Do Canadian companies make that much less money than American ones? Why should they get to pad their profit margins because 120k CAD is "good income"?
So they just pay what it takes to fill the spot.
Of course they are also incredibly resistant to changing this, preferring to complain about how we need to fix brain drain and/or make immigration easier.
So it seems like they're not losing devs at a fast enough pace to warrant increasing dev salaries? Or perhaps there are just enough developers for the Canadian market, to not have to increase compensation to attract better talent?
From what I've seen, American based companies with offices in Canada do seem to pay very well, but Canadian companies are unabashedly poorly compensating. I talked with a few hiring managers at some Canadian startups and what they were offering would be less than what I made right out of college. It left me wondering how talented folks can continue to work for Canadian firms?
The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. The combined market cap of FAANG is fluctuating around $3 trillion right now. That's about 2X the entire GDP of Canada...in just 5 American companies.
No large-ish tech company in Canada is near that level of profitability or size. Combine that with currency fluctuations and with the greater tax/regulatory burden of having a full-time employee in Canada, and you will never have a Canadian company that can afford to pay engineers $250K+ en masse like FAANG can.
The reason engineers in the US make so much, is because four to five decades ago US tech companies combined with globalization and scaled out into the entire planet as a market. That premise has remained intact, while the global economy has gotten a lot larger and richer. That's something most other nations have failed to do at a large scale (S.Korea has Samsung but not many other companies that have gone hyper global for example).
Go all the way back to Fairchild, Intel, HP, IBM in the 1950-1980 era. Nobody has done globalized tech like the US, probably only Japan got close (and they've largely missed out on the huge margins in software).
Without the ability to tap into the rest of the planet, Netflix wouldn't be able to pay what it does. The rest of the planet is half their market now, and will be 2/3 or 3/4 of it in the near future.
Europe only has three or four major tech companies that managed to go substantially global (eg SAP, ARM, Spotify, or Booking.com which got swallowed by Priceline). ARM & Booking got taken out, Spotify will be acquired next. The same kind of problem Canada often faces with its tech companies (Shopify is very likely to end up in the belly of a US tech or retail company, especially once their valuation normalizes).
I live in Germany, which has similar wages for software engineers as Canada. And in a 2 hours train ride I can be in Poland, where software engineers earn 1/3 their German counterparts.
Apparently, only business and finance people are allowed to want money because they provide a useful service or just because they want money.
I personally believe that in a capitalistic society, it is imperative that everyone tries their best to extract as much of the value that they create. Otherwise we end up with massive inequality.