Toronto’s Tech Industry
blog.brainstation.io
blog.brainstation.io
Last year, I spent a week in Toronto and I absolutely loved it. During a tour of the area, it was mentioned that the tech sector was growing, and that there are loads of initiatives to get tech workers into the city.
There seems to be some decent opportunities in Toronto, but it falls at the most basic hurdle. The salaries are too low, and the cost of property/rent is too high. It's a lovely place, but the world is full of lovely places.
However, Toronto has everything Canada has to offer in terms of big city life. It's got the hustle of a global big city. It's has amazing food and entertainment. If you live in Canada and like big, global cities, then there's not much choice.
Toronto is expensive. I need to express that. Business operating costs will always be lower of you compare another city to one that is often ranked exceedingly expensive. Relative references are not appropriate since you don't have a baseline. So, use a baseline of what the average operating cost is.
Toronto is HARD to get around. My morning commute is over 1 hour of driving at 5:40am - 6:50am with some variations depending on weekday, accidents, and time of year. My shift starts at 10am. If I leave at 8am I would arrive at 10:30am and be late for work. I hope this perspective shows how hard it is to get into downtown Toronto and how bad their traffic is. (The office is located away from the GO train and there's free parking in case people are wondering why I drive instead of transit.)
Toronto is also a bit old in tech. When I came from Vancouver and went to meetups, I felt like someone had rolled the clock back by two years. It was an odd feeling. The community just felt... Behind. I think this comes from businesses not giving as much time for developers to explore new technologies, hence why there may be larger delays in new tech popping up in Toronto.
Businesses are... Conservative. Having worked in Vancouver and coming to Toronto there was a cultural change that needed to be made. Businesses operated with less focus on employee happiness and talent retention and more on "talent results" (read: work or replaced) and transparency on 3x salary ROI. Banks and conservative businesses practices are very much the norm in Toronto. Very helpful for a business but to an employee, Toronto has a lot of cons for workplace lifestyle.
If you live in Toronto, I recommend working remote with US companies. Or, if you are inclined to do so, move to Vancouver or Calgary. Because of these issues that Toronto presents, I have myself been planning on moving to Calgary in a year or two.
However, I don't agree that the meetups in Toronto show legacy technology thinking. I just went to a meetup at Shopify on Istio. Just Istio. Google and Microsoft have big presences. Shopify is a huge company on the cutting edge of tech. And there are tons of smaller startups that are doing great work, pushing the boundaries. There is also a lot of AI work going on as well. I don't completely get Blockchain, but Toronto has gone crazy for it.
Edited to indicate Toronto meetups.
That's not a recommendation, IMHO.
Makes your choices, takes your chances.
For instance, I was at my last position for 6 years. The last 3 of which, I was actively looking for work. It took a while, but I'm making equiv to Toronto wages in a new position.
But yes, the majority of postings are in the low rent payscale neighbourhood. Which is weird, because you'd think to attract skilled talent away from T.O., the scale would in fact be higher.
I can't understand why you'd attempt to drive into the centre of a major city in the first place. That seems like obviously a bad idea. Why are you trying to do that? Where do you even park? Isn't there a train you can take?
GO service is amazing if you are on the Lakeshore line, and pretty good on others as well. But property prices are much higher close to stations.
Which tech/communities are you looking at? For example, I think the Elixir community is bigger/more active in Toronto.
Also I can't imagine that commute is better in Vancouver if you get a house that's just as far away.
Why? Startups here pay engineers 1/3 to half of what they'd make in the SFBay while only being ~25% less expensive. In real terms, I've heard that a "Sr. Engineer" is $75-85K CAD ($60K USD) where in at a typical SF startup (lower than FAANGs) you'd look at $130-140K+ USD.
Startups that get excited about low wages are rarely $B rocket ships. This makes the equity story difficult as there aren't employees who got rich from joining an early stage company. AND, the startups that did succeed also gave out less equity as it wasn't valued. Thus, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Startups and large tech companies would get founded/move here if there's an overflow of top tier talent. There's talent but not overflowing.
Good Solutions:
* Startups should pay more.
* Toronto should attract a FAANG or Uber/Lyft/Airbnb to build a serious office here.
* Employees should hop around more.
* Import talent through Canadian visas for foreign workers (which also takes advantage of more stringent US H1-B visas)
Crazy Solution: End the TN visa forcing a FAANG to open an office in Toronto.
Originally from Toronto, lived in SF and ran a VC-backed startup from 2011-2016 and moved home to Toronto in April to found a startup doing robotaxi ops software. Plug: we're hiring.
Yeah, I'm going to need a citation for that being a thing even now. London, Berlin, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Singapore... but Toronto? Srsly?
If you look behind the stories and check on which company's blog or who wrote these praises to Toronto, you'll see they all have something to sell from people thinking that Toronto is the place to be. Usual incentives include: difficulty hiring cheap talent, astroturfing for more VC money, selling a Toronto-tech related product.
Stopped reading here. When will this blockchain hype finally die?
Hundreds of people move to the city daily as job opportunities are not as plentiful outside the Greater Toronto Area. These could be international students, fresh college grads, people looking for a career change, etc. They've heard of blockchain and AI just enough to worry that they'll be left behind if they don't join "the tech industry".
So of course Brainstation will mention AI and Blockchain. These articles are lead generations pieces for their training programs. For SEO keyword purposes alone, they would have mentioned it.
Imagine 40 or so co-workers cheering behind your back that your brother died of cancer. I hope this gives a good perspective as to how he may be feeling.
For the record, Rob Ford was a very bad man.
* Toronto has a legacy as one of the best places to do ML, and while it felt like it was losing momentum, the Vector Institute's opening has infused the academic community with incredible energy. Vector's been recruiting top researchers from around the world, but particularly from the US -- there are a number of new Vector members who've come from the Boston/Cambridge area. The academic community in Toronto will only become stronger over the next few years, given how hostile the US has become to students from abroad.
* The strength of the academic community is fuelling a burgeoning startup scene. While it's still early days, there are a number of accelerators associated with the UofT and other entities, so given the talent coming out of the academic system here, I think the community will grow rapidly.
* Quality of life is fantastic. The food and music scenes are world-class, stemming largely from how diverse Toronto is. Downtown Toronto feels like a mixture of Manhattan and Brooklyn, just on a smaller scale. I don't own a car, and only use the subway perhaps once a week -- everything is in easy walking distance.
As to downsides:
* We have a reasonably cold winter from November to March. It's far less harsh than Calgary, though.
* Rent is expensive and rising. I've lived in the downtown core for all four years on a grad student's salary, so it's possible to make it work. But finding accommodations seems only to be getting harder.
* The political interests of the city are often overwhelmed by the sprawling suburbs surrounding it that make up the Greater Toronto Area. The new provincial government seems to be intent on attacking Toronto at every opportunity.
I've had the privilege to travel around the U.S. and Europe quite a bit during my PhD, and it's made me realize how well Toronto compares to the rest of the world. I plan to settle here after graduating -- the tech scene here seems like it's going to explode over the next decade, and it will be a lot of fun to be part of it.
Toronto's tech scene is not limited to that narrow and elitist scope of workers.
I'd love to get some advice from fellow tech migrants like myself that have moved from one of those places (NYC in my case) to a less vibrant but still honestly quite exciting environment like Toronto. Accepting a giant pay cut while still tying myself to a corporate 9-5 here is a depressing thought, and I'm not yet convinced that I feel right simply working remotely for US based companies, even if compensation opportunity is on average 1.5-2x better. Has anyone found a good balance between those worlds? Something that gives back to the local tech ecosystem but also taps in to the the better market potential to the south? I suppose building a business here and selling to the US, but trying to stay headquartered in Toronto is one way to do that, but any other thoughts?
We have many candid discussions about career opportunities and political issues in the city.
Disclosure: I'm an admin there.
This article is quite self-serving.
Essentially if you live in Toronto and you're working for a company in SF you are getting half the salary.
Surprised there hasn't been more of it in the tech space as yet. I keep hearing that the future of software dev is microservices, so if that allows for more remote work where teams don't have to collaborate as closely, I could see growth in development outsourcing.