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Comment by Ralo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Canadian that's been trying to get into this field. There is no "talent" issue. Any job that pops up is flooded with applicants.

It's night and day compared to America. All the companies are in America, while we find only a handful of start ups or some branch's of corporations in Canada.

Give a read to the /r/cscareerquestionscad subreddit

There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".

Articles like this make me want to quit everything. I try so hard to get into these field then the government claims no one can fill these roles and we need to import more people instead.

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The "digital nomad visa" is for foreign workers working for foreign companies to work while residing in Canada for up to 6 months (there are tax and residency implications if you stay longer than 6 months).

This is not directly competing with Canadian citizens looking to work for Canadian companies.

The directly part is because while in Canada, it is possible that a digital nomad may apply for and get a job for a Canadian company in which case the visa can get changed and they can stay longer.

But the digital nomad 6 month part isn't competing... directly.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne... (different page than the article)

    Promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads

    A digital nomad is a person who can perform their job remotely from anywhere in the world.

    Under current Canadian immigration rules, a digital nomad only needs visitor status to relocate to Canada for up to six months at a time while they perform their job remotely for a foreign employer.

    In the months ahead, IRCC will collaborate with public and private partners alike to determine whether additional policies to attract digital nomads to Canada would be desirable.

    We expect that some digital nomads who initially enter Canada to work remotely will decide to seek opportunities with Canadian employers. When they receive a job offer from a Canadian company, they would be able to bring their skills to a Canadian employer by applying for a temporary work permit or even permanent residence.

> There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".

That's bullshit, or you're looking at the tail end. Or these people are applying for jobs that require experience without any. What's their interview success rate? What's their target salary? They can't land any job? Ridiculous.

If there really was an overload of talent in Canada, it would be pumping out unicorns - it's not.

If there's 1M canadians in tech I would expect tens of thousands of those stories to be true.

The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done. The two most famous tech companies were founded by people without college degrees, just access to the American talent market. You can look good on paper, complain to the world about it, or actually get shit done.

It might not be CS talent that Canada lacks.

Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Canada has high taxes and a difficult bureaucracy. If Canada's government is business-unfriendly and their closest neighbor and competitor is the USA, then Canada might face a lack of people with talent for business. As in, the sort of person who would pump out unicorns would rather move to the US.

Then they would have lots of talented CS people, but nobody to hire them.

Yeah that comments is bullshit. It’s very easy to establish a business in Canada. The bureaucracy is efficient by comparison to most developed countries including the US. The tax authority is not scary like the IRS and the rules are reasonable and easier to understand. The provinces have considerable control over economic policies and taxation, generating competition between regions.

I’ve run tech companies in Canada for over 20 years. It’s a perfectly fine place to do business.

With the U.S. tax changes preventing early stage startups from deducting their employees' salaries from revenue outright, I wonder if we'll start seeing more Canadian-based innovation.

I think historically the thing preventing startups here from taking off was lack of access to capital

I’m guessing that change will be eliminated by congress. It’s sort of an unthinkable disaster that will find a compassionate ear on both sides of the House.

It seemed very intentional. Along with the recent monetary policies I would be surprised if this wasn't another hammer they're intentionally swinging to cause recession

Why do you trust a random person in the internet spreading bs?

It's very easy to set up a company in Canada. Taxes are an issue, but not that much more than CA or NY.

The issue is that you'll get offers of 75k from angels and 500k from VCs. You go to SF, and before your pitch is done, you have a seed of 1M signed and ready to go.

There's no unicorns because there's no VC. Everyone here is busy using their capital to trade houses with each other. For the few investors that do exist, you're expected to show multiple months of profit just to get tiny seed rounds.

> The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done.

Eh, no. If you ship a bunch of CS majors off to a cattle farm, they aren't going to get hired to do websites for the cows.

You need demand for the talent or the talent is not economically useful.

The is more obvious when you think about other areas that require talent but underpay (or have a talent glut), e.g. music, art, dance. Becoming a musician on average will not result in fantastic pay, yet composing music and playing an instrument both require talent.

> or actually get shit done.

You assume there is shit to get done - new companies take venture capital (either from a VC or a Bank) and a business plan to be profitable. Lacking those, if the companies that are successful are not going gang-busters wild profitable, they likely don't have the capital to expand their operations, and new people seeking to break into the market won't be able to fund themselves to do so.

> If there really was an overload of talent in Canada, it would be pumping out unicorns - it's not.

There's 0 funding. No VCs will back you unless you move to the states. Local angels want 25% of your company for 75k.

Canada has a ton of small devs making a good amount, but no big companies come out of here because there's no money to accelerate growth.

I don't think it's day and night compared to the U.S. I was looking for a job for 7 months already and can't land anything. 10 years of experience as DevOps/SRE, permanent resident.

So tried to find some basic job and it is even worse there. DoorDash is not hiring anymore, all my applications to custodian and similar jobs got rejected. I went to a bunch of restaurants around the town and applied to dishwasher, cook and similar positions, filled their forms and never heard back. I don't know what to do.

Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.

The choice is between jobs going offshore or people coming to work here as most new grads are not job ready. I have interviewed ones who have never done a pull request before.

I've also never written a press release.

I’m guessing PR stands for pull request in this context. But it could also be project review or peer review. We may never know.

I was trying to be funny. PR stands for public relations.

How do you expect a new grad (assuming no internship experience) to have done a PR? I agree the university should've taught version control, though.

I am an Indian graduate who has decent experience with actual programming, even contributed to open source, and yet struggled to get a job in between my peers who have done 300 Leetcode problems and nothing else.

So I assume the hiring meter for most juniors is not "can use version control" or "can architect a 1000 line codebase with decent OOP". It's "can recurgigate 300-500 common Leetcode problems and can cheat in online coding tests". We are all in a bubble.

I don't really care how they get it, just that I do not have to train them in it. An employee who requires tech training is a pain to have around. You need people ready to get to work.

Some companies do focus on Leetcode, that is true. Mine do not, but on the other hand we expect you to fit neatly into the role of developer without needing to be told about Docker, GitHub, testing. Tons of grads have no idea of the difference between a unit test and an integration test.

As someone who hired a bunch of recent grads in Canada, you couldn’t be more wrong in your assessment or in your conclusion, but, this is the internet so :shrugs:

Booming field that outsiders don't understand will continue to attract deadweight useless people.

Of course there's a bunch of people that can't find jobs, a CS degree is not a rigorous endeavour, there's no bar exam, no MCAT. Just a bunch of people who think it's a free lunch surprised they have to compete for it.

That is a lot of it. There has been a proliferation of Masters in Software degrees up here that anyone can sign up for, pay a few grand, and graduate with a degree from in a year.

>Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.

Presumably you exclude Waterloo, Toronto, UBC, and McGill from the list of awful programs. What do you have in mind? Brock? Guelph? UVic? UPEI? MUN? Lethbridge? USask?

> Brock? Guelph? UVic? UPEI? MUN? Lethbridge? USask?

A lot of those are likely mediocre, but probably ok(I have never encountered a grad from those programs admittedly), but many aren't even coming from undergrad CS programs but from the diploma mill colleges like Seneca and Sheridan that hire fake professors or from one year masters in CS programs. Don't get me started on the career colleges, one of which offered me an instructional job in my third year of university.

McGill doesn't have a particularly good CS program. Not even the best in Montreal actually

I'm surprised to hear that. I know that "AI superpower" is a punch line, but isn't Center for Intelligent Machines supposed to be at the heart of it?

Université de Montréal is a bit more involved in MILA and AI in general, hence the "not even the best in Montreal"

99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code

and

most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those...

are incompatible with one another. Which is it, HN? Do you want the Indian guy who can't speak English, doesn't understand you, but can whip up a microservice architecture in a week or the Canuck with whom you can communicate, will learn from you, but does not know anything outside of Java?

> 99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code

There is a minimum level of useful skill that is required to avoid having to spend a bunch of time training them.

Neither the Indian CS person or the new grad are great options. Ideally you want senior devs. But given the choice, I would prefer the Indian CS person as then the communications become more Product's problem than technical mentoring which is mine.

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