You pretty much described Vancouver, BC. One of the lowest average salary in North America, expensive housing, and normalized exploitation of labor. Fake positivity is just the cultural fact of life here and I think it hurts productivity.

We all know that because housing is so scarce, having a job or not can mean you have a roof over your heads or not. It's really disgusting the way they treat workers here. So of course there is going to be a Stockholm syndrome effect here.

Won't pay the market price but want the best. From what I've heard from insiders, they all do "surveys" with each other to fix wages since the 2000 dot come bubble collapse. The Vancouver Model is essentially: underpay your workers, demand the best and increase margins.

Then they wonder why we can't be like Silicon Valley. Most startups here get acquired by pre-primary market and very few ever IPO thus rendering stock options worthless.

It's no wonder that there is a massive brain drain going on and that startups here consist mostly of immigrant workers. I'm sure in some scale the exact same thing is taking place in SV but at least Indian engineers are making far more than what they would here in the Florida of Canada.