One of them explained it to me this way: the quality of employers, coworkers, and the overall software engineering work you'll do in Canada just doesn't compare to the US. Even if pay/finances were exactly the same, going to the US would still be the better career choice, because that's what everyone with talent and ambition does. The people who stay behind aren't people you want to work with, if you can help it.
From my experience, the only place the last statement hasn't been true is Montreal.
There are a lot of engineers over there that could move but won't ever. That's partly why everyone is setting AI shops over there.
This sounds like a generalization in need of evidence. Ultimately, the co-op program at UoW has a long history that includes ranking/matching data for co-op employers and students. It would be interesting to see the trends over time. My intuition is that the top ranked students accept jobs from their co-op employers after graduation but that may have changed.
I recently had a referral to a specialist for a non-emergency exam that was scheduled out two months. When I've had an emergency I've gone to the hospital and been seen within a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on the issue.
I would say I am fairly satisfied with the access I get, and I'm especially happy that I never have to worry about being denied coverage, or ending up "out of network", or having different levels of coverage depending on my employment.
The point is, the system works. I never have to really worry about healthcare or its costs.
The argument here is about whether socialized medicine is better than the horror show that passes for medical care in the US. I contend some small delays on non-life-threatening procedures is worth never having to worry about having to pay for it or risking bankruptcy.
I and three other CS/Eng seniors were going through full time job interviews on campus in Canada. We interviewed with the big Canadian software firm at the time and with a large US software company.
Three of us got offers from the Canadian company, four of us got offers from the US company. All of us ended up going to the USA.
Edit: I found the answer in the attached document [1]. About half the class immigrated to Canada. The stats for non-immigrant Canadian might be more interesting.
1) International vs Domestic students (6.2% vs 93.8%)
2) Did you immigrate to Canada? (47.56% yes)
You used the answer for 2).
I think the answer for 1) answers your question better than the answer for 2), which doesn't answer when/why they immigrated to Canada.
Plus you're looking at the profile for the 2020 Software Engineering class. Computer science is a different program in the Math faculty. The two programs may have different international student composition.
Tuition is one of the reasons there are so few international students. International students in UWaterloo SWEng pay almost 4x as much as domestic students (C$61.3K vs C$17.1K) - see https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition.
International CS students pay C$45.5K vs C$9.3K for domestic CS students.
As a result, I think "non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job" is a smaller set of people than you'd think, simply because they're held back by the (Byzantine) immigration system in the US.
Another related factor is that if you go to an American university for undergraduate CS rather than a Canadian one, you get the opportunity to use OPT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training), which gives you up to 36 months to roll for an H-1B visa. Add onto that the fact that there are so many good American CS universities to choose compared to Canadian ones, I'd expect most international students to study in the US versus at Waterloo if their goal was to work in California.
I mean just looking at the aerospace sector and the CSeries saga, Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.
Canadian politicians even pitched Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. I mean I'm all for it, my comp being stock-based I'm pocketing the difference.
Is that something the Canadian public... approves of?
[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
If you try to recommend people pay more to get better engineers and stop them all going to the US so they can build bigger and stronger companies here you just get dead eyes back - they can't comprehend why you'd give an engineer money.
At some point you need to look after yourself and go elsewhere.
Basically if typical engineers have business people anywhere in their management chain it is not an engineering first company. Not a lot of large companies are like that outside USA.
If the government fight hard, then lose, the opposing party will blame them for that and most likely make them win the next election. If they just do a marketing campaign telling they did the best possible, winning the next election is more probable.
And Trudeau has nothing to do with that, conservative or liberal, it will be the same strategy.
In order to make Canada more competitive, I think it should be addressed on the provincial level. We definitely need more startup to change the culture and have a place to keep the best talents. High risk funds, change in laws (so anybody can freely invest), etc.
Care to elaborate?
Train is a different market. Rail projects are a political nightmare, as every buyer is a government (municipal, state, national) and wants their rail equipment to be manufactured in their jurisdiction. So they can make a big announcement that the X millions they just paid is actually creating good jobs. Then a few years later the job dries up for a designated site (project completed) so the local government keeps bailing it out else they'll get voted out for getting rid of all these jobs!
Plus, of course, every project is custom hardware. And is long enough that it will span at least two municipal, state or national administrations so expect a feature creep/change of requirements in the middle.
How do you compete against the VC-powered economic system in the US? VCs allow startups with often pie-in-the-sky visions and shaky business models to recruit the best of the best from across the world. The recruits know that they may be looking for a new job in a couple of years if the cash dries up. For them, it's OK because there will be another startup flush with cash. For the VCs, as long as 1 out of 10 of those bets go public, the ROI still works out.
This is simply not something that exists at a comparable level outside of the US, outside Silicon Valley even.