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.
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 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.
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.
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...)
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.