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Comment by pugsawakening | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently a beneficiary of SRED in a startup context in Canada.

The first thing to note is that it doesn't solve many major problems. The lack of development talent is the biggest one; trying to get someone to move from California to Canada isn't something that's solved as simply as offering more money. And in my experience (as a recent graduate), the talent that would have studied computer science or has an interest in programming moves onto "safer" education and career options (in the local context) - usually engineering or commerce/finance.

There's simply a lack of talent, or more realistically, a lack of talent with no better options.

The money here is being used to attempt to make up for the extreme economies of scale that places like Silicon Valley have. It's not enough to make Canada a competitive place to start a startup, really, but it may have some effect on the total amount of expatriation by talented individuals.

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> The lack of development talent is the biggest one; trying to get someone to move from California to Canada isn't something that's solved as simply as offering more money.

Actually it would take a lot less money than you would think to get many people to move to Canada and take a job offer. There's a whole world of immigrants out there who would love to move to Canada. They're mostly not located in California however, but east and south of Europe.

Unfortunately they don't qualify for T-N visas! :)

Though there is mention of the "startup visa" in the article, which applies to people from non-NAFTA countries as well. Though not sure how it works for hiring talent.

I'm a Canadian who moved to SV.

I, personally, would have preferred to stay in Canada but finding a job is a right pain in the ass. American companies will fly you in on their dime, while Canadian firms won't even give you a phone call. It would even help if these companies were even offering competitive wages.

There are also plenty of American firms that won't give you a phone call or offer competitive wages. Silicon Valley strip mined its own local talent pool long ago, so they have to do well at courting potential relocation candidates if they aren't able to poach from the other valley companies.

Finding a job anywhere else is still a right pain in the ass. Entering through the back door using your personal network is still the best way. Otherwise, the process of resume submission to phone screen to technical screen to in-person interview to negotitations to at-will employee is horrible, and no company does it well from end to end. Being dropped without any further contact can happen at any stage in the process. I was flown out to Denver for a half-day, multipart interview ordeal and after I returned, it was as though I no longer existed to them, which was odd, because I thought I did rather well at the interview, at least enough for someone there to return an e-mail or tell me that I was cut.

It isn't being American that excepts SV from the rule, but the supply and demand for technical specialists. In that context, perhaps the Canadian program might not raise your pay directly, but it might make it easier for you to get hired in Canada.

Speaking as someone nearing the end of their undergrad and looking for internships/full time opportunities, staying in Canada is simply not competitive or attractive enough for the talented students in each class.

Local companies are not "big of a name" enough for career advancement (aka resume padding) and do not pay nearly as well either for entry level positions (50k vs 70/80k - taxes).

Furthermore I have heard of local startups that relocate or migrate down to SV for some period of time to fund raise or experiment before pivoting/failing/moving permanently to the US or their talent leaves during their time there.

I think if you're in computing this is true. The tax credit "successes" in Canada are groups like the hundreds of artists on videogames or mechanical engineers in aerospace. Software development that way does exist, but it doesn't account for a very high proportion of jobs in these programs.

As an outsider in Canada I've been told it's easier to get foreigners to join startups due to how risk averse Canadians are, and what I've seen would tend to back that up.

Can you please elaborate on your comment concerning the lack of talent in Canada? What's wrong with the large pool of CEGEP and university graduates or more experienced developers who are well able to pick up new technology?

What does U.S. talent have that's missing in Canada? Are the good ones really all moving away to where the money is? Or could it be that, despite all the available funding, Canadian entrepreneurs are less prone to risk training new recruits?

Lack of talent or lack of US-comparable salaries? A lot of U of Waterloo people get snatched by American companies, I bet if we paid them about the same many would stay here.

This is true. We have two recent Waterloo students on the payroll (in Vancouver), both of whom had options in SF (or anywhere they wanted really)

UWaterloo grad in the US here - I'd go back in a heartbeat if the salaries were comparable and the market healthier (i.e., a substantial number of players paying US-comparable salaries, so you're not golden-handcuffed).

Did you have any problems filing the papers with the provincial/federal govs? I'm guessing it's a lot of work.

It is work, and about as arcane as you would expect a government form to be. You need to track your eligible hours for SRED on a weekly basis or throughout the week (as an employee). As an owner you need to deal with capital expenditures as well.

Are you filing yourself, or do you use one of the organizations that take a cut?

Both are viable. We use a contractor that takes a cut (~25% for < 25k claims, 20% for bigger claims IIRC), but I know of companies that do it themselves and hire a SRED specialist to review their application on an hourly contract.

> The lack of development talent is the biggest one

My opinion is that it's less about lack of talent and more about hiring being hard (in general).

Looking at my own graduating class... it's not lack of talent, it's lack of opportunity. Many (most) graduates end up taking jobs south of the border within their first year post-graduation.

Hiring is really hard, but from anecdotal experience and hearsay, I still think the number of Canadian tech workers leaving for the US is a depressingly major factor. A large number of my ambitious Canadian peers ended up moving to the US, and Canadians are really well-represented among US tech companies. Many end up moving back (or plan on moving back), but it's almost always for personal reasons at significant cost.

I consider myself to be an above-average software developer, but I found the hiring processes at many start-ups (Wave, Freshbooks, Tophat, etc) in Toronto would reject me to weird reasons. E.g.:

- I had never used the functools library in Python before, so because I couldn't answer trivia questions about it, my Python skills were low. (FYI: You can read the entire documentation on the functools library in ~3 minutes). And this was after an initial interview where I apparently got the trivia question that 'no one' gets (which I'll note was actually more relevant to general Python knowledge as it was about keyword args).

- I had 'amazing technical skill' but because I didn't have enough side-projects to prove that I "love the web" enough to work with them.

I eventually ended up in my current position of lead developer at an early-stage startup, but it frustrates me a bit when I hear about a lack of talent while at the same time feeling like my own experience is that startups are being very picky in their hiring practices (i.e. looking for any chink in the armor, no matter how small, and then flat-out rejecting someone because of it). If they were rejecting me for such those kinds of reasons, then either:

1. They had someone better than me that they decided to hire instead.

2. They really aren't that hard up to talent, and decided to wait for someone "better"[1] to come along.

[1] For various definitions of "better," as in this case it just means jumps through the hiring hoops correctly.

I would have stayed, but there were (and still are) very few companies offering jobs in the technical areas I'm interested in, which is sad.

Talent is one problem.

What about access to customers and financing?

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