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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

Just a note: STEM money in Canada is significantly less than STEM money in the US, especially factoring in exchange rates.

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Yeah. Here in Vancouver you need 250k+ yearly household income to afford a very average detached single-family house (3 bed, 1 floor) anywhere in the metro area. A typical senior engineer salary here, for a local company, is $200k/year on the high end. AWS/MS might pay a bit more but not significantly.

The larger houses in "nice" neighborhoods are going for 4/5 million, so they're not getting purchased by anyone in the working class, by which I mean anyone who relies on regular employment income to live.

Vancouver's 90 percentile before tax income is 99k age 25-34 and 142k for age 35-44.

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/dv...

It's lower, yes, but in Toronto and Vancouver it has definitely improved in the last decade.

Amazon opened big offices in both cities (bias: I was one of the early Amazon people in Toronto) and quickly grew by outbidding other employers on good developers. Then other companies opened offices to do the same to Amazon. Now there's a pretty big dev economy.

Top end is not the same as average. Not everyone can work at FAANG and no one else in the sector pays like FAANG. What's healthy is a top end that can afford 90% of housing and a median that can afford 50%. Instead we have a top end that can afford 50% and a median that can barely afford 10%. That's what's out of whack.

It's still substantially lower. I know some talented devs who got offers from Amazon within the past couple years, and Amazon's internal HR rules placed a strict comp ceiling on their offer that could be doubled if they'd agree to work from Seattle rather than Vancouver. Same developer, same role, and a very short distance to move. So they moved.

And yet... the Vancouver and Toronto offices are still pretty big- thousands of devs. And not just for visa reasons.

Canadians want to be in Canada. That's why I moved back from Seattle, knowing it would affect my comp badly.

Taxes are a pretty big difference too. Even though the California top federal + state isn't that far off of Ontario the income bands are much wider. At 300k USD(410 CAD) you'll have about an extra 21k USD take home in California. Then sales taxes are 13% in Ontario vs 7-10% in Cali(local taxes).

For the Californian, you also need to factor in the $10-15k in health insurance costs. That cuts pretty deeply into the $21k surplus.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184955/us-national-healt...

The company pays 100% of my premiums and I’ve had the same thing at other places.

Right. I think a lot of foreigners are completely oblivious to how little people with good jobs have to pay for insurance premiums and max out of pockets. Everyone seems to think it’s nothing but $100K bills for having a paper cut.

Some people with good jobs have that. The huge majority of Americans don’t, and average out of pocket healthcare costs are around $1600 yearly per person.

Before I moved to Canada I never had a company that covered all my deductibles and only one that covered my entire premium. That kind of benefit is extremely rare. It is truly a privilege of the rich to not have to think about the cost of health care in America.

Meanwhile in Canada I can go to any doctor in the province and know that I will never see a bill, and never be told that my insurance won’t cover the cost, and never have to argue on the phone about whether a procedure ordered by a doctor was necessary. It doesn’t matter if I am employed by Facebook, unemployed, or taking a few months of paternity leave.

Foreigners don’t think that everybody goes bankrupt for a few stitches. They think it’s a travesty that anybody is in that position.

That is very rare, you should consider yourself lucky. I work for a 100,000+ person software company and my [health + dental + HSA] is over $10k to cover my family of 4.

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