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Comment by ultrasaurus | Hacker News Reader

One thing that Canada has in it's favour is that for competent CS graduates, you're competing with stultifying companies rather than companies in the SF bubble. PagerDuty is one of those companies that I expect Canada would've been happy to keep, and we're loving it in SF, but we're fighting with a lot of similar companies for people.

This year, we opened up an office in Toronto, and even though our standards are the same (exact same interview process everywhere) we've had a measurably easier time attracting CS talent.

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But can't Canadians move to the valley too with the TN visa?

Canadians can move to the valley with a visa but there are a lot of Canadians who want to stay in Canada. I live in Waterloo and am a CS student and I have talked to hundreds of students who do not want to leave Canada, even if they are offered a very attractive package from a company simply because they like Canada. Myself being one of them.

Us Immigration sucks. But if you're a talented engineer ... You can get down there. But there's plenty of Canadians that would to prefer to stay.

I run an internship program placing Canadian interns in the valley, and have interviewed plenty of students from US schools. There's some amazing students coming out of Waterloo and UBC in particular. Waterloo grads are as competent and hungry as grads from MIT or Stanford. I've been amazed with them.

You should have spoken to them pre-2001 then. Waterloo dumbed down the first two years to be "more industry focused".[1]

Waterloo has been founding great companies for decades - the Watcom compiler came out of there in the 80's and 90's.

1. A quote from a friend who did his PhD there during the period.

I'm sorry, but are you claiming that the education has been dumbed down post-2001? As a computer science student that witnessed the shift in education, I can assure you that the system has only increased the level of breadth and depth (and therefore academic difficulty) since the pre-2001 period.

Before 2001, Waterloo Computer Science offered Java courses and taught "more industry focused" material. Ever since, with the aid of a certain PhD here, the curriculum teaches functional programming (via Racket) from the start and carries its focus over the entirety of first year.

Following this, the second year courses are standard at any university and act as precursors to the third year Operating Systems and Algorithms courses, the most difficult required CS courses offered here.

I don't buy that. MIT and Stanford are the undisputed best in the world. Waterloo would be closer to "University of Texas-Austin" which is still excellent.

I don't buy that MIT and Stanford are undisputed "best" either. But they're damn good. And definitely top tier ... my point is that Waterloo and UBC are in the same ball park as the top ones.

My comment of "not buying it" was that there was no evidence (other than your opinion) to support your claim. Honestly, I would like to hear more about how you came to that conclusion.

I know the rankings are only one way to estimate (and would like to hear a better way :)

Is there a list that puts Waterloo or UBC better than Stanford or MIT? ANY LIST BY ANY MAGAZINE?

http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-ran...

University of Toronto (15th) UBC(27) Vs MIT (1) and Stanford (2)

What about ACM competition?

http://www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/Standings/

Year 2000: UBC tied with Stanford (difference in time, not by much)

http://www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/Standings/2000/Standing.htm

Year 2002: UBC and SFU tied with Stanford (won on time)

http://www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/Standings/2002/standings.htm

Year 2003: top 5, 3 from UBC, 2 from Stanford

http://www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/Standings/2003/results2003.htm