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Comment by abigail95 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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