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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

Are they going to pay enough for their developers to actually live near this Bay St office? Canadian developer salaries are abysmally low.

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When I worked for a big US company it was very clear- you open an office in Canada because it’s cheaper. So, probably not.

>you open an office in Canada because it’s cheaper.

Or, to hire international tech workers who you can't bring to your US office for visa reasons.

Yes, this is right. Big Tech is mostly focused on Canada and EU because they can hire people from (chiefly) China and India without H1-Bs.

According to a director I spoke with it’s because they can’t find enough qualified engineers, not to save money.

Seems we should just be opening more offices in Hyderabad, I don’t know why that isn’t done more. Political security maybe?

Canada timezones are more desirable

Because it’s even harder to hire good tech workers in india now? Europe and Canada have far more talent at far cheaper price right now.

>Europe and Canada have far more talent at far cheaper price right now.

Depends, it's not just about the employees salaries. Some EU countries have pretty high taxes and high worker's rights so big tech actively avoids them.

So in the grand scheme, Indian offices might yeld better return on their investment.

Not sure if you know what the ground realities in India are. Absolute unadjusted tech salaries are higher than in Canada or EU. And retention is really hard. EU workers have more rights so to speak but not clear to me how either of us can tell that’s still a dealbreaker.

I know and I wasn't contradicting you. I was saying that despite EU salaries being lower than Indian ones for the FAANGS, they might still prefer to expand in India and not the EU due to the EU's higher taxes, higher privacy and higher workers' rights.

High (income) taxes isn't an issue for "big tech", even with the taxes the compensations they offer in the US are a multiple of what the average software engineer earns. Worker's rights is people telling on themselves, I don't think 40 hours / week and ~25 days off a year is unreasonable. No vacation or long hours just means people will do less at work.

Anyway I know of plenty of people who landed remote jobs at US companies, or US-based companies opening offices within Europe. I mean most US companies operate through Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg anyway because of tax evasion.

>High (income) taxes isn't an issue for "big tech"

Except high taxes its an issue though but for the company's taxes, not the employees' taxes. You even said it yourself later ["I mean most US companies operate through Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg anyway because of tax evasion"] it just so happens that the countries with low corporate taxes also have low income taxes and countries with high corporate taxes usually also have high income taxes.

There's a reason why all big tech in EU is parked in those countries with low taxes and simple laws like Luxembourg, Ireland, Netherlands and not in countries with high taxes and complex laws like France, Belgium, Austria, etc.

And no, most big tech don't really hire EU-wide remotely outside of their HQ country and a few select other countries since we have no standardized EU wide corporate and workers' laws so a lot of EU countries get left out due to their stricter laws.

Google is currently building its largest non-US office in Hyderabad.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/go...

Of course, if you offer more money, you’ll get a larger pool of candidates.

I agree that there is scarcity on the market, but unless a company is really paying top salaries for their devs, they really cannot say that it’s not money.

I made about 650k last year and I'm not even staff-level. I don't think paying 750k is going to attract anyone new.

At that point, you would think there would be some introspection with respect to the hiring process and the possibility of an alarming number of false negatives occurring due to absurd leetcode gauntlets. But, naaah...

I completely agree

It might attract me. I work in a non tech role because, at the time I thought that tech paid less than my chosen industry.

If I had known that I could make $750k in tech then the gap is small enough that the improved work life balance and lower stress might have tipped me to tech.

What kind of career are you currently in?

Guessing medicine

Guessing finance.

People in finance make a lot money and fantasize about having another job. People in medicine make a lot of money and play golf.

>I made about 650k last year and I'm not even staff-level

Holy cow, how is that possible?! In my European country staff level goes up to 85K. That's insane.

Part of it is luck in how my RSUs got priced in and stock appreciation. I won't make anywhere near that this year because of how poor the market has done. It'll still be over 400k though.

Have a look at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...

Theres a natural cap of talent in a lot of cities, the more you offer only takes from another company instead of bringing more people into the pool. The time to get trained and enter the market isnt instant.

The Canadian government does all sorts of background checks on the workers, many of which be illegal for Google to do directly

I thought that was standard all over the world but then I worked in finance in Europe, American banks pay literally twice as much as European banks in Europe.

Yea I’m surprised how little Microsoft pays in Vancouver according to levels.fyi.

If an American company paid 80% of American salary to Canadians they would have their pick of Canada’s top talent. This slowly appears to be happening with Meta jobs in Canada.

Canada has the same time zones, a similar culture, is geographically close, the same language, and excellent computer science/engineering programs.

What Canada doesn’t have is a strong venture capital pool, a culture of risk taking, or a domestic market of 330 million people which stifles new businesses.

> What Canada doesn’t have is a strong venture capital pool, a culture of risk taking

I tried to raise a ~$300k seed round in Toronto in 2014. Most Canadian investors we met with wanted to see us have something like $10k/month in recurring revenue before considering an investment. We spent a week in SF and left with a $250k offer at a $4M valuation, when we were pre-revenue!

(We declined, and eventually our business failed (acquhired by a team in SF, though....). But still. Wow! What a difference!)

I haven’t seen any other country that tries new things and willing to spent than the US. That includes Europe and Asia. It’s quite disappointing really because the world is so much bigger than the US alone.

>I haven’t seen any other country that tries new things and willing to spent than the US

The US owns the money printer to the world trade currency (USD), and has the military force to defend this unique position, so of course it can afford to outspend everyone else.

That may be relevant to the US government, but the investors that would invest in startups don't have access to that printer.

VC firms, investment banks, etc. are all suckling from the same FED teat, and all this cash trickles down into the US tech sector/start-up scene.

Not really. VC are investing institutional money. Institutions in the US are willing to invest in "private-equity venture capital". Hell, even CALPERS does.

It has nothing to do with the federal reserve and everything to do with risk tolerence.

I wish the legions who, in online discussions of the US dollar (or almost anything US foreign policy/military-related), always bring up how the US dollar/economy's strength is based on the "petrodollar" (you didn't say it, but that's what you were thinking of), how the US goes to war to preserve the dollar's role as a reserve currency, how Russia/China/Saudi Arabia can cause the dollar to crash by using another currency, etc., would actually think about what they're arguing about.

No, kids, if Saudi Arabia suddenly started selling all its oil in Euros or Yen on renminbi, the US would not send the Sixth Fleet off its shore, any more than it did so to force KSA to use the US dollar to price its wares in the first place. Saudis (and Russians, and Chinese, and everyone else) use the US dollar because they find that a) using it is more convenient than another hard currency like the Swiss franc or British pound, and b) no one else wants riyals, rubles, or renminbi.

This is not necessarily some petro-dollar argument. Individuals in other countries and their central banks want to save or hold USD in reserve for a variety of reasons (local currency inflation, exchange rates, etc). They buy dollar denominated bonds. This essentially allows the US massive access to credit which can fund these sorts of ventures.

I can make the same argument without mentioning the military - we benefit from a virtuous cycle of having the most dynamic economy which allows us access to credit to improve it, making it even more dynamic, and we simply pay it back as a lesser share of % GDP later.

No kidding

The Canadian risk/reward curve is weird. They won't look at anything barely promising but will go "all in" once it hits a bit of traction (even if the business model is wonky)

So after all they were right and didn't lose ~$300k?

I dunno about that. Most of the team was "very Canadian" and didn't want to move to California - the main reason we rejected the SF deal (I was the only one who accepted in full the acquihire, the team did not move in the end). $300k, staying in Canada, would have gone a long way to providing a stronger team cohesion at the time. Maybe we would have succeeded.

Also, we were near completing a $10k/month enterprise deal but didn't have the runway to finish those sales in time. Additionally, we had Government of Canada contracts at $3k/month in the pipeline, which we did eventually complete. Our software was running on millions of phones, we had enterprise pipeline deals, signed government contracts (hard to come by I hear!) and a darn good team.

Hard to say how it would have played out, but, what's clear to me is that it wasn't clear that the $300k would have been lost.

Thanks for the context! It actually seems like something worth taking the risk, too bad it didn't played out better

>What Canada doesn’t have is a strong venture capital pool, a culture of risk taking, or a domestic market of 330 million people which stifles new businesses.

Replace Canada with EU and it's the same.

I was going to say UK!

I doubt it, London tech wages, especially in the City, beat everything else in the EU.

And are still lower than most places in the US.

Sure, but let's compare apples to apples (UK to EU) as US is unique in being the world leading economy.

I dont have enough karma to reply to my sibling comment:

> Sure, but let's compare apples to apples (UK to EU) as US is unique in being the world leading economy.

EU has a higher GDP than the US and is therefore the world leading economy.

The EU is not a single united market like the US is.

Sure, you can bunch the countries together and get high GDP number but that's not an Apples to apples comparison with the US as every EU country has it's own completely different languages, economy, political and economic agenda, culture, market, legal and tax system, and local issues plus high levels off autonomy from the EU.

The EU is not the United States of Europe therefore cannot compete with the US toe to toe as it's not 300 million people speaking the same language and having the same culture and laws, but 300 million people spread across 27 countries, speaking 24 official languages, with little overlap in laws and culture from end to end, that's why there are no successful software giants that came out of Europe and there's no EU military.

> The EU is not a single united market like the US is

The US is not a single united market. Each state has it's own economy, political and economic agenda, culture, market, legal and taxes, and local issues.

> that's why there are no successful software giants that came out of Europe.

this is just false. There are plenty of succesful european software giants , and there are numerous "unicorns" too; Spotify being the textbook example. There's an absolutely booming video games industry, Fintech and crypto (not my thing but can't argue there's no money in it) have very very solid bases across the EU too.

There's no single reason as to why the US has a stronger software market than the EU, but I would put money on it being "it's where the money already is".

What I took form your reply is that you don't understand the difference between how the US and EU differ economically, culturally and politically and what impact that has on the EU vs US tech sectors, nor are you willing to listen to arguments, yet you insist there's no difference between the US and the EU.

Therefore to end the argument here and save my sanity, I'll stop replying to you. Have a good day sir.

> The EU is not a single united market like the US is.

You made the comparison between US and EU, so it's in play. QED.

I compared them to show they're not in the same ballpark. But whatever, you pick what you want to hear.

?? No it's not. The US's GDP is higher than the EU's and per-capita massively so.

EU ~16t, US ~15t

In my experience London tech wages are not specially high unless they are linked to finance. IMHO Switzerland salaries are the highest in EU (although cost of living there is very high).

You still have the timezone issue, which is a problem

The timezone issue is as much of a problem as you make it. The difference between the east coast and the UK is 5 hours - the difference between East and West coast is 3 hours. Both of those are very roughly in the ballpark of "half a workday overlapping".

That’s a big problem for a 9-5 culture company in the USA.

By that logic they can't even work from east to west coast then.

I am not sure how your clock works but 9-5 work hours will have 5 hours common between the East and the West coast.

It's only a problem if the US and EU sides need to work closely together; most tech companies will have multiple products that can be built independently. IIRC Google Docs is mainly built and maintained in Germany.

> Canada has […] the same language

Just don't open an office in the province of Quebec:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/protest-montreal-bil...

* https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/breaking-down-th...

> If an American company paid 80% of American salary to Canadians they would have their pick of Canada’s top talent.

I thought top talent Canadians who want high salaries just moved to the US :)

(Of course, this could be because such high salaries aren't offered in Canada.)

A 1 bedroom in the area only costs around $2100 these days, taking that rent as 30% of your income, that would only require a salary of like $84,000 a year. That's probably on the low end of pay in Toronto for SWE these days, I can't imagine someone working at Microsoft downtown and not being able to afford a nice place.

Most of the office is for sales & support

Cost of living != cost of labor

Not many Toronto datapoints on levels.fyi for Microsoft, but it looks like their median Canadian comp is $146k cad for data points in the last year. Which is probably enough to afford living in Toronto. The higher end (90th percentile) is $262k cad, which is definitely enough. However, that is lower than you’d probably get in Redmond, though I’m not sure by how much exactly.

That p90 number (equivalent to 204k USD) looks like some typical SDE2 TCs in Redmond:

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Microsoft/salaries/Software-E...

Or less than a junior L3 in the bay area at google.

And what does that salary get you in the bay area? Living in a tiny apartment with a homeless guy outside. No thanks.

Toronto and Vancouver has basically the equivalent priced real estate as the Bay Area.

If there's a large earthquake, what would happen to SF?

- old buildings that do not comply with seismic code because codes don't apply retroactively

- new buildings built on the liquefaction zone

- Millenium tower already has defects even without earthquakes

- some buildings are already sinking

Everything is going to get rekt. SF is a huge house of cards about to collapse.

But they will probably have it better than the guys at Hayward, CA... a town built on top of the Hayward fault line. Why would you do that?

That's not to mention the worsening crime rates, even at the more suburban places. Oh, and the traffic, having nowhere to park your car, having to spend 1 hour in traffic to move 1 mile at peak hours, and seeing the city collapse each time a major conference takes place. And public transport is full of hallucination-haunted junkies that get randomly triggered.

Sounds like exactly the right place to live, form a family and spend all my money. Or maybe not.

It lets you afford a million+ dollar house after a few years?

Yeah sure. And then you will get mugged on your own driveway* because crime rates do not care about how expensive your home is.

*: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/asian-man-robb...

[redacted]

(Sorry, I don’t want to grumble.)

That sounds about right.

If you look at the net immigration flow between Canada and the US, the trend is pretty clear.

US immigrants of Canadian origin (2019): 11,900 [1]

Canadian immigrants of US origin (2019): 10,800 [2]

Of course, with 8.7x the population of Canada, you'd expect the net neutral number to 1:8.7 (Canada to US), but it's actually 1:1. So ~9x more Canadians per capita immigrate to the US than reverse.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/us-immigr... [2] https://www.cicnews.com/2020/02/a-quarter-of-canadas-immigra...

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