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Comment by martin_drapeau | Hacker News Reader

Canadian tech startup entrepreneur here.

Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant. Even after 4 years of grinding and finally achieving product market fit and growth, my wife doesn't understand why I'm doing a startup. Life could be so much easier working for Google.

Heck everyone has a job here. The 2/1,000 missing entrepreneurs don't have an incentive to start. I'm from Ottawa and all my friends work for the federal government with big fat pensions and doing boring work (my perspective mind you). But they have great family lives, lots of vacation and great outside of work experiences. Why the hell would they jump into entrepreneurship? Worst of all, the government workforce is growing faster than that of the private sector!

What worries me most is the future - a country cannot get wealthier nor innovate without entrepreneurs. It is s a real concern indeed.

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What are you talking about? Coziness? Are you one of those people you bought a house in the 2010s and are now well positioned to cash in and live a life of comfort with 500$ mortgages while homes out there are near a million dollar. Because then it would make sense.

Problem with Canada is the cost of living is too high. And there is more money if you move south. Easy. A job in US would easily pay you twice if you are in tech. Why would you want to live in Canada? Oh did I say the taxes. For a millennial,ife is way more harder.

Plenty of affordable homes in Canada at the $500,000 mortgage + down payment range. Go find a smaller city and grow with it because you have the same affordability problem in San Francisco or New York. Your tech salary isn't getting you a house there either. The time to buy a house in Toronto was when they cost $5,000 after the war or was the time to buy in 1975 when the property cost $30,000 or in the 90s when you could have gotten a house for $200,000. In 2012 for $500,000 you could get a house in 2021 it was 1.3 million now it's 1.1 million. In 2015 you could have purchased a home in New Brunswick for $25,000..

Your 1.1 million dollar home you buy today will be worth 5 million in 50 years at least 2 million in 20 years. Still as good of an investment as ever.

It's like bitcoin sure it would have been great buying coins for 5 cents and today and you would be a billionaire but you weren't able to make that bet. If you want to buy at the 5 cent level you need to find another coin because that opportunity passed. You weren't able to buy a home in 2010 or 1947 so you are never getting those prices again. You can buy today but don't expect the same prices on the same properties as if you lived in the past

> Plenty of affordable homes in Canada at the $500,000 mortgage + down payment range.

Canadian humor is weird.

Using the most typical US salary as a guide, it would require the combined salaries of 6.3 people to afford a $500k home. After adding insurance, maintenance, fees, property taxes, etc - I'm thinking more like 8 people (10 in FL).

ref: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-do-you-need-to-ea...

ref: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/common-jo...

Even that $500,000 would be a steal in most markets in canada. The average house price is about 780,000 across the country and $900,000 in Ontario the most populous province.

If houses were just 500,000 and there were jobs in those areas I think we WOULD see more entrepreneurs because that was pretty much the conditions 10 years ago that TFA mentioned

The parent mentioned $500,000 mortgages are the thing of the past.

The $500,000 is usually carried by two. $250,000 mortgage while expensive is still much cheaper than current rental values.

The rent would also be carried by 2.

yeah, but in 1975 the average household income was 50k. Now its 92k. The cost of a house in Toronto (and everywhere in Ontario) went from being 60k (120% of annual average family income) to 1.1m (1200% annual average family income).

"Go somewhere else" - They did that - and Halifax housing prices tripled in 3 years, from 310% annual average family income to 840% annual average family income.

We need to build more houses or have fewer people, but instead we're slowing down on building and importing new people as fast as we can

Halifax is a premier city. Think smaller.

There's always one in every thread.

Someone who says the solution to the housing problem is to move somewhere horrible with no jobs, no culture, no services, horrible schools so that my children can waste their future, never mind if I want to go out and do something one in a while. These places are so awesome that the depression and suicide rates are far higher than in real cities.

Maybe you like living in such places. But the solution to the housing crisis cannot be to give up on having a reasonable life for most people.

You want to live in the top cities but you want mid city prices? Toronto wasn't always top city. It was known as hogtown and when people feared Quebec leaving Canada in the 1970s many in Montreal moved to Toronto. Vancouver wasn't an expensive city until China took over Hong Kong and many moved to Vancouver. Today many smaller cities are popping and posed for growth.

The culture argument is biased. People leaving Montreal for hogtown in the 80s probably felt the same way. But Toronto's cultural aura grew. Saying that the culture of say Miramichi or Yellowknife is horrible and your kids future will be wasted if you don't live in downtown Toronto is a little naive.

Young people are flocking to smaller towns because of affordability. Culture is being made there. Why do you want to live with older folks and try to relive there heyday in places they made big?

For jobs. Stick to remote. The longer these in person positions go vacant the more likely they become remote jobs. Be part of the solution.

> Someone who says the solution to the housing problem is to move somewhere horrible with no jobs

The stated solution was always to move to where the jobs are. Perhaps counterintuitively, the trouble with high housing prices is that even the job providers don't want to live there. In fact, through the mid-to-late 2010s as Vancouver and Toronto became unmanageable, the strongest job market in Canada was in a predominantly rural area with an average home price of $200,000.

The trouble is that people eventually take notice, so it is always a moving target. The average home in that rural region is now $700,000 as people have pushed their way in to bask in the job opportunity. Which, of course, also means the job market is no longer as strong (although remains stronger than a lot of country according to September data – the decline takes time) as job providers have started moving to more prosperous ground again. You can't say "move to <location>, problem solved" because as soon as you do, <location> will necessarily need to change to somewhere else.

A story as old as time, of course. Canada wouldn't exist at all if people weren't always needing to find a new location. That is life, I suppose.

I'm forced to be in the office, which is not in the 'think smaller' cities...

COL is even higher in China relative to their domestic wages. Yet, entrepreneurship is much more dynamic in China than Canada.

It's a cultural problem. Hustle culture and entrepreneurship is respected in China. That's not the case in Canada.

I don’t know about Canada, but there’s also no unemployment safety net in China, which drives a lot of “neighbourhood” businesses (hairdressers, AirBnb, milk tea shops, etc).

Small cities usually don't become cosmopolitan cultural centers in the span of a lifetime. So growing with a small city with the plan of living there long term isn't viable.

Growing with a small city as an investment vehicle seems like it would run into problems predicting which small city is going to see significant growth.

Toronto did. Other cities can too.

They can. That doesn't mean any specific small city is likely to.

- 2010 mortgages are not that low, unless you bought a travel trailer - $1million actually doesn't buy you much in Toronto, Vancouver, or even a smaller city like Victoria - a millennial working at big tech ($200k+) can still afford one of these absurdly priced homes

Yes housing in Canada is messed up. But very well paid tech workers are actually some of the few young people that can still make it work.

Heck, I know some millennials that managed to buy in the Bay Area where it's even worse (they work at Tesla).

Oh so now the millions in Canada all they need to do is to work in big tech. I see. Problem solved. Thanks for enlightening me. I am so glad I left that messed up country filled with “we made it our own and you can too” people.

Just to give you context, median software Engineer salary in Canada is 95200. An average townhome in any of the cities now is over 600k easily, forget about Toronto and Vancouver where most likely those tech jobs are. Mortgage for a place like this in the current rate is easily around 2500-3000. Add in car, insurance, electricity, cost of daycare. And then see how much of after tax income can you afford to bring home.

The situation in the US is not any different. I would even say much more of life in the US is "pay to play" than in Canada.

Enlightening you? Apologies for staying on topic!

The comment you replied to said this:

> Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant.

I'm in no way implying that requiring a big tech salary is a _good_ thing (obviously it's not).. I'm simply agreeing with the original statement that it stifles startups.

> to buy in the Bay Area where it's even worse

Is it? If adjusted by median income Vancouver and Toronto are both more expensive than San Francisco or San Jose.

They said working in big tech as an engineer. It's cozy. It pays well. Ask anyone who's done it. It's a fair description.

Canada is very much a "let someone else do it" kind of place. You see that in politics, you see that in business, you see that in government.

A lot of that though is simply not wanting to be rich. Americans truly want lambo type wealth. I can't say I have met someone born here who wanted that. We are content to own a house and go to Mexico.

> We are content to own a house and go to Mexico.

But isn't housing ridiculously expensive in the parts of Canada where jobs are concentrated (which I'm pretty sure are around Toronto and Vancouver)? Pardon me if wrong, I'm American ;)

For the record, I want those things too, it's just that housing in California is ridiculously unaffordable

Depends on who you are.

For most people, yes it is quite expensive. If you are looking at techies specifically, it is still affordable.

For typical knowledge jobs or skilled labour jobs, it is affordable as well if you pair up with someone.

Average house price in Toronto $1.3 million.

Average SW developer salary 95,000

I would say yes.... this is very unaffordable.

The current mortgage on a house of that price is around $8,500 per month

I frequently travel to Toronto and the number of people driving Teslas there has increased 10X in the last 5 years. This could be a result of new Chinese money though and not native Canadians.

Many Canadians became wealthy via the housing market. Effectively drawing wealth from the mortgaged future potential income of Canada's young first time home buyers.

Or, just running STRs in the big cities.

Dunno about other cities, but City of Toronto proper didn't add any net new hotel rooms from 2000 - 2015. And only up 22% in the "Greater Toronto Area", which is way less than that area's pop'n growth. I doubt things improved as airbnb became a thing.

p. 10 here: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2016/ed/bgrd/backgroundf...

When your residential construction market is so on fire that you don't even build hotel space, you end up with STRs as a symptom.

> I can't say I have met someone born here who wanted that

Possibly because the ambitious people moved to the US.

USA also has a significant amount of generational wealth to go around. Canadas is isolated to a few dozen families in Montreal and Toronto. Canada is at its core, a resource extraction economy. Generational wealth doesn’t really come from that these days.

The inefficiency of the Canadian government is nothing to be proud of though. It's insane how many people are employed there compared to doing something productive.

Implying the employees of the federal government aren’t doing something productive? And the Canadian federal government isn’t even that different in size to the American government, accounting for population different.

By what metric are you making your claims?

Just going to toss in my own anecdotes but not so much productive but surprisingly inefficient. My current employer is currently contracted for the federal government and it's painful to do anything.

Just an example, I put in a request to order a $40 network module to replace a failed one. On our side it's already painful enough, I had to get approvals from 3 different managers that have to align all of the budgeting before bringing it forward to the federal government's representative for approval. The rep in tern has to bring it to his bosses for approval as well.

Typically this takes 12 weeks but this was put in as a critical priority because this was impacting about a hundred people. Probably costing the federal government (cause they're footing the bill) about $12,500 a week in lost productivity because our teams can't do their job properly. Thus their director got to it in a blazing fast 4 weeks.

$40 part. $50,000 in lost productivity because they couldn't get a $40 approval for done faster then 4 weeks.

The other anecdote I've had is with the Canadian Firearms Center in Miramichi. For those that are unaware, Canadians are required to be licensed under a federal program to own a firearm privately. Miramichi handles much of the paperwork for firearms registration. This was a while ago but last time I saw, they were still manually entering in data from paperwork but also from electronic submission as well. Stuff that could be readily automated and something I demo'd in an afternoon.

As it turns out, the inefficiency is intentional because there's a very real fear among the line staff of job reductions if they get too productive per person. And there's not many jobs in Miramichi that pay as well as the federal government (or at least that was the case when I was visiting there probably 20 years ago). So unfortunately there is justification to be as inefficient as possible. But it's always left me wondering how much how much further this attitude extends to other government departments.

It does extend to other departments. I’ve worked alongside entire teams of longtime federal employees who would spend 10 minutes cleaning up and changing out of work gear, drive 5 minutes to the building with a cafeteria, take a 15 minute union mandated break, then spend 5 minutes driving back to a work site, 10 minutes getting back into their gear and readying tools, only to work for 20 more minutes to finish the job at hand. Then get cleaned up, change, put tools away, and drive back to the building just about in time for lunch.

Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable.

There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment.

That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.

If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen in private sector tech companies, even after all the layoffs, I've got some bad news for you.

Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.

The big difference is that the private sector is burning their own money. If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later. Whomever was involved in this will naturally wise up next time.

On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.

>If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later.

Sure, but sooner or later is quite likely to be at least a few decades from now, since this is mostly a large organization sort of thing and large companies don't tend to vanish overnight.

That might be true, although some companies pretty much vanish overnight be it small or large (eg Nokia).

If a private company is burning money slow or fast it doesn't really matter. It's their money, it's not my money.

But when I see spectacularly bad/expensive (usually both) projects financed with taxpayer's money, I definitely do want some scrutiny and responsibility. Unfortunately we don't get any of that because it's not in their interest to do so.

Nokia is a great example of companies not disappearing overnight. They still make around 20 billion a year.

That stuff can happen but I've mostly worked at companies where it wasn't like that at all, not even close. And the one exception was a recently privatized ex-government org.

I'll two-up you:

I've worked at two very large tech companies in the past. At both shops I have experiences that make that $50k in lost productivity look like a joke.

First company invested tens if not hundreds of millions chasing the idea of scaled clustered deployment using Spark. I'm sure they saw some kind of technology return but the actual investment was never returned nearly a decade on and turned out to be a blunder.

Second company had a far worse procurement issue than what you describe in your post. $50k in lost productivity would've been welcomed. They had a hardware failure in one of their datacentres affecting the cooling systems. Some customer systems impacted but mostly internal stuff. It took about seven weeks to replace during which time hundreds of employees basically got to twiddle their thumbs.

Yeah, it shouldn't take four weeks to get approval for a $40 part but let's not pretend these kind of problems don't also happen in the private sector too. It's one of the reasons I left and won't go back -- I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.

I agree with your point that things may not be more efficient in certain big companies of the private sector but there is a crucial difference between the two.

The difference is that the government's employees are paid from taxes collected from productive companies, aka companies that create jobs and achieve a profit big enough to warrant paying taxes in the first place.

A private sector company, unless it is subsidized in some way or has a monopoly on a certain market will eventually try to rectify these inefficiencies because its makes it more resilient in the fight against it's competitors.

On the other hand, there is no incentive on the government side to make things more efficient.

If a government looses money, they can just borrow more, increase the national debt and sweep any kind of reform under the rug. Because of this lack of incentives, some state and government agencies act as de facto subsidized job's programs.

It's the same problem in many western nation, just look at how many people are employed in France by the government.

Many basic services are actually decaying but the government keeps hiring more people.

If we remove the employees who work as teachers, cops, in the military, and all other essential services, the rest of them, I am just not sure what the hell they do with their time.

My point is that it should be a duty of the government to be as efficient as possible. To do more with less, should be a priority unless the tasks require more people.

So I can understand when people complain of the inefficiency of a government agency.

Not saying that it doesn't happen in the private sector. But companies that are stuck on inertia and don't adapt, don't tend to fare particularly well. IBM was one of the most powerful companies in the world, now it's just a laughable shell of it's former self. Microsoft had it's time in the sun before the shift to mobile devices and cloud service gutted it's hold over over the computing space and left them scrambling to try to adapt to the world today. At some point or another it will be Google and Apple's turn to fall from the throne as technology marches on.

The public sector is insulated from suffering that kind of failure. In some ways it's good; there's no real way to run a police or military force at a profit, but both are vital. But in other ways it's problematic when major failures occur and the consequences of such are are just shrugged off.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-pay-system-iss... $2.4 billion for a federal HR pay system that still doesn't work.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-... $2 billion for a gun registry database that ultimately had to be dismantled because no one could find any evidence that the accomplished the goal of making Canadians safer.

> It took about seven weeks to replace

Because of waiting for internal approvals? Or because the lead time on datacenter equipment is quite long?

> I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.

So in your new public sector job how easy is it to get a new monitor?

The government also makes huge decade long missteps, but the cost is inflated if all the individual employees are acting like the GP post said.

uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation".

Meanwhile my Canadian tax return is pretty straightforward: open my tax app, click some download function, it pulls in stuff my bank/employer/etc has already electronically submitted to government.

The most annoying part is calculating "Adjusted Cost Basis" for cap gains/losses on stock sales. It's technically fairer than a simpler FIFO approach, but brokers/gov refuse to understand that most people do everything through 1 broker and calculate these figures for us.

Firearms license renewals were at a standstill for over a year because apparently the single license card printer for the entire country was out of order.

That was COVID lockdown caused I thought.

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...

> uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation".

Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so.

Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2].

The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense.

All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-...

It's to the benefit of the parasite to make it easier to feed on its host. It is also to the benefit of the parasite to ensure that its host cannot get rid of it.

Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.

By having lived there for almost a decade and interacting frequently with the government, many different departments (taxes, immigration, law enforcement, municipalities, various ministries). I don't see what America has to do with it.

What other governments have you interacted with recently?

My experience after living here for 5 years is that the Canadian and BC government deliver an incredible level of service compared to other jurisdictions I’ve lived in.

The efficiency of the Canadian government is significantly greater than that of Germany, often considered the world's capital of bureaucracy.

> Coziness is the biggest hurdle. As a programmer, I can make a really good salary at a tech giant. Even after 4 years of grinding and finally achieving product market fit and growth, my wife doesn't understand why I'm doing a startup. Life could be so much easier working for Google.

If this was a major factor then it would also apply to entrepreneurs in the US, yet it doesn't.

There are a lot of engineers in big tech in the bay area who would start a company if not for their 6-700k (or more in some cases) salaries. I personally know many and they are making a completely rational choice.

People don't make decisions in a vacuum. They make decisions amongst a set of choices.

Same problem with the imperial exam Keju[1] in China. It would recruit all talent for the state leaving civil society resourceless. The examination path to a government official position was more attractive than being a farmer, scholar or soldier.

> Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …

We can see its effects in the long run: promoting conformity at any cost, losing ability to innovate and improve.

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/why-chinese-minds-still-bear-the-long...

>Heck everyone has a government job here...ftfy

1 in every 4 people work for the Gov in Ontario and it is increasing. An elementary school teacher, fireman, Police officer and even some postal workers make more than most programmers. HS teachers retired with million dollar pension at 57 and collect 60-70k a year. There are regular cops making 120k a year. There are more STEM jobs in some US cities than there are in entire provinces. There is no work in Canada unless you find a Gov job. Private industry pays like shit in Canada, it's embarrassing. Everyone I know flees to the US first chance they get. Canadian private industry pays like shit and most folks are either slaves or under employed if they are lucky enough to find work.

It is an incredibly bad situation across the entire country.

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