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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

Trust me bud, Canada is not a place you want to come to right now unless you want to spend $500 per month to sleep in a hallway. Housing prices and inflation here is out of control. I know people that are going back to India because it’s so bad here and not what they were sold when they were convinced to come here for “opportunity”.

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Shit, let me check out a place for $500/mo please? All jokes aside, ‘da west’ as a land of opportunity, pioneering spirit, freedom, milk, honey… is gone. There are too many people now for it to work effectively. An increasing amount of people are fighting for the same resources that aren’t becoming more abundant. ‘Constant growth’ is not the reality now.

This reminds me of the famous quote from Yogi Berra: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Now seriously, there is indeed such thing as being a victim of one's own success.

I like it :) By ‘nobody’ he must mean ‘the in-crowd’, those that ‘know’.

For sure. It’s like anything really. The smaller and more niche it is, the better. More people means more competition, more idiots. This is why I’m happy that emacs is this tiny community. The quality of the average emacs user is super high, everyone is polite, acts in good faith and can initiate newcomers to do the same and continue the spirit. A huge influx breaks this little ‘yolk’ and then it’s just a mess.

TLDR: Canada (Toronto in this ex) has much lower salaries, higher taxes, worse weather, but lower one bdrm rents.

According to goog, Boston is comparable to Toronto so...

Soft dev average salary in: . Toronto: 60k USD (77 CAD) [0] . Boston: 106 USD [1]

[0] https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/toronto-software-developer... [1] https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/boston-software-engineer-s...

Post tax income: . Toronto: 42.5k USD (54.7k CAD) [0.1] . Mass: 70.4k [1.1]

[0.1] https://ca.talent.com/tax-calculator/Ontario-77000 [1.1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/massachusetts-tax-calculator#er...

Median rent for studio: . Toronto: 2k CAD/month [2] . Boston: 2.5k USD/month [3]

[2] https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/toronto-on [3] https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/boston-ma

Wouldn't they just ... spend more than $500 per month ... to not sleep in a hallway? OP was interviewing for Meta, they should be able to afford rather more than $500 per month.

Meta salaries are not really competitive, frankly. In Canada at least. A small 350 sqft 1 bedroom in Toronto is very expensive given the salary of junior positions.

Yeah, okay, but 500 bucks a month?

Housing supply is incredibly low and fiercely competitive, some people I've personally spoken to literally had no other choice but to "rent a hallway".

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