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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Isn't compensation, even after adjusting for cost of living and health insurance, much lower in Canada than anywhere in the U.S.?

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Most people don't care about money, they want to raise family in a safe environment, I interview a lot of foreigners and there is clear trend that they don't want to go to the US with the current administration.

That sounds great, I welcome less competition on the job market. Btw I've lived in Toronto before, have a family there and know the tech scene pretty well. If people didn't care about money and job satisfaction, you would not have that many Canadians here in SV. Most of the ones I talked too would like to go back at one point, but career prospects are very bleak. One would need to take a massive paycut and face fierce competition for a few available jobs out there. I know decent engineers making 70-90K which is essentially living paycheck to paycheck.

Just to provide context to that 70-90k range, median household income in Toronto is $78k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Median_household_incom...

> you would not have that many Canadians here in SV.

You are talking about Canadian citizens not immigrants who want to live in a developed country.

That's very much true. The only way to survive in Toronto is through consulting for fintech. From engineer's point of view those are mostly jobs from hell

> Most people don't care about money,

This is BS. Most ppl care about money above all else. India is a not a war zone its a "safe environment to raise family".

> I interview a lot of foreigners and there is clear trend that they don't want to go to the US with the current administration.

Why are you interviewing them then? Are you in Canada?

After a certain point, more money takes lower priority than other aspects like life goals, hobbies, family, environment, etc.

Are the countries these workers coming from so much more unsafe than the US or Canada? Otherwise, I think people do care about the money (as they should!).

> Are the countries these workers coming from so much more unsafe than the US or Canada?

Perhaps - but other than gun violence, if I went back home several things would be unsafe.

Money can buy a lot of things, but it takes more money to buy a first world lifestyle in India than it takes to do it in Canada (or even the US, as surprising as it sounds).

Buying clean smoke free air and water you can drink out of the tap might not feel like luxuries, but that's priced in here (& even there, this is by no means perfect - see Flint).

And at least, I've yet to be stopped by a cop who wanted a bribe.

It's very likely that pay in Canada is a lot higher than many people's home countries (e.g. India). So it's more a calculation of "high pay + security + life benefits" in Canada and "even higher pay but nothing else" in the US.

Canada makes a lot of sense. A lot of these people aren't just economic migrants, they are looking to settle down and start new lives. No immigrant in their right mind would do that in the US right now (if they have a viable alternative).

Yup. Last time I looked, Seattle paid twice what Toronto did. Seattle was more expensive, but only about 25%.

Canada just doesn't have the sort of top-tier companies that go head to head competing for talent that the US does. Hence, rates are lower.

People who have spent a few years at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc would have accumulated more than enough assets[1] that the drop in real compensation is an easy tradeoff to make for massively reduced stress in life.

And a far easier citizenship process in Canada means they won't have to worry about their kids anymore.

[1] https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

No because the cost of living is very high in Canada for it's major cities. Cities where there are jobs with decent-ish pay have high housing costs, the only exception being waterloo where houses are merely expensive. Also the cost of everything is about %20 higher. The weather is also relatively bad. Overall with the high pay in the USA, it's better to be a upper-middle class person in the USA than a upper-middle class person in Canada.

The assets accumulated from 6+ years working in the Bay Area would generate more than enough interest annually to cover the difference in living costs.

I agree about the weather, but bad weather doesn't affect your mental health anywhere as much as the uncertainty in America's never-ending visa process.

As more of the best engineering talent moves to Canada (or decides not to come to the US in the first place), it should: 1) increase salaries in the Bay Area in the short-term as their a shortage of engineers 2) decrease salaries in Canada in the short-term as their is a surplus of engineers

The more interesting thing to consider is whether US tech companies will begin to build out more aggressively in Canada instead of the US. Amazon HQ3 might make a lot of sense in Canada.

By HQ3 do you mean HQ2 (the one Amazon is currently in the process for selecting a city for), or are you talking about a theoretical far future new new HQ?

More importantly, with more and more talent present in Canada, more and more startup funding will move there.

I'm not sure that's true. Availability of VC capital is a tricky thing. There's some in Canada but only seems to be in small pockets. The startup scene in Vancouver is so small that basically everyone knows everyone else, for example. Vancouver is also suffering a real estate crisis that is worse than Silicon Valley's. I think it really takes large institutional draws to make a serious dent in the size of a talent pool that would ultimately draw larger VCs.

> I'm not sure that's true. Availability of VC capital is a tricky thing. There's some in Canada but only seems to be in small pockets.

But that is the reality TODAY based on the talent pool accumulated YESTERDAY.

For other countries, that YESTERDAY is TODAY. They want a SV future and if they had to import some people to recreate SV, this pool of people is it.

It's a lot lower in Canada, but simply the uncertainties of and anxieties caused by living in the US (for many of us) is unbearable.

That doesn't particularly matter when you can't get or retain a visa to work in the US.

Maybe salaries in those places will increase as a result.

It will be interesting to see if this is true, or whether they will go down and the local workforce will be negatively impacted as a result. Conversely, it will be interesting to see whether salaries for US techies will go up, or older people will have more opportunities. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Interest in offshore talent will go up. The US is lagging in education and can't fulfill the need for cost effective talent. The benefit of developers being in the US is not much of a benefit globally.

Why would salaries increase? If anything, they would drop due to increased supply.

Salaries are incredibly high in SF because of the high supply; it's an aggregation/network effect. SF is the world's tech center. As that starts fading globally, and SF is no longer the obvious and undisputed place to base your operations, great developers moving to other locations should drive up wages there and start heating up the job markets in those cities that are now becoming mini-SFs now that they're no longer being starved of oxygen from everyone migrating to SF.

> Why would salaries increase? If anything, they would drop due to increased supply.

As paradoxical as it might sound, competition attracts more and more work and raises wages for top talent. That's why SV has high salaries for engineers, NYC/London has high salary for finance, Bangalore has high salaries for local engineers (because competition creates an eco system, increasing the fight for talent).

Imagine Amazon moving their minimum wage workers to Ohio and then giving them $15/hr. Now, all other Ohio companies have to pay $15/hr or lose talent. Then the other companies start paying $18/hr and Amazon loses talent. Then Amazon raises rate to $20/hr and others lose talent and this keeps growing as more and more employers move to the region to find all those skilled employees who can join and be productive right away.

Money isn't everything. Software engineers in any developed country get paid enough to live a comfortable life.

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