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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

The immigration quotas in Canada are simply out of control.

Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!

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Immigration quotas have remained constant at about 1% of the population per year since 1992.

Low wages in software compared to the US for sure, but that's in part because Canada has very low income and wealth inequality compared to the US. Most people make a living wage, and there's not a huge spread.

The US ranks near the bottom of the world in income inequality [1]. Canada's GINI coefficient was 33.8 in 2018 vs the US of 43.4. This puts America at 51st in the world (lower being worse) vs Canada's 107th.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/ma...

The issues of income inequality, most people making a living wage are non-sequiturs to the argument that says if you have an ample supply of cheap labour, the wage goes down.

I guess the argument I was making is that you can't at the same time have "low income inequality" and a short supply of a particular skillset which drives them to receive disproportionate compensation. To the extent that software engineers aren't paid drastically more or drastically less than people in comparably skilled professions, I would argue that's the system working. Not everyone would agree with that to be sure.

Canada also has lower average wages. That doesn't mean that the average worker is better off; rather it's that it's harder to find high earners.

I think you'll find the "low" wages in software here are lowish in comparison to wages in the Bay Area but are comparable to other professional salaries.

But also, the cost of living in the GTA has gotten completely out of control so that's part of it.

My wife and I bought a house in a "bad" neighbourhood of Toronto back in 2005. It was $280,000 CAD and that was the cheapest we could find in the GTA for a 3 bedroom detached home still on decent public transit.

At the time both of us were both employed in tech, and we still had to struggle a bit to scrape together a down payment. We didn't perceive $280,000 as a trivial or cheap amount. And even back then we wondered how families that didn't have our (pretty decent) income level could possibly be buying homes.

That same home would be now be worth over a million. I just can't grasp how that's conceivable at all. I make really good money as a Google employee, but I'd still find it frustrating to scrape together money for that. I don't understand how my kids will ever own a home.

So I think it's less that people are under-compensated in our industry as much as costs of living have just become stupid due to housing price inflation.

EDIT: wife went to go check the mailbox and it was stuffed full of real estate flyers only, including one from an agent who will give you a free lottery ticket if you come to his open house. I smell doom on the horizon, but I've been saying that for a decade, so don't listen to me.

Mind sharing some numbers? This is a patently false statement. Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.

But gross wages are also lower here. If anything almost everyone I've came across here in Canada talks about their salary using the gross amount. So not only are wages employers advertise pretty low already, they are usually pretax too.

Unless there's something more that is taken from wages that isn't shown on paychecks. Which would be weird considering that paycheck stubs usually have a full breakdown of where your money went and how much taxes were taken.

Everyone I talk to in the States also talks about their salaries in gross amounts, not post-tax (same applies for business advertising jobs).

Canada in general has much lower income inequality, which is an a-OK trade off for slightly lower wages, as long as basic needs are covered.

>Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.

Not really. They (and most other developed countries) simply pay less of their GDP towards healthcare.

That is... the opposite of what Canada does? Healthcare there is not uber-funded, but also not necessarily strapped for cash.

I'm not implying that Canada (or other developed countries) are cheaping out on healthcare. I'm only pointing out that your initial claim (that the differences in pay can be accounted for because of the various taxes paid) isn't true, or at least isn't telling the whole story.

For Software Engineering pretty much all jobs will have great health coverage included, on top of a higher salary. So when you add the value of the coverage, the wages looks ever lower in comparison.

Taxes in Ontario are similar to say California. That's not the reason wages are lower.

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