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Comment by xinsight | Hacker News Reader

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?

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