Toronto adds more tech jobs than Silicon Valley in past 5 years
m.huffingtonpost.ca
m.huffingtonpost.ca
The report by CBRE Group says Toronto added 82,100 technology-related jobs between 2012 and 2017 to beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000 jobs over 5 years, ok. Let's look at some other accounts of Bay Area tech jobs, for example https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slow... :
Tech’s annual job growth throttled back to 3.5 percent, or 26,700 new jobs, in 2016. That’s much slower than the 6 percent annual gain of 42,300 jobs in 2015, or the 6.4 percent gain in 2014.
That describes around 110,000 jobs growth in just three years.
These numbers just don't match. The first one is based on a survey by a real estate group, the second one is based on official statistics from the California government. What's the reality here? I can't say, but I do know that you can't trust hypey news articles that don't bother to dig around for the most accurate data sources. My guess is that this survey operated by a real estate group is just bad data.
You can get numbers much like HuffPo's if you compare urban San Francisco (population 800,000) to Toronto (population 3,000,000). Which is grossly misleading to begin with, but they then listed it as "Silicon Valley" in the headline and the "San Francisco Bay Area" in the body. Which are, obviously, three fundamentally different regions.
The CBRE data probably isn't perfect, but projecting their San Francisco percentage change back to 2013 does match Census Bureau numbers surprisingly well. Things get a bit confusing in 2018 because it looks like CBRE changed their grouping from SV and SF separately to the whole Bay combined.
Unfortunately, HuffPo didn't know or care about that distinction, so we got this article instead.
This just makes it all the more confusing.
But yes, this is unbelievably ambiguous.
What a mess.
You are comparing apples to oranges
Even in port credit you cannot rent a brand new bachelor in a new building that’s not in a basement, which has new stainless steel appliances, dishwasher, air conditioning and at least a gym or pool.
I’m not knocking the idea of paying low rent to save money to get ahead in life, I think that’s something all young people should do.
But comparing port credit bachelor unit life to a new build 1 bedroom in the core is just a bad comparison
Mississauga ... lol.
What's funny is I remember when the downtown waterfront condos were $50,000 each and nobody wanted to buy - long walk to downtown and freezing cold in winter. How things change.
I hope for your sake you bought one of those 50k condos. I'm 25 so I missed the boat on cheap real estate.
Big backwater suburb of Toronto?
It might be cheaper to live that far away, but the cost in quality of life + hours commuting isn't worth the trade. Instead you can just go to a smaller town like Waterloo or a cheaper city like Montreal or Ottawa.
EDIT: On second reading you may be talking about driving to the GO station, in which case I agree... although I can easily walk to the GO station in <5 minutes myself. Your parent comment might also live a short walk or bus ride away from the Clarkson GO station
If you have a partner or significant other, it's not worth relocating to Toronto. Tech job's salaries are already considered extremely high here, but the majority of other jobs don't come close outside a few industries such as medical. Not to mention, non-tech industries are not booming like the tech industry, so even finding a decent job is a challenge.
Therefore, the demographic of people that would even consider relocation to Toronto are singles. After I graduated college and moved downtown from Etobicoke, I have so much more free time to actually live life. That 2 hours of commuting is extremely valuable, and this is coming from someone who was born and raised in Toronto. If you're a newcomer and single living outside of downtown or at a distance from work, commuting 1 hour to work, then working for 8 hours, and finally commuting 1 hour back - that's already 10 hours gone from your day. Factor in daily tasks and you're left with very little time in the week to find friends or socialize.
People just don’t understand how valuable time is. Commuting 2hrs each way daily x 5 days is 40 hours a month you will never get back.
Also I find that people with long commute times rarely admit how bad it is in the winter. I work from home 70% of my days and when I commute it’s 30 minutes by car each way. On a bad winter day it’s 3x that! Taking an Uber home to port credit after a night of drinking on a winter day would take 3 hours!
I recently spoke to a man who lives in the east end and commutes by car everyday to Cambridge! He said it’s 3 hours each way in the winter, blew my mind! (His wife worked in the east end)
All joking aside, some folks I've known driven from St Catherine every day to work in the core. Summer wasn't too bad, winter they left at 4am and got home around 10pm just to rinse and repeat. Hardly got to see his kids. Truly not sure what they told themselves to keep doing it every day as to me it was simply insane.
Toronto COL might feel expensive now but it can definitely get a lot more expensive.
Which half? Did you include the rest as an exercise? Lol.
I don't care how much rent costs, what I care about is the delta between income and expenses.
I'm trying to buy a house in Waterloo. Inventory is already staggeringly low.
The only reason you would stay in Toronto for a job in tech is if you wanted to stay close to family, or your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse.
Or, you just hate money and being at the center of the tech industry...
Maybe if you're not a visible minority and never leave the valley you could stick your thumbs in your ears and just cash the cheques.
Are you serious? Canada has a point-based system that requires you have some actual real skills and an education. I wish we had an immigration system like that in the US. Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
While based on binary categories rather than point-based system, so does US employment-based immigration. It also often requires a sponsoring employer, as well.
OTOH, Canada, like the US, also has family based immigration—and because it doesn't have per-country limits, it doesn't have decade+ wait times from some high-interest countries in key categories (though it does have smaller multi-year waits in some categories for immigrant visas, but it also has renewable multi-year “visiting family” supervisas which you can apparently take advantage of while an immigrant visa is pending.)
> Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
Canada not only has asylum (and accepts proportionately more refugees than the US even before Trump), but it doesn't seem to have a major political party scapegoating them and illegal immigrants to justify policies cutting back on legal immigration.
> If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
No, they wouldn't; difficulty of immigration isn't the reason people who make that kind of hyperbolic threat every election almost never follow through.
My wife and I aren't from any of the blocked countries, but who knows how the list could have grown at Trump's whim and current "enemy of the week".
So if it's just a preference for the Canadian political climate, then Toronto still does not seem like the best bet.
If any toronto natives know of some big companies in Toronto with tech jobs please prove me wrong.
I know Apple is hiring some JS devs in Toronto as well.
https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e...
I've seen a few articles about Apple hiring developers in Toronto, so there's that too.
Maybe Waterloo is a bit too far away to count, but Google has a fairly big engineering office there.
Muse, Google, Facebook, Softchoice, IBM, ALL major banks have a tech arm now, like Scotia Banks Digital Factory, CIBC Live Labs ,etc., and other tech companies, Flip, Wave, Freshbooks, Wattpad (raised major vc money), Ritual (raised 75m this year), TribalScale, Worktango, just to name a few.
Replace fb with Autodesk.
Are you sure you're not thinking of kitchener-waterloo?
There are a few. Most large ones are in the suburbs. Downtown has an overwhelming amount of VC-funded ad-tech companies that I wouldn't go near if my living depended on it. (I'd take up something else to cover the bills...)
One misconception I think, is that many people moved to SV for big-N companies and comparing that with average Toronto salaries.
This is a common misconception, and is promoted by a lot of tech companies in Toronto. It actually frustrates me whenever someone says that the compensation in the bay vs Toronto is the same after adjusting for CoL.
It's really not. You will end up with more absolute savings by working in the bay area, than you will in Toronto in a similar living situation.
Almost every expat Canadian working and saving in the US also has a little voice in the back of their mind reassuring them that even if the absolute number of saved US dollars is the same as saved Canadian dollars, there's a really good chance their US dollars will go further [when|if] they move back home in X years due to the historical exchange rate.
Salary difference between medium no name companies in the two cities are about that much.
I've been casually seeking either something more profitable so that I can save, or otherwise a viable remote position so that we can move a little out of the city (or to the coast). (Both profitable and remote would be ideal in this case, but I can take one before the other as either would help get me there).
Hell, I'd probably even move to the right suburb if I could land a substantially compensated job with Honeywell or something for a while.
Judging my present circumstances, you'd probably wager that I do hate money. I used to have a lot more fun here than I do these days.
Let's say you're in Canada and you move from the bottom quintile to the top. Top quintile starts at $100K, and you're making $110K. Great!
Those poor American's who don't make it to the top quintile ($150K) and only the 4th quintile are making $125K.
Which one would you prefer? Does the US actually have lower income mobility? Relatively speaking, yes. Not in absolute terms though.
I feel, there is more hype in Vancouver tech scene, with more emphasis on "trendiness bonus"
Local job boards periodically explode with generic "enter the buzzword" specialist/developer jobs. More VC funding spilling over the border. More "1 month startups." Even these days, I heard, generic facebook clones still manage to somehow secure multimegabuck funding.
The rates for tech workers in Toronto are terrible. An enterprising worker can easily triple their income by working for American companies.
The fact that this report is sourced from a real estate firm should give you a hint to the rent-seeking nature of the Canadian economy.
San Francisco is 124k USD (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...)
So, it's not triple, but it's more than double.
Also, if you're going from a junior/midlevel role in CA to a senior position in the US, you could pretty easily triple your salary.
Toronto gets the sloppy seconds of America's tech industry; the Canadian tech grads who couldn't move to the US, the Indian tech migrants who couldn't get US visas, the "startups" who couldn't get US VC funding, tech conferences etc. etc.
That some companies are seeking to lower their costs but retain "North American culture" by transferring some functions to Toronto is not an indication of the strength of Toronto, but its weakness. Cheap dollar, far cheaper salaries, cheap(er) office spaces, far cheaper politicians to buy if necessary, etc.
When anyone in the North American tech industry can name 5 bustling Canadian startups from the top of their mind, then maybe we can talk about the Canadian tech industry doing well. Until then, it's about as relevant in tech as Bangalore and jobs there are as relevant as any of those located in other outsourced, cost-reducing "tech centres".
As long as the cost for privileged access to the US market is open season to poach the best and brightest of our labour market, and a local tech scene too addicted what amounts to a subsidy in the form of large immigration numbers that prevent wages here from adjusting upwards to US levels, very little will take root here beyond satellite offices and near-shoring, and the brain drain will continue.
https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Tech-30-2017
https://www.cbre.us/about/media-center/tech-talent-2018
https://www.cbre.us/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talent...
I still appreciate the link, though, because HuffPo didn't source their numbers, which look very strange. CBRE's 2017 data says San Francisco has had the highest percentage growth in tech jobs for 6 years running, and it's ~20 points higher than Toronto in each timeframe listed. The 2018 report does list Toronto growing at 51.5%, and the San Francisco Bay Area growing at 31%.
But we need to know what region is being assessed - the 2016 report separates San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so this is a crucial difference. San Francisco proper is 800,000 people, Silicon Valley is ~3,000,000, Toronto ~3,000,000 and the Bay Area is 8,000,000. The CBRE data does break out Silicon Valley separately, at least in pre-2018 reports. The headline here says "Silicon Valley", but the body gives numbers for the "San Francisco Bay Area".
Working backwards from the publicly-available CBRE report stats, I get 90,000 new tech jobs in Toronto from 2013-2017. That's noticeably higher than HuffPo's 82,000 from 2012-2017, but plausible given that I'm using CBRE's heavily-rounded numbers.
San Francisco apparently had 79,100 tech jobs at the start of 2017, up from 56,800 at the start of 2015. We can back-calculate to 38,600 tech workers in 2013. Calculations from Census Bureau estimates from that time period put the number somewhere very similar in 2013, suggesting that this is correct. CBRE tells us San Francisco also had the highest percentage growth surveyed in 2012, so we can project 2012 growth from the next years. Percentage growth has been slowing, so I used the 2013-2015 rate to get 7,300 new jobs in 2012. Those numbers are for San Francisco itself, population 800,000. If we nevertheless apply the 2017 "San Francisco Bay Area" percentage growth to this number, we get 2013-3017 growth of 65,600, for a 2012-2017 total change of 72,900.
> Toronto... beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000-72,900 = 9,100
This is 2x HuffPo's number, but I'm really working the data to make these rounded percentages workout. Fortunately, all of the other differences we're worried about dwarf this. It's not Silicon Valley, that's distinct, and it can't be the whole Bay Area, because that would imply the non-SF Bay Area of 7,200,000 people gained a total of 4,000 tech jobs in five years.
It looks like HuffPo used CBRE's San Francisco proper numbers, cited raw counts despite a ~4x population difference, and then reported it as the "San Francisco Bay Area" based on CBRE's 2018 language. That, or they failed to notice that CBRE (and other firms like PwC) have changed their region breakdown this year, and simply conflated Bay Area numbers from one year with San Francisco numbers from other years.
It looks like somebody tried for a dramatic-but-misleading story with a useless comparison, confused their subject between headline and body, and ultimately made a numerical statement that's simply false. Failing to link their source was probably a good move given all that.
(And I'll bet this article took half as long to write and publish as it took commenters to debunk. The Gish Gallop even works for professional news organizations.)
Personally I much prefer to live in Toronto but the salary is just too low.
If you're a saver/investor then it makes much more sense to move to the US for a little while, save up a decent sized nest egg, then move back.
I would say it's not difficult at all - there were hundreds of job listings.
Any thoughts?
Of course you start at $90-$100k as a new grad in Amazon and Google.
I expect that to change as the hiring crunch continues but right now the ceiling has been slow to budge - much slower than the lower end of the spectrum, which is pressured more with average rent in Toronto going up over 15% year over year
Canada has an exceptionally strong culture of pushing for workplace training, to the point that the OECD calls Canada the most educated nation, so when a career stands out as having good job prospects (which development has been billed that way for several years now) people flood into it, putting downward pressure on incomes unlike you find stateside where the social dynamics don't push people into those jobs the same way.
If you're doing something really unique perhaps there is still room for upward growth (although you're probably already well past $150k in that case), but generally it is unlikely that developer incomes will climb further at all.
A few devs I know with >5 years experience have moved to new roles lately, and the companies didn't even hesitate when they asked for salaries well over 100k. I know it's just anecdotal, of course. Other probably have good counter-examples. but maybe it's a useful data point regardless.
Those jobs do exist, but they're hard to get and hard to find.
That and combined with relatively lower salaries...
Could you elaborate? curious what you mean.
Do we have anecdotes about the delta is between how much it costs to hire a contractor vs. employee for same role in the Bay Area vs. Toronto.
In Toronto, anecdotally, per year a contractor costs between %175 and %200 of an employee. Contractor firms take their %15-%50 cut depending on contractor desperation.
What's it like in the Bay Area?
Bottom line is, for the basket of goods and services used in their comparison, LPP at San Francisco is 30% higher than Toronto.
And plenty of skilled workers surrounded by 4 or 5 private and public colleges. And some of the best pizzerias lol...
San Francisco builds 1 unit of housing for every 1.8 jobs. This means tons of people commute into the city from elsewhere, and lots of living rooms converted into de-facto bedrooms.
> but that still describes enough housing
At what point does it not describe enough housing? 3 bunk beds in the living room and 2 bunk beds per bedroom? Someone living in the bathtub?
What? It's not even remotely close.
The cost of rental housing has jumped up quite a bit recently, too. When I was looking for a place to live in 2015, I saw quite a few condos for rent right downtown for $1700-1800 a month. Now I see units in those same buildings renting for $2300 a month and up.
Still cheaper than SV, I suppose? And if you don't mind a bit of a commute, you can find more affordable accommodation.
Well no-one is saying that Toronto is better than SV "in absolute terms" either. Just that more tech jobs were added.