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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

This is the fun reality that most FAANG Canadian offices have faced for years. Cross the border from Seattle to Vancouver, suddenly you're being paid much less for the same value provided.

And basically, it's market economics. The wage is determined by supply and demand in the labor market, not on the value provided to the company.

This is why it's important to have many competing employers rather than just 1 or 2 big ones. Competition for labor increases wages. Hopefully, as more companies accept full remote employees, we'll see that- a single huge market not defined by regions.

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You are correct. Moving to Seattle would grant me a 50k usd raise vs what I currently make. The other issue besides getting paid less for the same value, is that the money doesn't get you as far as in the US, as the cost of living in Vancouver is high (more or less the same as in Seattle but in cad) and you have more taxes, so your 100k cad in Canada is much less than 100k usd in Seattle.

If you mention health insurance for the taxes, that's actually taxed to employers in BC, not employees, so it's not part of the taxes I pay.

Yep. I took the cut to move back from Seattle to Toronto many years ago.

But you know what? I'm not living in America. I'm not living in America in the clusterfuck that is 2020.

I consider it money well spent.

I respect that, but you don’t have to let politics run your life.

If you're not in a place of privilege life is politics.

A old co-worker of mine couldn't get permanent residency for their legal partner. As a result rather than staying in the US they both moved back to Canada.

Honestly I don't blame them, sometimes I wonder if the US survives in spite of our political policies instead of because of them.

If you're not in a place of privilege life is politics.

Hoping from country to country with your pick of jobs isn't privilege?

I'd say it's the opposite. Those without privilege are the ones that don't have that option.

Privilege isn't a binary thing, it exists along many dimensions.

I'd hope you could understand that just because someone has a finite set of options doesn't mean they can't be impacted significantly by political policy due to society putting less value on who they are or where they come from.

You can have privilege in job selection without privilege in certain other things that America would deny you while Canada would grant you...

You mean like migrant workers? Many people have to leave their country to find work and most of them nobody would call privileged.

No, I mean educated, highly paid workers with access to multiple western countries choosing which country to reside in.

That’s a luxury 99% of the world doesn’t have. Hell, I’d guess almost half of Americans can’t do that.

That specific example is most certainly privilege. Being able to find gainful employment where you live is usually hard to come by. The overwhelming majority of people who _have_ to leave their home country in order to find work are definitely not privileged.

I would be curious to hear if the parent to your comment was talking about politics. They might instead be talking about the response to Covid-19, and the much larger death toll per million people in the US compared to Canada: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/9/9/21428769/covid-1...

Which, to be fair, is partially due to US politics. In that sense, making the choice to live in the US is letting one's life be run by politics, just in a different direction.

All of it.

2020 is a mess, and I'm glad to be in a country with: a strong universal health care system; a strong social support system; politicians who do the right things, listen to experts; a society of people who mostly wear masks because it's the right thing to do- to sacrifice comfort in order to help others.

Is that politics? I don't think it should be. I think that if people in the USA consider those important things to me to be political, then you can add that to the list of reasons I'm glad to be in Canada.

Making such a decision doesn’t mean politics is running your life. What kind of society, part of which includes politics, you want to live in matters to a lot of people. For me the biggest luxury of working in tech is actually that pretty much anywhere I earn enough to be solidly in middle class which give me the freedom to weigh other aspects of work and life higher. Chasing higher compensation or climbing corporate ladders is more optional.

Voting with your feet can well be an apolitical stance.

We're living in the age of Trump. You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.

Fine, I'll bite: that is what people are referring to when they refer to "privilege". Politics has an enormous influence on just about every problem you might face, from whether you're paid enough, what "enough" is, how easily you can bargain for more, to the freakin' weather, and thereby food supplies, to whether your neighbour would face consequences for shooting you, or how easy it is for them to do so.

Either you don't realise how your problems are due to unfavourable (for you) politics, or you have very, very few.

I’m wondering if moving or not, due to the higher pay in the us, but I have gotten used to Vancouver (I’m not from Canada), and I’m wondering how life long term is here. Buying a house seems to be the biggest issue here, in the us it would be easier with the higher pay, as well as getting retirement money, but well, it’s the usa. Also, I could get citizenship in less than 3 years, which is tempting.

If I were weighing these options I’d just move to the expensive place, make the money, and then spend it later in the cheaper place. Moving for a job doesn’t mean moving for good, and your money works anywhere.

If you don't mind me asking a tangential question, how is the salary mapping from Seattle to Toronto for the same position/role. I am also thinking of moving out of the US and to Canada.

This for Vancouver. Here I’m at 100k cad. In Seattle I would be at 120k usd. So 50k usd difference

Thanks for the input. Seems like things have gotten a bit better. A few years ago someone I knew said they got around 90k cad for a 115k usd role. Still a huge drop! :(

Is it gross or net? How much difference in savings after taxes and expenses do you see?

Gross. I think in the US (specifically Seattle), you can save more as you are taxed less, and cost of living is more or less the same, so 2k cad rent in downtown vancouver, 2k usd in Seattle, but you are taxed at 35/40% in Vancouver vs 24% I think in Seattle.

Also made a decision to leave the US (San Francisco) and miss it immensely. There's nothing comparable to bring surrounded by genuine techies, and the go big or go home attitude is inspirational.

Yes, the politics is in shambles and society is arguably falling apart, but at some point you need to decide what your impact on the world is going to be. If you believe you can fix tech in Europe, I applaud you, and that would be a worthy cause. I've learned that I function best in the fast lane, and that's in the tech hubs. Innovation requires lots of people bouncing lots of ideas off each other, and I don't think remote work is going to significantly compete with where the next innovation wave will come from.

I think you’re being too hard on Europe. There are tons of smart people on the Continent working on unique and interesting startup ideas. The only thing Europeans may lack is access to funding and resources.

I think that's exactly it. There are smart people everywhere who want to work on interesting ideas. But they will naturally congregate where the opportunity and resources exist and the bureaucracy doesn't.

Fixing Europe isn't about finding smart people to work on things. It's about preventing them from leaving. Ironically Covid might be helping that for a couple years.

>The only thing Europeans may lack is access to funding and resources

I've met a lot of European founders... in the Bay Area. The stories they told me were eye opening.

There's so much regulation and red tape that one company's 5th employee had to be filling government grants and filing for tax exemptions full time.

> If you mention health insurance for the taxes, that's actually taxed to employers in BC, not employees, so it's not part of the taxes I pay.

There may be a tax on employers specifically labelled as some kind of health tax, but your health insurance coverage is being paid for out of general provincial government revenues and some (actually: a lot) of your taxes are absolutely going towards paying for health care.

Fees like the one you're talking about are just a way to shift some of the tax burden off of individuals.

Editing to add some specifics:

- when implemented it was estimated the health tax would replace the $2.6bn from fees previously collected with $1.9bn of tax revenue: https://tricitieschamber.com/backgrounder-employer-health-ta...

- BC health care spending $21.5bn in 2020/2021: https://vancouversun.com/news/politics/b-c-budget-2019-healt...

Thanks for the info. So you are saying that bc income tax is also going to fund healthcare?

BC income tax as well as federal income tax[1] by way of transfer payments from the federal government to the provinces specifically designated as being for health spending (the carrot&stick the federal government uses to regulate health care across the country).

Specific fees or levies for health care in canada are a drop in the health spending bucket.

([1] federal spending and taxing is more complicated than this and they are not coupled in the same way provincial spending and taxing are but that's not super relevant here)

> If you mention health insurance for the taxes, that's actually taxed to employers in BC, not employees, so it's not part of the taxes I pay.

You actually should take this into account as this is in fact a part of the expenses for the employer to employ you.

Different countries play it differently.

For example some countries in EU have health and pension insurance excluded from the salary such that employee only sees the income tax deduced from the salary.

In another countries employee sees half of the insurance and the other half is considered as "employer contribution".

How ever you split it, it is still expense.

This becomes self evident when you happen to be self employed.

Yes, both employer and employee taxes affect the tax wedge [0] and you should factor both in when calculating how much you are taxed as your employer 100% is factoring in the employer tax when calculating how much to pay you.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_wedge

Only now you're competing against everyone in the world, not just everyone in your region. I can't see how this is good for the developed world.

It's good for developers from developing world who are just as educated and just as experienced as their western counterparts. Global wage equilibrium is outright horrible for western developers

Global wage equilibrium would be horrible for western labor.

... for a while, but then theoretically there would be a massive amount of economic growth.

Of course that only works if people all do the free trade thing. US/China broke down because the US was globalist and China was nationalist and protectionist.

That's not clear from a historic point of view. In general the more participatory the economy, the faster quality of life improves overall.

While wages may drop for the west, that should be more than offset by the rate at which goods and services become cheaper and more plentiful. Protectionists often look at only one side of the equation.

Except the US already has basically free movement of goods and services.

So people are already reaping the benefits of cheaper and plentiful goods and services.

The last 2 years have begun to show the massive benefits of this. The US tariffs have led to a situation where today the US has the largest net trade deficit since 2006 and is paying subsidies of over $40bn simply to keep farming afloat in the Midwest. And there has been no gain in jobs within the US or any benefit whatsoever to those tariffs. The US consumer is only paying a lot more for products they were paying a lot less for a couple of years earlier making everyone here functionally poorer.

I generally agree that free trade is the way to go and we are reaping the benefits.

In the context of free-trade however: How would you handle the intellectual property issue, can you still have free trade with a state that does not treat IP in the same way?

Would be? Look at the manufacturing sector in the US since outsourcing started. It's an absolute shadow of its former self in terms of people employed and salaries.

I mean it's not wonderful, but timezones and native English skills are a pretty good moat.

Developer jobs need strong English, not native English. And with remote work becoming more of a thing they'd need strong written English, which is an easier threshold for lots of foreigners to clear.

I think devs (not just devs, everyone) should save aggressively for rainier days. If it's not offshoring it could be automation or just plain ol economic downturn that could kill scores of jobs in the coming decades.

I think it is not as simple as that.

Many companies have tried to move their development to India for example (I have a second hand anecdotal evidence from one) and it is not as simple as it seems.

There are huge cultural differences, meaning what is considered not acceptable in the west is common practice somewhere else like getting degree for bribes etc. You have to know how to navigate in such environment.

You may think that because your company employs people from multiple cultural backgrounds then the environment of the company is multicultural.

In reality the culture of the company is most likely following the protestant work ethics (it is my generalization, there are of course variations and exceptions).

Well, even in Canada / UK / Australia / Germany software developer salaries are about 50% less than in America. There's nothing in terms of workforce education or productivity dictating companies should pay the American 2x more. Offshoring is difficult for small companies to do (taxes, accountants etc) but any unicorn startup has the means to do it.

Probably has more to do with the cost of doing business in these countries. High taxation / regulation has a real cost.

I think there was no real need to cut on costs for a lot of companies. If every startup can raise 100-200 million easily because of these very low interest rates, why would they care about trying to save 10 million dollars a year in wages? Money is not a problem for them. Who needed the headache of working remote, offshoring etc? But now that some of them were forced to go remote and they saw productivity wasn't hurt, arguably maybe even improved (up for debate of course), they might rethink the whole issue.

The companies found in Silicon Valley have given me problems to solve that nobody I knew in Seattle had faced. Maybe someday experience will be evenly distributed, but the industry has been concentrating it here for a long time.

The company you work for is competing against companies from other parts of the world already. Except China I guess, because geopolitics. But certainly European, Indian, African ones.

It always reminds me of that line from Snow Crash, which is set in a future when "the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity".

There will be just as many jobs for just as many people. There aren't many places where software engineers are unemployed.

What's interesting is that there are places where people are paid much less because there's so little demand for labor there- if you're the only employer of software developers in 100 miles, you can pay a pittance. And at the same time, places like Silicon Valley pay a premium for labor because there's a shortage (let's not discuss the reasons around that- I don't feel the need to drink).

When the market is merged, it will be leveled. And I cannot imagine those who stay in San Francisco are going to benefit. But the brilliant developer who has been paid terribly at a small software firm in the middle of no where, who can't leave for other reasons, that developer is going to see their fortune changed for the better.

Doesn't that mean that developers will be forced out of living in desirable areas with higher costs of living?

Yes but that's part of the equilibrium I suppose.

Places where current wages are low are going to see wage increases (because of higher demand / lower supply), which in turn will lead to an increase in costs of living.

Places where current wages are very high are going to see downward pressure on wages (because of lower demand / higher supply), which in turn will eventually lead to a lowering of costs of living.

Obviously that's valid in the "fullness of time". How long it can actually take for this new equilibrium to be fully realized is anyone's guess.

> Places where current wages are low are going to see wage increases (because of higher demand / lower supply), which in turn will lead to an increase in costs of living.

I'm not sure that there's so many SW people outside of the big tech hub areas so as to make such a difference. If they are more uniformly distributed across the country, their impact on each community will likely be negligible.

Some but not all. There is still an advantage to locality (near VCs, technology events, ease of meetups, local talent pool).

Companies were definitely overestimating the need/benefit for this locality but that doesn't mean it is now zero.

I seriously don’t understand the argument that a remote first world would lead to a move from larger US cities to smaller US cities.

If there is any mass movement that is gonna happen, why would it be from big expensive US city with a lot of different entertainment options to a smaller, still fairly expensive US city with almost no entertainment options as opposed to significantly cheaper non US large city with a lot of entertainment options?

Why wouldn’t people move to someplace in Mexico, or Brazil instead? If time zones are not an issue, why not move to somewhere in Asia instead, like Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, etc.

Because there's more to life than work and entertainment. There's language barriers, culinary familiarity, family ties, cultural familiarity, quality of schooling, levels of crime, etc. etc.

Its good if you live in a country that has relatively poor pay.

I think we'll end up with several different markets for a give type of job.

1. One market in each city that has companies in it that require that the job be done in the office.

2. One huge market for doing the job remotely.

The WFH trend seems to be working out exactly as expected. What’s going to happen is wages in places like India and The Philippines will go up, wages in countries like the US, Canada, European nations... will go down.

The real lesson here is if an economic theory has to overcome the forces of supply and demand to work, then it’s not going to work.

The poor remote engineer team in an African country will definitely appreciate better income, however the Canadian one most likely not, while working remotely to the same company.

There's also a skill gap here.

Most US employees at FAANG could easily relocate to Canada, if they wanted to, but the opposite is far from true!

Full remote will also increase supply for each company.

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