The increase in the purchasing power of the US dollar relative to the Canadian is surely having an impact here, particularly the large increase over the past year, from 1.12 to 1.39.
In the 90s, when Canada's currency was low, there was similar talk of brain drain amongst highly educated professionals.
We can't compete, a research lab and accelerator won't change the fact that our dollar is 3/4s the American dollar. I could move to the states, take the same salary, and get an instant 30% raise. That, coupled with the fact that our goods are 10-20% more expensive than the states and our housing prices are skyrocketing, you're just shooting yourself in the foot by staying here.
It may be accurate, but the number is meaningless for this purpose. Cost of living varies within the US by far more than that, and I'm sure the same is true of Canada. You'd have to look at the actual cost of living in the location a person is moving from and to.
Canada has 2 tech hubs; the Greater Toronto Area, and Vancouver. Maybe you can count Montreal? In any case, the cost of living is very high in these areas, especially Vancouver. This is primarily brought on by a Canadian law which allows foreigners to purchase property in Canada, so wealthy Chinese are buying up property and using it to store wealth.
In both Toronto and Vancouver, the public transit is abysmal and, in my opinion, 20 years behind what the population requires. So you NEED a car, and for Toronto at least, the insurance will kill you due to Ontario's "no fault" law.
Our power infrastructure is crumbling as well. There was one point this summer where our power rates were temporarily jacked up by something like 300% due to an issue at a nuclear power station. A bad case of NIMBYism has delayed a gas power plant in the GTA, and the public company which manages power generation (Hydro One) recently sold a 60% stake to private investors. There is wide spread fear that the costs of power are going to skyrocket in the near future.
The US has tech hubs all over the country. Houston, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and those are just the big ones. If living in the "core" of these cities is too expensive, it is quite feasible to live on the outskirts and use the public transit to commute into the city. San Fran is a bit of an exception to this, as I understand it, though.
I guess my point is, is that I have many many options in the States, whereas my hands are tied in Canada.
I do. I agree with him - the transit system here is abysmal for the job it should be doing. We had a referendum this year to expand translink, but it failed.
Transit is moderately OK if you live in Vancouver-proper. But no one moves to Vancouver anymore because no one wants to raise a family in a 700 sqft apartment. Burquitlam/Richmond/Delta/Surrey? Forget about it; translink is awful there.
This is primarily brought on by a Canadian law which allows foreigners to purchase property in Canada, so wealthy Chinese are buying up property and using it to store wealth.
It's also worth mentioning that Vancouver is especially vulnerable to this problem because for 30 years now we've had 'sustainable development' policies in the city and the province that were mostly there to make it difficult for people to live south-east of the Fraser. Vancouver effectively has a 'green-belt'. Other cities would have built more highways and bridges to make it easier for people to live where they want; Vancouver tries to fix the game and incentivize living north of the fraser. But we've reached a breaking point and none of the very mild incentives on offer makes up for crushing mortgage payments and trying to raise your kids in a broom closet. The solution here is simple - build more highways and bridges into Vancouver and let people live where they want.
But are goods and services in Canada correspondingly cheaper. In other words converted to US dollars, devs make less there, but is food, housing and healthcare also costing less?
>But are goods and services in Canada correspondingly cheaper.
Only if they are made domestically without imported inputs. Currency depreciation lowers your standard of living and increases cost, it doesn't even make domestic goods more accessible - it only makes them cheaper compared to the imported alternatives - the only exception being if you earn money in foreign currency - in which case you are being stimulated as exporter.
I doubt any of those is cheaper considering all the tax differences - for a young/healthy developer - health insurance will probably be a part of the package as well - the only exception would probably be housing which can vary.
No. A ton of Canadians close to the border regularly cross the border to buy goods, including groceries, gas, and electronics. All of which are typically substantially cheaper even if it's only a 30 minute drive away. The Canadian dollar is doing terribly right now, so it's not as beneficial, but even but even though our dollar is only at $0.72 you can STILL save a bit of money after the exchange rate.
Services tend to be significantly cheaper. (Cell phone plans, taxi's, ect.)
Isn't that mostly because the US has lower sales tax? Technically you should probably be paying import taxes on stuff you buy in the US and take back to Canada.
Similarly Californians can cross the state border to Oregon (which has no sales tax) and buy cheaper stuff there, but technically they have to pay California a use tax on those items equivalent to Californian sales tax.
Sales tax is a small part of it, but most item's just cost less period. When you declare at the border, as long as you don't have more than a few hundred dollars, you're typically alright. I've declared up to $350 worth of groceries and they let me go through no problem. Liquor/Tobacco is a different story, however, once again, I've crossed and declared a flat of beer (24) and was asked to pay.
In the GTA, the cost of gas is $1.00/L ~ $1.30/L over the past year or so. I converted the cost of gas in the US a month ago when I was visiting family (in the Detroit area) and it came to ~$0.70/L (also converted between USD and CAD at the time).
Edit: I recall the cost being 2.09 USD/gal which currently converts to 0.77 CAD/L according to Google (Search for "2.09 USD / gal in CAD / L")
No. I would say goods are either the same or more expensive.
I remember coming to the US and being shocked you could buy a pair of Levi's for $30 when they were closer to $70-80 in Canada.
When the Canadian dollar was at par with the US, there were a ton of Canadians going south to buy cars. Before hitting par, the numbers made sense (convert US price to CAD and you get pretty close). Once it was at par you could save thousands of dollars buying a US car and bringing it across the border.
When Google offers triple-the-pay (Overall compensation) for low-level Canadian SWEs, is it any wonder that it has no problem picking up AI researchers?
Software engineers are paid relatively poorly in Canada, (Vancouver in particular) - and this is discounting the poor performance of the petro-canadian-dollar.
Why? I've seen this before but it always mystified me.
Oh, and totally tangentially but: how do human beings actually live in Vancouver? The rents and real estate prices are almost as bad as the Bay Area but minus the high paying jobs.
The Lower Mainland is a pretty big area, the farther away from Downtown Vancouver the lower the rent is. I rent a small 3 bedroom house in North Delta (about a 45 minute drive to Downtown, no traffic. An hour if I park and take the train in) and pay $1550/m plus utilities. The house we're in sold for $510,000 in November 2014. It's very difficult for any single family to purchase even a small house. The vast majority of the houses being sold where I live are being bought by Indian/East Asian families who will buy the property, tear down the house, build a massive multi-tenant home, and have 2-3 families living under the same roof. A ton of property is also being purchased by people who will get their Canadian residency, buy a bunch of property, but still live in China. The property is bought as investments and left empty. There are area's downtown that are full of 20+ story residential buildings but yet the streets are deserted since nobody is actually living there. Super strange. Everyone who I know who's purchased recently is either buying townhouses or condo's (which are both still going for a minimum of $350K for 1-2 bedrooms).
Rents aren't as bad as the bay area (still awful) and the skytrain makes getting around easy. Most people just don't live in Vancouver proper.
As for why, there isn't enough upward pressure. Vancouver is at least getting a few of the big companies, but they really need to get some big tech in sucking up talent to drive some competition in salaries. Currently if people want money they head south, those who stay are in a market where they can't command the big salaries.
Total guess, there isn't a critical mass of companies whose owners, executives and shareholders are missing out on billions in profit because they can't find enough sw engineers.
Said another way (a guess again), developers are not rare enough for current demand.
Rent is nowhere near as bad as the Bay Area. For example one could find a brand new apartment in Mount Pleasant (Essentially Vancouver's Mission) for less than $1500.
However recently the vacancy rate has dropped to near zero, even though new condos are constantly being built, so the problem is actually finding a place. Accordingly rents are rising substantially.
> Software engineers are paid relatively poorly in Canada
Do you have any sources to back up that statement? I only ask as I know many devs, myself included, who receive pretty competitive pay when compared to SF (taking local living costs into account).
Back in 2010-2011, everybody I knew in Vancouver was earning ~45-60k after graduation (With multiple semesters of co-op experience). No stock, no bonuses, maybe a bit of RRSP matching. I was an outlier at ~95k CAD (At an investment bank).
Eight months later, I got an offer from Google for ~180k USD total comp.
Since then, only three people from my school that I know have broken 100k CAD - one of them works for Amazon, one of them worked for SAP for a decade, and one of them gets paid in USD.
The cost of rent in Vancouver is not as high as SF, but the cost of home ownership may as well be. Single-family homes at a 40-minute commute are north of half-a-million, and a home in Vancouver proper will run you more then a million.
I hear things are better out east, but I don't want to spend a third of my life living in a frozen hellscape.
Similar story here, when I was a dev in Toronto I was probably pretty close to the most poorly paid among my group of friends (who are for the most part not programmers) and after moving to California I am the best paid now of my friends back in Canada.
Agreed, I live north of Vancouver in a town whose name you can probably guess and work remotely for a SV company. I make at least 2x what I'd make in Vancouver, based on various offers and talking to friends. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement.
So along with all of its other problems - ridiculous home prices, "zombie" neighbourhoods, terrible traffic, no night life to speak of - Vancouver also has awful salaries.
That said, we'll be driving in this weekend to see Star Wars.
Amazon and Microsoft have expanded here significantly due to the weak loonie and proximity to Seattle. AMZN has over 1,000 engineers working here, and MSFT has about 600. They've been snatching up a lot of talent over the last two years, and salaries have increased significantly as a result. As in, $70-85K at the high end for new grads.
For us old timers this is the third AI boom (including two "A.I. winters" in between). In the 1980s the boom was experts systems and logic inference supercomputers. Many computer science departments were decimated then.
This "third wave" isn't really AI, it's more "Machine Learning". Watson's question answering service is basically an ensemble of statistical methods, like everything else these days.
Disclaimer: I'm a Canadian expat who's been living and working in the US tech industry for a few years.
> "Google Raids Threaten Canada's Lead in Artificial Intelligence"
This seems like an unnecessary specific title, I'd suggest the following edit:
"US Tech Company Compensation Threaten Canada's Trailing Status in All of Tech"
For one thing, this isn't just an AI thing, US companies have been moving Canadian tech workers south of the border for years across the board, regardless of specialization or focus area. Everyone from the humblest code monkey to the brainiest algorithms wrangler is being exported from Canada at a rapid pace.
This has been happening for long enough that a significant fraction of Canadian tech talent is already residing in the US, which sort of raises eyebrows about any claims that Canada "leads" in tech currently. If there ever was a lead the brain drain has certainly put that to bed long ago.
And it's not just Google, all of the major companies recruit Canadians heavily, and even startups have gotten in on the game in recent years.
And these aren't "raids". Google isn't marching off computer scientists at gunpoint. There's nothing predatory about this - if Canadian companies want to play in the same league as US tech, they need to catch up, the least of which is narrowing the pay gap.
Right now I am literally making 500% the salary a similar position pays in Canada. Even accounting for the living costs of SF/SV/NYC it's not hard to see why people make the move. Canadian tech pays incredibly poorly in comparison to US tech, and that's far and away the #1 reason the brain drain exists and will persist.
I'm a proud Canadian, and all else being equal I'd rather live in Canada than the US, but one of the persistently annoying things about Canada's tech industry narrative is the continuous denial of just how far behind they are compared to the US.
500% ? What field? I'm in Canada and earning a good wage. I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids).
> "I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids)."
I hear this a lot from Canadian colleagues who stay in Canada, and I dunno, it always irks me a little bit.
Increasing your wage doesn't necessarily entail longer hours or fewer holidays. It seems like it's a popular perception in Canada to imagine all US jobs as some kind of hellish sweatshop where you're chained to your desk all day in exchange for more money - but in reality the spread of job quality is the same here as it is in some place like Toronto or Vancouver. You will find the same shitty sweatshop jobs and you will find great jobs - the pay increase seems entirely orthogonal to that. The market rate is simply higher - much higher, across the board.
I think large urban centers generally have longer working hours. Such as NY and London. Typically the living quarters are smaller, the commute is longer and the culture is more "you shall be here until at least 6pm because you live to work". Not everywhere, but on average.
I'm in NY, my office is empty at 9am, mostly full at 10am, starts emptying at 5pm, and is mostly deserted by 6pm. People work from home all the time, and leaving early is entirely accepted and even encouraged.
This feels like it lines up with, well, everywhere else.
I've had 4 jobs in this city and this has been the case with every single one, and they've ranged from tech megacorps to startups. This isn't some pressure-cooker investment banking job...
I feel like your impression of NY tech (I can't speak to London) is drawn from stereotypes more than reality. I've worked also in Toronto and the work expectations do not feel much different - if anything it feels a bit more lax here in NYC than TO.
> "But not 500%, I'm quite sure."
I dunno, what do you think an iOS developer with ~4 years of experience fetches in Toronto or Vancouver? Let's say total comp (i.e., salary, any guaranteed bonuses, public stock).
I'm afraid this is anecdata. I'd expect a dev with ~4 years most places to not get that much. The how much doesn't matter, it's the idea that you get 500% that is clearly nuts. I mean - why would firms not be queuing up to cut their wages by 80% in the same timezone? Makes zero sense and doesn't accord with any figures.
Also it's not a sane comparison at the start of your career. You have ~2 years then move and have ~4 years and your salary went up? Is that location related or related to the fact that you are now actually useful instead of learning the ropes?
Avg developer salary in the US is ~80k. So to meet your 500% dev in Canada would be earning less than part-time hot-dog sellers.
I work with people in NY every day. They work longer hours. I think if you asked most tech in big cities if their day is longer they'd agree.
Ok it's working for you then. I think with housing costs factored in plus the net pay as the pay increase is taxed at a higher rate, plus quality of life issues make it less appealing.
In the main I'm talking about "world cities" where the big finance firms launder money through property, detaching the price from local wages, such as NY, LN and TK.
I wouldn't count Seattle as a "big" city. The OP was talking about NY and SF, both of these are very big.
Same for Mexican software engineers. Except the difference is more like 13-15x. I just found a job posting for a .NET web dev role for $17k pesos per month, equivalent to $12k dollars per year. Even adjusted for COL, US salaries are a fortune.
I feel that you could replace "Canada" with a lot of other countries here. Canada is even more impacted due to its geographical proximity and the agreements between the US and Canada, but what you said rings true for a lot of European countries as well!
> “We are losing our top talent, the talent at every level,” says Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “While we had that advantage, it is slipping through our fingers.”
well yeah, people want to go to the states and be paid more while working on interesting things.
The article brought my ML prof at UBC, Nando de Freitas. Absolutely stunningly brilliant, in a way that inspired deep questions in philosophy, CompSci, math and psychology. It's a shame he no longer teaches at UBC and now works at Google.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadIn the 90s, when Canada's currency was low, there was similar talk of brain drain amongst highly educated professionals.
USD to CAD chart for the past five years: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CAD&view=5Y
Because, if rent and utilities are 40% average higher here and you make 30% more by moving, it may not be as big of a raise as you think.
In both Toronto and Vancouver, the public transit is abysmal and, in my opinion, 20 years behind what the population requires. So you NEED a car, and for Toronto at least, the insurance will kill you due to Ontario's "no fault" law.
Our power infrastructure is crumbling as well. There was one point this summer where our power rates were temporarily jacked up by something like 300% due to an issue at a nuclear power station. A bad case of NIMBYism has delayed a gas power plant in the GTA, and the public company which manages power generation (Hydro One) recently sold a 60% stake to private investors. There is wide spread fear that the costs of power are going to skyrocket in the near future.
The US has tech hubs all over the country. Houston, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and those are just the big ones. If living in the "core" of these cities is too expensive, it is quite feasible to live on the outskirts and use the public transit to commute into the city. San Fran is a bit of an exception to this, as I understand it, though.
I guess my point is, is that I have many many options in the States, whereas my hands are tied in Canada.
Have you actually lived in Vancouver?
I do. I agree with him - the transit system here is abysmal for the job it should be doing. We had a referendum this year to expand translink, but it failed.
Transit is moderately OK if you live in Vancouver-proper. But no one moves to Vancouver anymore because no one wants to raise a family in a 700 sqft apartment. Burquitlam/Richmond/Delta/Surrey? Forget about it; translink is awful there.
It's... Pretty damn good. Much better than Seattle/SF/SJ/Just about other city that's not NYC.
It is, however, a regional pastime to complain about it.
It's also worth mentioning that Vancouver is especially vulnerable to this problem because for 30 years now we've had 'sustainable development' policies in the city and the province that were mostly there to make it difficult for people to live south-east of the Fraser. Vancouver effectively has a 'green-belt'. Other cities would have built more highways and bridges to make it easier for people to live where they want; Vancouver tries to fix the game and incentivize living north of the fraser. But we've reached a breaking point and none of the very mild incentives on offer makes up for crushing mortgage payments and trying to raise your kids in a broom closet. The solution here is simple - build more highways and bridges into Vancouver and let people live where they want.
Only if they are made domestically without imported inputs. Currency depreciation lowers your standard of living and increases cost, it doesn't even make domestic goods more accessible - it only makes them cheaper compared to the imported alternatives - the only exception being if you earn money in foreign currency - in which case you are being stimulated as exporter.
I doubt any of those is cheaper considering all the tax differences - for a young/healthy developer - health insurance will probably be a part of the package as well - the only exception would probably be housing which can vary.
Services tend to be significantly cheaper. (Cell phone plans, taxi's, ect.)
Similarly Californians can cross the state border to Oregon (which has no sales tax) and buy cheaper stuff there, but technically they have to pay California a use tax on those items equivalent to Californian sales tax.
US: $30 - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001EZYMF4
Canada: $70 - http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B001EZYMF4
Edit: I recall the cost being 2.09 USD/gal which currently converts to 0.77 CAD/L according to Google (Search for "2.09 USD / gal in CAD / L")
I remember coming to the US and being shocked you could buy a pair of Levi's for $30 when they were closer to $70-80 in Canada.
When the Canadian dollar was at par with the US, there were a ton of Canadians going south to buy cars. Before hitting par, the numbers made sense (convert US price to CAD and you get pretty close). Once it was at par you could save thousands of dollars buying a US car and bringing it across the border.
Software engineers are paid relatively poorly in Canada, (Vancouver in particular) - and this is discounting the poor performance of the petro-canadian-dollar.
Oh, and totally tangentially but: how do human beings actually live in Vancouver? The rents and real estate prices are almost as bad as the Bay Area but minus the high paying jobs.
As for why, there isn't enough upward pressure. Vancouver is at least getting a few of the big companies, but they really need to get some big tech in sucking up talent to drive some competition in salaries. Currently if people want money they head south, those who stay are in a market where they can't command the big salaries.
Total guess, there isn't a critical mass of companies whose owners, executives and shareholders are missing out on billions in profit because they can't find enough sw engineers.
Said another way (a guess again), developers are not rare enough for current demand.
However recently the vacancy rate has dropped to near zero, even though new condos are constantly being built, so the problem is actually finding a place. Accordingly rents are rising substantially.
http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2015/12/16/vancouver-...
Do you have any sources to back up that statement? I only ask as I know many devs, myself included, who receive pretty competitive pay when compared to SF (taking local living costs into account).
Back in 2010-2011, everybody I knew in Vancouver was earning ~45-60k after graduation (With multiple semesters of co-op experience). No stock, no bonuses, maybe a bit of RRSP matching. I was an outlier at ~95k CAD (At an investment bank).
Eight months later, I got an offer from Google for ~180k USD total comp.
Since then, only three people from my school that I know have broken 100k CAD - one of them works for Amazon, one of them worked for SAP for a decade, and one of them gets paid in USD.
The cost of rent in Vancouver is not as high as SF, but the cost of home ownership may as well be. Single-family homes at a 40-minute commute are north of half-a-million, and a home in Vancouver proper will run you more then a million.
I hear things are better out east, but I don't want to spend a third of my life living in a frozen hellscape.
So along with all of its other problems - ridiculous home prices, "zombie" neighbourhoods, terrible traffic, no night life to speak of - Vancouver also has awful salaries.
That said, we'll be driving in this weekend to see Star Wars.
Would you consider any current system or approaches are a continuation of that or did that end up a dead branch in the AI evolution so to speak.
I can perhaps think of IBM's Watson as sort of continuing in that legacy.
Modern systems use probabilistic models which are much more flexible.
> "Google Raids Threaten Canada's Lead in Artificial Intelligence"
This seems like an unnecessary specific title, I'd suggest the following edit:
"US Tech Company Compensation Threaten Canada's Trailing Status in All of Tech"
For one thing, this isn't just an AI thing, US companies have been moving Canadian tech workers south of the border for years across the board, regardless of specialization or focus area. Everyone from the humblest code monkey to the brainiest algorithms wrangler is being exported from Canada at a rapid pace.
This has been happening for long enough that a significant fraction of Canadian tech talent is already residing in the US, which sort of raises eyebrows about any claims that Canada "leads" in tech currently. If there ever was a lead the brain drain has certainly put that to bed long ago.
And it's not just Google, all of the major companies recruit Canadians heavily, and even startups have gotten in on the game in recent years.
And these aren't "raids". Google isn't marching off computer scientists at gunpoint. There's nothing predatory about this - if Canadian companies want to play in the same league as US tech, they need to catch up, the least of which is narrowing the pay gap.
Right now I am literally making 500% the salary a similar position pays in Canada. Even accounting for the living costs of SF/SV/NYC it's not hard to see why people make the move. Canadian tech pays incredibly poorly in comparison to US tech, and that's far and away the #1 reason the brain drain exists and will persist.
I'm a proud Canadian, and all else being equal I'd rather live in Canada than the US, but one of the persistently annoying things about Canada's tech industry narrative is the continuous denial of just how far behind they are compared to the US.
I don't see 500% as a likely pay gap for most.
> "I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids)."
I hear this a lot from Canadian colleagues who stay in Canada, and I dunno, it always irks me a little bit.
Increasing your wage doesn't necessarily entail longer hours or fewer holidays. It seems like it's a popular perception in Canada to imagine all US jobs as some kind of hellish sweatshop where you're chained to your desk all day in exchange for more money - but in reality the spread of job quality is the same here as it is in some place like Toronto or Vancouver. You will find the same shitty sweatshop jobs and you will find great jobs - the pay increase seems entirely orthogonal to that. The market rate is simply higher - much higher, across the board.
I think large urban centers generally have longer working hours. Such as NY and London. Typically the living quarters are smaller, the commute is longer and the culture is more "you shall be here until at least 6pm because you live to work". Not everywhere, but on average.
This feels like it lines up with, well, everywhere else.
I've had 4 jobs in this city and this has been the case with every single one, and they've ranged from tech megacorps to startups. This isn't some pressure-cooker investment banking job...
I feel like your impression of NY tech (I can't speak to London) is drawn from stereotypes more than reality. I've worked also in Toronto and the work expectations do not feel much different - if anything it feels a bit more lax here in NYC than TO.
> "But not 500%, I'm quite sure."
I dunno, what do you think an iOS developer with ~4 years of experience fetches in Toronto or Vancouver? Let's say total comp (i.e., salary, any guaranteed bonuses, public stock).
Also it's not a sane comparison at the start of your career. You have ~2 years then move and have ~4 years and your salary went up? Is that location related or related to the fact that you are now actually useful instead of learning the ropes?
Avg developer salary in the US is ~80k. So to meet your 500% dev in Canada would be earning less than part-time hot-dog sellers.
I work with people in NY every day. They work longer hours. I think if you asked most tech in big cities if their day is longer they'd agree.
Granted my rent has gone up by a factor of 3.5, but after paying rent I've still got double the money leftover. Other things are cheaper too.
Now of course there is a couple years experience vs when I was in BC, but I would still probably be close to double.
In the main I'm talking about "world cities" where the big finance firms launder money through property, detaching the price from local wages, such as NY, LN and TK.
I wouldn't count Seattle as a "big" city. The OP was talking about NY and SF, both of these are very big.
As opposed to what kind of place in Canada? NY was pretty awesome the last time I visited.
I think we need some border-tightening. :-)
Here's another title: "Canadians Drive down Salaries of US Artificial Intelligence Researchers"
well yeah, people want to go to the states and be paid more while working on interesting things.