Indeed. Big companies like Microsoft and Google tend to snatch a good portion of highly skilled engineers, while most designers (product and visual) tend to head towards New York City or San Francisco for better growth and money.
The last 8 years I've worked almost exclusively for US based businesses as a remote contractor. It's the best of both worlds, I can charge competitive rates but have a relatively overall lower cost of living and access to free healthcare. Taxes are higher in Canada, but it works out that I'm way ahead than if I lived in SF or NY.
The downside is that I occasionally do miss the one-on-one interaction I get with team. It helps that I've begin working for a co-op, and I'm often working as a team with the same devs on new client projects. I also do lots of oss work, which helps me keep my skills up by working on challenging projects as part of a community.
The people running the coop are responsible for finding us the new contracts, and they add something on top while I get to charge decent rates. I know I could probably market myself and earn the same thing without the middleman, but I don't have to worry about keeping the pipeline full, billing, negotiations, etc.. having someone else handle that frees me up to focus on development.
The nice thing about this arrangement is that since we're a team we can work on larger projects than I would otherwise be able to bid on myself. Instead of having to juggle 5 or 10 projects to fill all my billable hours in a month, I can easily do it with just a couple. I'm also able to go much deeper and work on 6-12 month contracts, rather than doing short, trivial projects.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown from Waterloo of how many postings are in the US vs Canada and how large the companies are. Sort of like a litmus test for the tech scene there.
I'm also surprised at the lack of news from the Waterloo incubator, especially on this site.
I live in SF currently, and recently accepted another job in NYC. Apples to apples, the pay in SF/SV is easily 100% higher than Toronto right now.
The gap is even higher in NYC (150%+), though of course, cost of living is going to eat up most of that. With the bubble heating up even more right now, I know people who are picking up comp packages 200%+ higher than the going rate in Canada.
There is simply no reason to go back - critical mass of talented, dedicated people. Interesting work. Ludicrous sums of money.
For a while, I had trouble working because of health issues so I decided to work part-time while getting medicated and going through physio.
Much harder to do that in the U.S. without a sort of group insurance. The cost of subscribing to an individual plan with my condition would probably be through the roof.
However, because of socialized medicine in Canada, I had far less financial pressure on myself as my medicine and visits were obviously covered.