The problem that I see (as a Canadian) is salaries. I'm not in Toronto but am in Canada, and I see people with 10 years experience making less than new grads in SV (without even factoring in the USD/CAD differential). Until that aligns, I don't think the brain drain will stop.
Yep. Even worse with the current USD/CAD exchange rate. I do love the homeland, but taking basically a 50% paycut adds a lot of weight to the US end of the scale.
Plus I spend less than $1K USD/month on rent here in Seattle (live with one roommate), so cost of living is pretty much the same - especially with food being more expensive in Canada.
Seattle might be an exception, but this site suggests COL is ~50% higher in SF than Toronto [1], USD is 33% stronger than CAD. Basically, if Vector Institute can offer 200K CAD, it's no different than 250K USD in SF. Is my math wrong?
The math sounds about right, but the kind of COL calculation you just made assumes people spend all the money they make with no savings/investments.
A more realistic model for most high-income earners that accounts for savings/investments would heavily favor higher salary+COL regions.
For a simplistic illustration of this using the same numbers, if you spend 100k CAD a year and make 200k CAD, you can save 100k CAD a year. If you spend 150K CAD (50% higher COL) and make 312.5K CAD (equivalent to 250K USD at 1.25 exchange rate), you'd save the equivalent of 162.5K CAD a year.
You seem to be assuming that the SF and Toronto workers will retire to the same place, so the extra savings of the SF worker will go further. Conversely, if you assume that the SF worker retires to a place with a 50% higher COL than the
Toronto worker, the difference disappears.
Personally, my backup plan is to retire to Bulgaria based on SF savings ;)
If we take into account the time-value of money (which would be natural since we're talking about savings/investments that are subject to inflation and compound interest), higher income + higher COL remains favorable even if the cost of living ratio remains constant upon retirement.
Hmm, no. Each per-year saved amount is compounded by the same multiplier k after N years (assuming the same interest rate), so if you start with 1.5x more, you end up with 1.5x more.
With respect to income/material wealth? Factoring in cost of living Toronto is still a poor place to live compared to any reasonable location in the United States.
The currency basically negates any cost of living difference. Toronto is expensive as fuck (as most major cities are now).
Most people here are comparing Toronto to San Fransisco, not any reasonable location.
Let's do some numbers. According to glassdoor an average salary for a software engineer in San Fransisco is 110k USD. A single bedroom apartment in SF goes for 3500/mo on average.
In Toronto, according to payscale the average software developer job is 65k CAD, though let's also consider 80k because it's not hard to get that at a decent place if you have several years of experience. A single bedroom apartment right in downtown can be had for 1,600/mo CAD. Assuming you are living where you work and not doing something like living in Toronto earning a US salary, your buying power with left over money is likely to be similar.
SF, after taxes (21%) gives you 86,900. Taking out rent, you are left with 44,900. Toronto at 65k is taxes about 25%, so you are left with 48,601 and after rent you have 29,401. But, if you get 80k, then you are taxes 26% and after rent get 39,461 left over which starts looking a lot more comparable.
Did you forget to convert the currency? 44,900 * 1.3 = 58370. Also, you don't have to live in a single bedroom apartment for $3500/mo. I've had comfortable living conditions at $2000.
You're also forgetting that Toronto does not reward being a good developer. Your salary is capped way too early compared to America where you can easily go above 200k+ total compensation. Not to mention networking, getting technology for cheaper (in general), exclusive events, etc.
It's not even close to comparable despite recent propaganda to show otherwise. Not unless you're a below-average developer, in which case, it is better to be in Toronto.
Source: Born and raised in Toronto. Ran the numbers a bunch of times trying to convince myself to stay. Money won out.
The tightening of (or perception of tighter) visas in the US may result in more grad students considering Canada as a potential destination than the US. Industry is likely to follow where the talent goes and this could result in wage equilibrium
While that may be true for a software engineer the same does not apply to AI talent.
The Vector Institute will offer salaries comparable to top global industrial AI labs. Also the Canadian industry appreciates the value a good data scientist and knows the talent war is global.
Likely no published source. OP seems to be involved with U of Toronto's business school "incubator" for A.I. start-ups, which has close ties to Vector Institute.
I'd also love to hear which employer is paying 250K for an entry level position? This seems like the salary the 1 genius for every 10,000 good graduates would get. And without taking bonus into account, I doubt an engineer is getting paid 900K. You would see that engineer out the door the moment his retirement account was full. No engineer is gonna bust their ass for someone else once they know they are set financially.
"Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in computer vision, said one of her Ph.D. candidates had an offer for a job paying more than $1 million a year, and that was only one of four from big and small companies." https://nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-to-...
I don't know if you're wrong, but you're certainly not alone. If you read history, or you're old enough, you'll know that we've already had at least two AI winters (mid 70s to early 80s and early 90s to early 00s), depending on how you count them, and the hype around machine learning is almost word-for-word the same as the hype around expert systems was last time around. This bubble is ripe for bursting.
If I remember correctly, this salary was offered to Andrej Karpathy, who's easily the top 10 in the world in DL field. So, no, it's not a bubble. Top experts have always been paid well.
DL is over hyped. This idea that people from a few AI labs are producing everything is basically SF VCs sniffing the farts of AI departments near SF telling them that only their labs and the labs of a few friends are magically producing pixie dust. It must be nice to be so well connected. When the bubble pops very soon, 1 year on a 500k salary will have been enough for them anyway.
I think that there are 3 or 4 companies who would have happily paid that for say Alex Krizhevsky ("Alex Net") a few years ago, and it's pretty clear that would have paid off (it certainly has for Google).
Many more are sticking around because they want to be part of this potentially world changing field, and because you can always find uses for more money.
I agree, I live in Toronto and I have been working exclusively for US based companies because of this.
Good Canadian companies offer a maximum of 120k CAD entry salary if you are very experienced, that is 90k USD and taxes are pretty high in Canada. It makes no sense for me to accept work here, thankfully I know a couple of uncommon and old school languages that have kept me employed as a remote developer.
Ok here it goes...
Perl.
I am on my early 20s, but most of my co-workers are hardcore unix hackers in their 40s or 50s, so the pay is definitely good.
And no I'm not working on hacky codebases from the 90s, I mostly work for companies that use "Modern Perl".
dude awesome! I love Perl. I use to do a lot of scripting in Perl for my old job. Good to know this information. Question, are you guys at Perl 6 or not yet?
For the full picture it's worth mentioning that weak CAD also means less expenses when converted to USD. Also basic health insurance is already paid with taxes. But it still doesn't compensate the difference.
I don't think you understand that Canadians pay out of pocket for many non-emergency medical services that are 100% covered by the gold-plated health plans offered by Google, Facebook, etc.
Dental, prescriptions, eye tests, rehabilitation and physical therapy, hell even an ambulance ride - all NOT covered by the Canadian "universal" medical system.
Most do. But companies that are stingy with compensation are stingy with all forms of compensation. Supplemental medical benefits at low-paying Toronto tech jobs don't match the top companies in Silicon Valley, so a Toronto tech worker could easily spend more out of pocket for medical than one in San Francisco.
State/Provincial income tax appear to be similar, yes. But Canadian federal tax is higher, and Ontario sales tax (HST) is a gag-inducing 13%. If you think Ontarioans are ok with that sales tax, just check out any outlet mall in Buffalo on a Saturday.
A more useful comparison would be the 'effective tax rate', which of course varies by individual situation but can be done for some archetypes. This would allow you to consider additional deductions such as the mortgage interest deduction, which shouldn't be underestimated.
At ~170k USD (220k CAD) in Ontario, you'll be hitting the combined top marginal rate of 54%.
It's true that California+Federal will be within a couple points of that at their top marginal rate, but that's 1m+ in California and 400k+ federally. So you won't even be within spitting distance until 400k+.
In California at ~170k USD you'll only be paying a combined marginal rate of ~37%, which is a huge difference. The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+. And although payroll taxes are a bit more in the US AFAIK, Canada has higher sales taxes and lots of other hidden costs (e.g. much higher gas tax, more expensive consumer goods due to import duties, etc.).
We may be able to get by with lower salaries than America if Americas immigration system continues to lag. It's easier for potential AI brains to immigrate here than the States under the current climate. I do agree that this is only of limited advantage, but it's something.
I feel like because of structural and tax issues with our society, American style salaries will never be a thing here. That probably means that we will never be the tech power house that America is, but I think we can compete pretty effectively with Europe in getting the brains who, for whatever reason, choose not to go to America. And hey . . . second best ain't that bad.
our taxes are much higher meaning people and companies have less disposable income - more money is in the public sector rather than the private sector. Structural is the way our society is set up, there are lots of public services so people rely on that more than on personal savings. We don't have as many venture capitalists as America, we don't have the same number of startups, the wealth in our nation is tied up in the hands of a few large corporations rather than spread out among many businesses.
Our taxes aren't that high compared to some states. California's are definitely higher. Toronto's housing market is stupid though. Would be better off in Waterloo, or Ottawa
Canadian-American here who was eager about the possibility of working in a Greater Toronto Area company. At one startup I was offered the equivalent of $35k USD per year.
I currently work at a startup in SF making almost three times that amount.
I left Toronto for the US in 2015, and my compensation increased by 3-4x (currency conversion taken into account). I have been working for large well-known US companies in both cities.
There is some false reasoning here. While Canadian per-capita income is lower once adjusted for currency valuations, Toronto's per-capita income is higher than the Canadian average, and thanks to significant wealth disparity, there's plenty of people in Toronto earning better than Silicon Valley wages.
The economy can absolutely support those higher salaries. The fact of the matter is there aren't many jobs of that nature in Toronto right now, but if there were, I don't see reason to think the pay couldn't be competitive.
The difference might be even more extreme than that. I still am in school (University of Waterloo) and am going to an internship which pays ~110k USD, whereas in Canada I could maybe hope for less than half of that. All my peers aim to go to the valley just because of this HUGE pay gap.
Edited:
Granted every time I've worked in the valley, housing has been exorbitant, but still makes it worth my while. The most I've seen people pay in SF has been ~2k if you don't want to share a room.
You are not factoring in costs that will one day materialize.
Believe it or not, one day many people decide they want to have kids. To send them to a decent school in the U.S. costs money. I've seen $10k for K-12. That's 13years of $10k per child. So 3 kids = $390k U.S. That's $U.S. dollars and after taxes.
Then there will be a day where you get laid off. The AI/ML industry will suffer a downturn at some point. In the U.S. your severance will be tiny (?2 weeks salary?), whereas in Canada it will be a minimum of something like a month plus 2 weeks per year of service - but often much more than that. So 10 years of service will be provide 24 weeks.
Vacations - in the U.S., 2 weeks seems common, but many Canadians enjoy 4-5 weeks of vacation.
Then there's the increased crime and violence. Guns in particular. In the U.S., if you want to be as safe as Canada, you need to live in a gat
ed community. Those ain't cheap.
I definitely agree that Canada has a great social safety net and is a better place to live. Those costs you mentioned do add up. I will most likely be working full time in Canada because of those reasons. The vast majority of peers though might not because of the UPFRONT lack of competitiveness from Canadian companies.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is it not the purpose of taxes to fund these services. I actually had to pay Canadian income taxes this year in addition to US taxes, even though I had no income in Canada. I totally understand and accept this as it helps maintain everything that is great about where I live.
I'm not seeing how valuing an Engineer less solves the issue of funding social services. If anything a higher income for an Engineer would mean that they would be paying more in taxes to also fund those services. Does an Engineer in Canada not provide the same financial benefit for the institution where they work, compared to if they were to work in the US? I feel like there are set income brackets that companies have established that have not been modernized to adapt to the changing marketplace. It just so happens that being a competent Computer Scientist is a valuable skill at this point in history because of the potential upside they can provide for a company and companies are not acknowledging this.
For those who haven't been, Toronto is a really wonderful city. Safe, great food, and has an awesome art and music scene. Lots of cool cultural events as well.
If it wasn't so hard to emigrate as an average America, I'd live there in a heartbeat. They do have a really good working holiday program for people in Asia and some parts of Europe.
Canada only allows something like 300,000 long-term residents to move into the country per year, of which about half those slots are reserved for refugees and family reunification. They're immigrantion process is just as bureaucratic as the US (if not slightly more so), and they are very selective about whom they take (favoring the wealthy, those with advanced higher education, and French/English bilinguals).
Google is also building an AI research lab in Montreal, which is supposedly a talent center for AI. According to this article from Wired: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-opens-montreal-ai-lab-s..., Google "donated about $13 million CAD to academic research in the country and about half was earmarked for AI research."
As someone who lived in Toronto and now lives in SV, this is great news for the region, which is flush with talent and is really doing everything to support researchers and entrepreneurs. However the cost of living(COL) is prohibitive, maybe even more than SV and the ratio of salary to COL is definitely higher than SV.
House prices are skyrocketing but condos are still pretty cheap. There just isn't any more space for actual houses in the city so the ones that are there are extra valuable.
You can still find tons of 1+1 units in the city for under $2000/month which is the same as it was 3-4 years ago.
$2k per month is really high. Even if a tech worker can afford that, it really restricts the city to the rich, which is not good. Every city needs a balance of all classes for there to be stable growth.
$2k per month for a 1+1 in a 'luxury' condo building right in the core of the city isn't high by basically any standard. There are a lot of options in the city still that are a lot cheaper.
I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let them all live there and keep it affordable?
I'd argue that the biggest factors creating the spike in housing cost is the of the centralization of most good jobs to a handful of urban centers, the purchase of housing by foreign investors as vacation or investment properties, and an artificially low housing inventory.
The centralization of most jobs to a handful of urban centers is the largest and most powerful force driving this spike in prices. Jobs are flying out of rural areas and less populated cities. It increases prices, making it very difficult for a newcomer to buy in the area, let alone rent. It creates pockets of areas that reap the benefits of globalization, creating a very stark contrast between areas that benefit from it and that don't. And all this is just so that the corporation benefits from the concentrated, highly technical labor pool.
The foreign investor cap should be easy to implement, but because our government is broken, it won't happen. There are lots of ways this could be addressed, with property taxes of unleased housing, taxing of a third home or beyond, and probably lots of other things smarter people could think of.
The artificially low housing inventory is difficult because that stems from local government more than anything else. Fixing this might take state laws to be passed since locals will have an incentive to not have new properties made.
Again, the centralization of the remaining jobs is the biggest factor in my opinion. It really needs to be addressed since it negatively hurts our society, but I don't know any other ideas on how to fix it without increasing demand for lower class labor via protectionism. That would drive companies to look to rural America for cheap labor vs Mexico or China which would weaken the requirement to live in an urban center, but obviously that would be very costly to our economy. If you have any other ideas on how to fix it, I'd definitely read it.
Do you think Toronto has an artificially low housing inventory? With the hundreds of 40 story condo towers popping up?
So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers? Say I own a tech business how do you convince me to move my company to Barrie for example? I now have the difficulty of finding local talent or convincing talent to relocate to me or deal with a very long commute. Where is the benefit for me? Network effects are real.
Besides this Toronto already essentially has a number of business cores that are distributed. You have the financial district, Young/Eg, Sauga, Markham, Vaughn and those are just the biggest ones.
None of that reduces demand for the core though because it is the most appealing place to live for most young people.
> So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers?
That's the tough thing. The only solution I can think of, protectionism, will be very rough on employers. The lower and middle classes would thrive, but corporations that previously had massive profit margins would see those almost disappear, especially after unions form again.
Obviously this would be very expensive, but I really fear that if we don't do something, our country will end up politically and socially unstable. A country with millions of minimum wage workers and a handful of rich-only cities is bound to have troubles.
As far as Toronto's housing inventory goes, I don't know enough about Toronto to comment.
Global trade has benefits beyond cheap labor. Resource distribution between nations is not even. Because of that, I'd stop all or most trade with countries who don't have labor and environmental protection laws similar to our own, but still allow trade with countries with similar economies. That would allow the resource flow needed to give a balanced economy, but still bring manufacturing back. Over time, demand for lower class labor would raise, leading to higher wages and quality of life for most people.
That's the hope anyway. If you see any blaring flaws beyond the fact that multinational corporations would suffer, please let me know.
So you stop international trade but why wouldn't the manufacturing just build up on the edges of the cities? Why do you think that would distribute naturally throughout the country? The cities have a built in and stable workforce. Unless there is a natural resource that needs to be extracted from the area I'm just not seeing it.
Besides with the increase in automation the types of workers factories will need in the future will be high tech as well.
Farming and natural resources generally.
Where there was a mine to open or lumber to chop a town would spring up. Otherwise you'd typically get small towns springing up in the middle of farming areas. But back then a family might have 100 or 200 acres so you'd get a lot of people in a fairly small area. Now with modern tech farms can be 10 times that and corporations probably own most of them so they don't each have their own family.
Thank you as well. It was a good one for thinking about stuff even if we disagree on the basic idea. :)
UMontreal has Bengio, UofT has Hinton. Toronto also has Google Brain, and many UofT phd students and postdocs have ended up there (Sutskever, Karpathy).
Correct, Montréal is already way way ahead of Toronto on the AI front. Google and Microsoft already invested heavily into Montréal. M$ donated 7 million to UdeM and McGill as well.
Despite repeated communication from employees that no one wants to live in fucking Waterloo, and a significant portion of the engineers there commute from Toronto anyways.
Toronto's problem (and to an extent the other major cities in Canada) isn't so much about the salary differences with SV so much as the entire tech ecosystem. The money and cost of living would probably affect decisions for people outside of the GTA trying to move here. But because Toronto is the largest city in the country and is the focal point of Southern Ontario, it could do well by simply retaining the talent it outputs.
The brain drain from the GTA and Southern Ontario has long been real. But alternatively, many people move from other places to Toronto. What makes it difficult for new grads and industry veterans from keeping shop in Toronto is that the mobility and learning experiences aren't there. There are a limited number of high-tech jobs here and anything else is likely in the medical, law, finance, or even media world. In that sense, I wouldn't even classify tech as a second-class citizen so much as being far down on the totem pole.
I partially wonder if the general inferiority complex of Torontonians/Canadians has created this effect. Because the city typically lusts for things from other places (such as SV or NY), it never develops its own reputation and chooses to be itself. Because of that, tech has never developed an identity because all of our tech talent chooses the shiny opportunity granted to them by some company because it's "from Silicon Valley". Just think of what the tech ecosystem would be like if all Torontonians simply stayed here.
For instance, I often posit what would have happened had the ML/DL community had stronger partnerships with AMD as opposed to building everything with CUDA/NVIDIA. AMD, afterall, is just up the street from the University of Toronto in Markham. A symbiotic relationship could've been built with Hinton's lab.
As one of those brains that drained out of Toronto, I would say that "limited number of spaces" is malarky. You can create the space. What I did find was that Toronto's investment community (at least a couple of decades ago) was much more conservative, so it was much harder to create the space in Toronto than it was south of the border.
I think you're overlooking the broader point I'm making by focusing on that one line. The point is that if Toronto had the same tech ecosystem as to say even Seattle or New York for salaries ranging between half to two-thirds of their American counterparts, I'd reasonably certain Canadians would opt to stay here.
Yes, the investment community has a broader effect on the startups within the city. But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
> I think you're overlooking the broader point I'm making by focusing on that one line.
Sorry if my comment read that way. I was only critiquing the one line, not the entire post.
> But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
I think you are getting cause and effect backwards here. In my experience, there were plenty of tech employers in Toronto, just not for the really interesting & challenging stuff. For example, IBM has had a very large presence there for decades, but twenty years ago the coolest software project they had going on up there was the Visual Age IDE's. Alias Systems was a big deal back in the day, but even that ended up being bought up and by Autodesk...
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, is the great-great-grandson of George Boole, whose Boolean algebra is a keystone of digital computing—has sometimes been called the father of deep learning; it’s a topic he’s worked on since the mid-nineteen-seventies, and many of his students have become principal architects of the field today.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadPlus I spend less than $1K USD/month on rent here in Seattle (live with one roommate), so cost of living is pretty much the same - especially with food being more expensive in Canada.
[1] https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-americ...
A more realistic model for most high-income earners that accounts for savings/investments would heavily favor higher salary+COL regions.
For a simplistic illustration of this using the same numbers, if you spend 100k CAD a year and make 200k CAD, you can save 100k CAD a year. If you spend 150K CAD (50% higher COL) and make 312.5K CAD (equivalent to 250K USD at 1.25 exchange rate), you'd save the equivalent of 162.5K CAD a year.
Personally, my backup plan is to retire to Bulgaria based on SF savings ;)
There is still plenty of inherent value in accumulating wealth at a faster pace though.
The currency basically negates any cost of living difference. Toronto is expensive as fuck (as most major cities are now).
Let's do some numbers. According to glassdoor an average salary for a software engineer in San Fransisco is 110k USD. A single bedroom apartment in SF goes for 3500/mo on average.
In Toronto, according to payscale the average software developer job is 65k CAD, though let's also consider 80k because it's not hard to get that at a decent place if you have several years of experience. A single bedroom apartment right in downtown can be had for 1,600/mo CAD. Assuming you are living where you work and not doing something like living in Toronto earning a US salary, your buying power with left over money is likely to be similar.
SF, after taxes (21%) gives you 86,900. Taking out rent, you are left with 44,900. Toronto at 65k is taxes about 25%, so you are left with 48,601 and after rent you have 29,401. But, if you get 80k, then you are taxes 26% and after rent get 39,461 left over which starts looking a lot more comparable.
You're also forgetting that Toronto does not reward being a good developer. Your salary is capped way too early compared to America where you can easily go above 200k+ total compensation. Not to mention networking, getting technology for cheaper (in general), exclusive events, etc.
It's not even close to comparable despite recent propaganda to show otherwise. Not unless you're a below-average developer, in which case, it is better to be in Toronto.
Source: Born and raised in Toronto. Ran the numbers a bunch of times trying to convince myself to stay. Money won out.
The Vector Institute will offer salaries comparable to top global industrial AI labs. Also the Canadian industry appreciates the value a good data scientist and knows the talent war is global.
Scroll down to career opportunities. The research scientist position is advertised as being competitive with industry labs.
Just so we're clear, top ai pays like $250k USD for entry level with no real cap, but senior staff can easily take home $500-900k
and yes, people are taking home that kind of money.
Many more are sticking around because they want to be part of this potentially world changing field, and because you can always find uses for more money.
Good Canadian companies offer a maximum of 120k CAD entry salary if you are very experienced, that is 90k USD and taxes are pretty high in Canada. It makes no sense for me to accept work here, thankfully I know a couple of uncommon and old school languages that have kept me employed as a remote developer.
Many things are more expensive because of the weak dollar.
Dental, prescriptions, eye tests, rehabilitation and physical therapy, hell even an ambulance ride - all NOT covered by the Canadian "universal" medical system.
A more useful comparison would be the 'effective tax rate', which of course varies by individual situation but can be done for some archetypes. This would allow you to consider additional deductions such as the mortgage interest deduction, which shouldn't be underestimated.
At ~170k USD (220k CAD) in Ontario, you'll be hitting the combined top marginal rate of 54%.
It's true that California+Federal will be within a couple points of that at their top marginal rate, but that's 1m+ in California and 400k+ federally. So you won't even be within spitting distance until 400k+.
In California at ~170k USD you'll only be paying a combined marginal rate of ~37%, which is a huge difference. The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+. And although payroll taxes are a bit more in the US AFAIK, Canada has higher sales taxes and lots of other hidden costs (e.g. much higher gas tax, more expensive consumer goods due to import duties, etc.).
> The brackets are lower all the way up, so you pay way less overall even if you do hit 1m+.
I'm not going to do the math for a specific example though, people should do that themselves.
I currently work at a startup in SF making almost three times that amount.
Montreal is touted as an AI centre and has cheap land.
I left Toronto for the US in 2015, and my compensation increased by 3-4x (currency conversion taken into account). I have been working for large well-known US companies in both cities.
The economy can absolutely support those higher salaries. The fact of the matter is there aren't many jobs of that nature in Toronto right now, but if there were, I don't see reason to think the pay couldn't be competitive.
Edited: Granted every time I've worked in the valley, housing has been exorbitant, but still makes it worth my while. The most I've seen people pay in SF has been ~2k if you don't want to share a room.
Believe it or not, one day many people decide they want to have kids. To send them to a decent school in the U.S. costs money. I've seen $10k for K-12. That's 13years of $10k per child. So 3 kids = $390k U.S. That's $U.S. dollars and after taxes.
Then there will be a day where you get laid off. The AI/ML industry will suffer a downturn at some point. In the U.S. your severance will be tiny (?2 weeks salary?), whereas in Canada it will be a minimum of something like a month plus 2 weeks per year of service - but often much more than that. So 10 years of service will be provide 24 weeks.
Vacations - in the U.S., 2 weeks seems common, but many Canadians enjoy 4-5 weeks of vacation.
Then there's the increased crime and violence. Guns in particular. In the U.S., if you want to be as safe as Canada, you need to live in a gat ed community. Those ain't cheap.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is it not the purpose of taxes to fund these services. I actually had to pay Canadian income taxes this year in addition to US taxes, even though I had no income in Canada. I totally understand and accept this as it helps maintain everything that is great about where I live.
I'm not seeing how valuing an Engineer less solves the issue of funding social services. If anything a higher income for an Engineer would mean that they would be paying more in taxes to also fund those services. Does an Engineer in Canada not provide the same financial benefit for the institution where they work, compared to if they were to work in the US? I feel like there are set income brackets that companies have established that have not been modernized to adapt to the changing marketplace. It just so happens that being a competent Computer Scientist is a valuable skill at this point in history because of the potential upside they can provide for a company and companies are not acknowledging this.
It's very important to do the math to understand the upside of going to SV and equip yourself appropriately for negotiations.
If it wasn't so hard to emigrate as an average America, I'd live there in a heartbeat. They do have a really good working holiday program for people in Asia and some parts of Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/move-to-canada...
You can still find tons of 1+1 units in the city for under $2000/month which is the same as it was 3-4 years ago.
I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let them all live there and keep it affordable?
The centralization of most jobs to a handful of urban centers is the largest and most powerful force driving this spike in prices. Jobs are flying out of rural areas and less populated cities. It increases prices, making it very difficult for a newcomer to buy in the area, let alone rent. It creates pockets of areas that reap the benefits of globalization, creating a very stark contrast between areas that benefit from it and that don't. And all this is just so that the corporation benefits from the concentrated, highly technical labor pool.
The foreign investor cap should be easy to implement, but because our government is broken, it won't happen. There are lots of ways this could be addressed, with property taxes of unleased housing, taxing of a third home or beyond, and probably lots of other things smarter people could think of.
The artificially low housing inventory is difficult because that stems from local government more than anything else. Fixing this might take state laws to be passed since locals will have an incentive to not have new properties made.
Again, the centralization of the remaining jobs is the biggest factor in my opinion. It really needs to be addressed since it negatively hurts our society, but I don't know any other ideas on how to fix it without increasing demand for lower class labor via protectionism. That would drive companies to look to rural America for cheap labor vs Mexico or China which would weaken the requirement to live in an urban center, but obviously that would be very costly to our economy. If you have any other ideas on how to fix it, I'd definitely read it.
So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers? Say I own a tech business how do you convince me to move my company to Barrie for example? I now have the difficulty of finding local talent or convincing talent to relocate to me or deal with a very long commute. Where is the benefit for me? Network effects are real.
Besides this Toronto already essentially has a number of business cores that are distributed. You have the financial district, Young/Eg, Sauga, Markham, Vaughn and those are just the biggest ones.
None of that reduces demand for the core though because it is the most appealing place to live for most young people.
That's the tough thing. The only solution I can think of, protectionism, will be very rough on employers. The lower and middle classes would thrive, but corporations that previously had massive profit margins would see those almost disappear, especially after unions form again.
Obviously this would be very expensive, but I really fear that if we don't do something, our country will end up politically and socially unstable. A country with millions of minimum wage workers and a handful of rich-only cities is bound to have troubles.
As far as Toronto's housing inventory goes, I don't know enough about Toronto to comment.
Like what concrete actions would you take?
That's the hope anyway. If you see any blaring flaws beyond the fact that multinational corporations would suffer, please let me know.
Besides with the increase in automation the types of workers factories will need in the future will be high tech as well.
Thank you for this post. This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to get.
Thank you as well. It was a good one for thinking about stuff even if we disagree on the basic idea. :)
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
The brain drain from the GTA and Southern Ontario has long been real. But alternatively, many people move from other places to Toronto. What makes it difficult for new grads and industry veterans from keeping shop in Toronto is that the mobility and learning experiences aren't there. There are a limited number of high-tech jobs here and anything else is likely in the medical, law, finance, or even media world. In that sense, I wouldn't even classify tech as a second-class citizen so much as being far down on the totem pole.
I partially wonder if the general inferiority complex of Torontonians/Canadians has created this effect. Because the city typically lusts for things from other places (such as SV or NY), it never develops its own reputation and chooses to be itself. Because of that, tech has never developed an identity because all of our tech talent chooses the shiny opportunity granted to them by some company because it's "from Silicon Valley". Just think of what the tech ecosystem would be like if all Torontonians simply stayed here.
For instance, I often posit what would have happened had the ML/DL community had stronger partnerships with AMD as opposed to building everything with CUDA/NVIDIA. AMD, afterall, is just up the street from the University of Toronto in Markham. A symbiotic relationship could've been built with Hinton's lab.
Yes, the investment community has a broader effect on the startups within the city. But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
Sorry if my comment read that way. I was only critiquing the one line, not the entire post.
> But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.
I think you are getting cause and effect backwards here. In my experience, there were plenty of tech employers in Toronto, just not for the really interesting & challenging stuff. For example, IBM has had a very large presence there for decades, but twenty years ago the coolest software project they had going on up there was the Visual Age IDE's. Alias Systems was a big deal back in the day, but even that ended up being bought up and by Autodesk...
Fix that, and startups will flourish.
From: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md