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Comment by mdtusz | Hacker News Reader

Montreal is an extremely easy city to live in. Very inexpensive rent, good nightlife/events and arts/culture scene, and a pretty good transit system.

The Quebecois will disagree with me on this, but I don't think you even need to speak French if you're working in tech - you might just have a smaller friend circle of Anglos.

Taxes however are crazy high and salaries are low compared to cities like Vancouver or Toronto.

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Taxes are pretty comparable to NYC, but they include health insurance (assuming one has the right immigration status) regardless of employment. Salaries are definitely lower but also in line with cost of living. Agree about language, though one may want to learn French after arriving for maximum enjoyment.

Hello from another techie in Montreal, recently arrived from NYC. :)

> The Quebecois will disagree with me on this, but I don't think you even need to speak French if you're working in tech - you might just have a smaller friend circle of Anglos.

Native anglophone; non-native fluent speaker of French.

You can totally make it work in Montreal with your small circle of anglo friends. But almost anyone I've known over the years who tried to make it work like that is either quite bitter, or has left once raising a family comes into the question.

For good reason, just as in Germany or Poland, unless you learn French, you will be excluded from public culture, especially as you get older, and that largely means a lot of the great things of Montreal get watered down.

This is fairly accurate, I am in Montreal.

Except he missed one major selling point. Our food/restaurant scene is second to none. If you consider moving here then negotiate a couple of months remote work per year and work from Costa Rica in Jan-Feb.

Is there an actual remote work policy there? I did think working south in the summer would be a neat way to escape the cold, though I'd pick somewhere closer. Raleigh or Nashville, perhaps.

That's a very important point. I moved from Montreal to NYC a couple of years back and one thing I definitively miss is the food scene. Not that NYC is bad by any metric but Montreal just has an amazing food scene.

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