Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me why I cancelled my Economist subscription years ago. But gotta love the obligatory shout out to Richard Florida that pops up whenever the media covers the tech sector in Canada!

Question: If there will supposedly be 200,000 tech vacancies in Canada by 2020, why are tech salaries in Canada so low compared to the US?

Another question: If the Canadian government is serious about developing the high tech sector, why doesn't it reform the absurdly overpriced telecoms oligopoly? See e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/low-cost-data-crtc-1.494942... that reports on the imminent introduction of $30/month for 1 GB of wireless data as "low-cost" with a straight face. That's literally 10X what I pay here in Australia (https://www.optus.com.au/shop/broadband/mobile-broadband/dat...) never mind what it costs in Europe!

I think the primary reason Canadian policymakers want to juice immigration to Canada is to delay the real estate bubble from popping on their watch...

Makes perfect sense, the vacancies stay vacant because the salaries are so low!

From my understanding, jobs in Canada are scarce, at least for new immigrants, it seems most of them can only start off of menial jobs.

Since Canada is relatively easy to immigrate to, newcomers have to stay within the country to compete for scarce and low pay jobs, while citizens of Canada can pursue high salaries abroad.

This is only true for refugees, economic migrants usually have a wide range of good jobs to choose from.

And unemployment is at its lowest point in year in Canada.

Good, high paying jobs are scarce. But if you can speak the language passably getting a job in a Canadian city is easy.

I work as a programmer in Canada, get descent pay, can afford to buy a house and take my family to vacation. Yup, it's far from money I got at Bay Area, but I can afford more, and live in neighbourhood where I don't have to lock doors or really worry about being mugged, which happened in Cali several times.

What action do you believe the Canadian government should take in order to reform telecoms? There could be multiple plausible explanations for their high prices, and since I'm not sufficiently familiarized with Canadian laws and regulations, it's not obvious to me that their services are severely overpriced given the ecosystem in which they operate. I'd ask why it costs so much for native customers, while foreign visitors can consume data at much more competitive rates. For example, I'm using Google Fi and they charge $10/GB, regardless of your location. Maybe if you're Canadian you should try signing up for a Google Fi account and using it for mobile data.

> What action do you believe the Canadian government should take in order to reform telecoms?

Easy, allow in foreign competitors like we have here in Australia such as Vodafone (UK) and Optus (Singapore) that compete fiercely w/ the former domestic monopoly Telstra.

> There could be multiple plausible explanations for their high prices...

The industry justification for high prices is that Canada is a large, sparsely populated country. But that's also true of Australia and Russia which have much lower telecoms pricing (and the US to some extent). Personally I believe the real reason prices are so high in Canada is that the CRTC (the Canadian regulator) has been captured by the industry. Which is a polite way of saying plain old corruption.

At the last AWS users group I was at in Toronto everyone was hiring. Can’t speak for the rest of the country.

> Question: If there will supposedly be 200,000 tech vacancies in Canada by 2020, why are tech salaries in Canada so low compared to the US

So that companies can push for more immigration and keep salaries deflated.

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