the USA. Also the US might get universal healthcare in that time span.

You are kind of proving my point: for Canadians to come to the US for more money as you state makes a lot of sense. You get to keep your Canadian citizenship and if things go badly, you move back. Also, re. 'employers pay for your medical insurance', the trouble is how long said employer will keep you around if some unforeseen illness comes about. COBRA, for which the premiums are very high, is good for another 18 months, assuming you have enough money saved up to pay for it along with the medical expenses brought about by the adversity.

I think my motorbike vs. Camry analogy is reasonable. Vast numbers of people ride motorbikes every day and live for decades without encountering a problem .Others can end up having their lives turned upside down as a result of some accident. A social safety net is not designed for everyone to bounce on but to catch the most unfortunate in society and help them cope as best as possible at their time of extreme adversity. My point is that the US, especially with the impending destruction of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid defunding, is about to lose its very short-lived and already weak safety net. If you can go back to Canada when adversity strikes, you are in good shape. Most people don't have that option.

You can use a relatively small amount of your salary to buy income protection or disability insurance in the US, and pocket the difference.

I am aware that most companies will automatically buy a certain amount of disability insurance for employees with option to buy more, often as a pre-tax deduction. These cover, afaik, something like $1 million in expenses for the specific circumstance of disability. However, I think the overall sub-thread was discussing healthcare. It is not clear to me that a long-term debilitating disease, such as (heaven forbid) cancer, would be covered adequately by such plans. Certainly, even healthcare prior to the Affordable Care Act could deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions or if there ever was any lapse of coverage; for such circumstances, assuming the disability insurance applied, the money would get spent pretty quickly. Real disability expenses are often much more expensive than anticipated - the referenced link [1] shows the expenses for Texas governor Gregg Abbott, who was disabled by a falling tree trunk while jogging at age 27; he managed to negotiate a pretty good settlement with the homeowner and you can see that his disability, for which he was too young or unprepared to have purchased disability insurance, had cost $6 million as of 2013.

My intent was to outline the fact that the US safety net is weak and there are plenty of corner cases that one could fall into from which recovery will be tough. Reduction in Medicaid will only worsen this. If you have coverage that you feel covers you in a majority of worst case scenarios, then you are in good shape but hopefully you are up to date on your read of the coverages. The Canadian safety net, in my opinion, saves one a little bit from this planning.

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-politics/2013/08/02/gr...

In Canada, you pay for that healthcare via taxes, so pre-tax salary shouldn't be different. If you're on a high salary, you can get income protection and healthchare insurance.

Though I'll note that the US puts a higher percent of GDP into public healthcare expenditure than Canada (yes, Americans pay more taxes for healthcare than Canadians, despite not having much public healthcare), so I guess the US is just bad at doing healthcare efficiently. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PUBL.ZS

I agree, Canadian employers are really not paying good wages for the same skills as the US. The reason for that, AFAIK, is Canada's skills-based immigration policy. In the original article, notice that the CEO effectively brought over teams of people permanently to the country fairly easily (it seems like) so perhaps that causes wage depression?

I was answering the parent post on why salaries are not directly comparable in the US and Canada with one opinion, re. the healthcare safety net. It is entirely possible that having a sane immigration policy rather than the indentured sickness that is the H1B also leads to a healthier supply of talent and thus lowers wages. I am sure there are other factors.

Living on the border, from what I have observed salaries are roughly 30% lower in Ontario compared to the US, across the board.

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