The cheap labour pool as a consequence of the weak Canadian dollar certainly helps, alongside having identical time zones and nearly identical culture to the United States. Lots of Canadian consultancies butter their bread with USD.
Salaries are about to go up way more for the average employee. Simultaneously, any companies that were making money on labor price arbitrage are about to have a real tough time; Good riddance.
I was flat out told there are no such jobs in Canada two years back. Has that changed?
Can guarantee Senior Software Engineers don't make >600K in SF.
What really happens though is RSU appreciation. GOOG has more than doubled in the past 4 years. You are awarded X dollars of stock on hire and every annual review period, but that is converted into shares awarded every Y months. If you achieved a 1:1 salary:RSU vesting ratio, today that would probably be 1:2, a 50 percent pay raise.
(When comparing keep in mind Netflix hire only at senior software engineer level and above and have a single level title so staff/principal levels are collapsed to senior just with higher salaries.)
https://www.levels.fyi/# (L6 at Google, for instance.)
I know engineers in Canada who are making similar amounts. There's not a lot but it's not nonexistent.
At google a Staff engineer is a title notably higher than senior swe, and many talented people will not reach this title or pay grade.
"Senior Software Engineer" is a role you can reach in 3-8 years of experience.
"Staff" is a whole different ordeal, a role many never reach. And even then compensation is closer to 450K; you might find some around 600K but those are outliers (whereas OP made it sound that >600K is something common)
If you can grow, you'll grow pretty much everywhere
I know the 600k sound tempting but it's not like it doesn't have any strings attached.
Getting paid, let's say 200k USD in Canada, might get you closer to owning your home than the 600k in SF
I left Toronto immediately after my Master's, but have multiple extremely talented friends who feel they've topped out at well under half that.
If you're in a non-primary market in the U.S. (non NYC/SF/Boston), my experience has been that you can hire comparable or better talent in Canadian cities for less the local U.S. median salary, especially in talent-starved markets within the U.S. It's an open secret that many Americans are somehow unaware of.
https://www.csmonitor.com/EqualEd/2019/0304/Go-north-young-g...
(This being points-based skilled immigration)
So while there certainly is a skilled worker immigration path, if you are accepted by the board as a refugee, you will be met with help and kindness. And even while waiting, we do not separate kids from you and put them in cages. And we accept the most refugees in the world: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696974
How is that different than the U.S.? Are refugees not met with help and kindness in America?
> And even while waiting, we do not separate kids from you and put them in cages
While I do not agree with this tactic, I also think that this paints an unfair picture, since Canada has never experienced immigration issues to the degree that the U.S. has. Maybe the U.S. should do what Mexico did and let caravans of migrants show up at the border in Vancouver?
> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696974 > And we accept the most refugees in the world
"According to the US-based Pew Research Center, which looked the the UNHCR data, 2018 was the first time the US did not lead the world in refugee resettlement since 1980."
I guess congratulations? I don't necessarily view "accepting the most refugees" as a moral calculation, nor something that should be a competition. But if you want to keep score I guess the U.S. is now 28-1 since 1980. Go America!
"The US is the world's major recipient of new asylum applications, registering 254,300 applications in 2018.
Canada was ninth on the list of new asylum claims with 55,400 registered in 2018, behind the US, Peru, Germany, France, Turkey, Brazil, Greece and Spain."
Jeez only 9th? Worse than Peru?
"An influx of asylum seekers crossing at the US-Canada border has become a political issue after approximately 40,000 people "irregularly" crossed into Canada between 2017 and 2018."
Why is this an issue for Canadians?
" Canada currently is struggling with a backlog of almost 74,000 asylum claims with applicants waiting almost two years for a hearing."
Other relevant facts from your article.
But hey, the U.S. is bad because that's what the news says.
The US Asylum backlog jumped to 340,000 - up 10x since 2014. Certainly some of that is due to heightened applications, but a lot is due to antiquated systems in USCIS and political changes.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-claims-reducing-re...
I’d also note in the Syrian refugee crisis, that Canada punched high above its weight in resettlement, far beyond the numbers the USA accepted, for a country 10x smaller.
With global warming and conflict on the rise, we are about to see over a billion people displaced over the next 50 years. In prior eras, the US would have led global efforts to manage this in a structured, humane way. But lately the US has preferred dismantling the global order and institutions it created after WW2.
> we are about to see over a billion people displaced over the next 50 years
Yes. And this is worrisome because stable countries won't be able to "let them all in" (sorry not sure the best way to put that). Long-term it's going to be more sensible to stabilize unstable countries.
A few years ago, it took me fifteen minutes to renew a Work Permit at the border. Last year, it was an intentionally unpleasant all-day affair. The online system is horrifically backlogged, far beyond the 100 or so days it says on the website.
Lol. Maybe a similar culture to some parts of California or Washington, and that is a stretch, but Vancouver is very very different than "the United States". Live in both for a while and all the little difference (the guns, health care, government, police, civil-military relations, the environment, land use, education etc) add up to markedly different approaches to life.
I have lived in Alberta for over ten years, and though culturally distinct from the rest of Canada (as is every other province I've spent time in) Alberta's brand of rugged individualist / conservatism is still very Canadian.
And though we may look very different to the urbanites of GVRD (Vancouver and surrounding) and the GTA (Toronto and surrounding), you'll find many more similarities between us and those living in rural Canada with resource-based economies, like the people living in B.C.'s forestry-dependent areas, the northern prairies or NorthWest Ontario. The difference for us is that we have very vocal, oil-industry-controlled politicians and a population that is immediately suspicious of any time an easterner tries to tell us what to do.
Sometimes the easiest way to see our distinctiveness is by contrast - immediately evident when crossing over to even the closest border states.
I love Montana and its people, but boy do you know you're not in Canada anymore - roadways lined with advertisements; cops everywhere you look; huge rich/poor divides; razor wire, visible drug problems and ghettos in even the smallest cities; and a love of all things military.
All that to say, there's far more to being Albertan than oil, guns and god, and those three things don't make us a 'murican.
Vancouver is especially different from the rest of canada than most canadian cities. Its like using Portland to characterize the entirety of America.
San Diego was far more different than Austin, TX, and considerably different than Ithaca, NY.
I'm still legally a WA resident, and having done a lot of time around Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, and Vancouver, I can tell you there are a lot of similarities. Seattle doesn't have the Aberdeen Mall, but in terms of attitude there isn't anything you can't find in Seattle.
Once you get out of the city, guns, religion, and skepticism of the urbanites is just as common as in the US -- standard Urban-Rural divide. Hell, even the "fly-over" provinces are conservative, just like in the US.