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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Depends where you live. Some places are tech hubs that are always craving new manpower, and some places are university towns without much private industry of their own, and some people have ties to an area.

I live in Hamilton (which is Canada's Pittsburgh). We've got a great STEM-oriented school here, and Waterloo (RIM's home) is only an hour away... it took a long time to find a job that didn't involve suffering through a two-hour commute in some of the most miserable traffic on the continent (Ontario's corporate tech-hub is Mississauga).

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I just moved to Hamilton!

Ontario is rough. Most job offers are in the range of 65-75k for 10+ years of experience and highly-specialized skills. The cost of housing and living in Toronto and surrounding regions has sky-rocketed in the last 10 years. And the traffic is terrible.

All of the STEM grads get shipped off to SF or the Valley. There are American recruiting agencies on the campus' of every major STEM-focused university in Canada and are at every job fair. The choice for these grads is pretty easy: stay here and make Wordpress themes for a social media marketing agency and get paid 35-45k or go work at Google/Twitter/Whatever and work with the best-of-breed tech, get paid 90k to start and be making 120-130k within a few years.

We could do better up here. The visa situation is much more permissive here and there are a plethora of grants and tax benefits for tech companies available. VCs are even finally starting to warm up a bit too.

Yup. With RIM bleeding talent and Waterloo and McMaster shooting out grads on both cylinders, a firm could probably do well sucking up all the budget-priced geeks west of Highway 6. Or the GTA and the province could finally get their crap together with respect to transit and complete Hamilton's transformation into a bedroom community of a bedroom community.

As an original Pittsburgh native, I'm curious which attributes of Pittsburgh you're thinking of when you say "Canada's Pittburgh"?

Hamilton is a steel town. Blue collar workers, steel mills, dense century construction, etc. Or, rather, was a steel town. Our steel industry hung on about a decade or so longer than Pittsburgh, so we're going through the same crap Pittsburgh did when it had to go through that confused process of trying to find its place now that all the jobs are drying up... that's where the similarities end though, Pittsburgh had to stand on its own while we're close enough to Toronto that our answer to the problem might be turning into a bedroom community of a bedroom community instead of a Tom-Murphy-esque revitalization.

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