Yeah the Toronto tech job market is really hot right now. Moved there from Silicon Valley for almost two years but I wouldn't recommend it. Pay is much lower and cost of living is still relatively high. If you are looking to stay in North America, Seattle, Austin, or LA, seem like much better bets to me
How? Why? I mean, it's easy to see the return on investment that SV has yielded from employing more people, and to see the competitive advantage SV has to maintain its growth. But Toronto is everything bad about SV, and nothing good. Its housing is just as unaffordable, yet it doesn't have a large network of talent from decades of innovative companies to draw from.
Not in absolute terms, but it's closer when you compare housing cost vs compensation, I think.
The cost of rental housing has jumped up quite a bit recently, too. When I was looking for a place to live in 2015, I saw quite a few condos for rent right downtown for $1700-1800 a month. Now I see units in those same buildings renting for $2300 a month and up.
Still cheaper than SV, I suppose? And if you don't mind a bit of a commute, you can find more affordable accommodation.
Yup, all the new building (buildings built after 1992) weren't under rent-control. Since last year, they now are under rent-control which means landlord can only increase rent by 1.7% every year, which is why you saw that jump in rent. Not leaving my condo until i manage to buy my own place, which is going to be very difficult as well.
It's actually a very attractive option for people who are stuck in the EB-2 GC queue in the US. For instance, you could wait in the US for 15 years on a H1-B unable to open your own business, or you could move to Toronto on Express Entry and try and build a company.
That press release is 2016, and puts San Francisco at the top of the list. The HuffPo article makes its claim using 2012 - 2017 stats, so presumably it's a newer report. Here are the CBRE report summaries for 2017 and 2018:
I still appreciate the link, though, because HuffPo didn't source their numbers, which look very strange. CBRE's 2017 data says San Francisco has had the highest percentage growth in tech jobs for 6 years running, and it's ~20 points higher than Toronto in each timeframe listed. The 2018 report does list Toronto growing at 51.5%, and the San Francisco Bay Area growing at 31%.
But we need to know what region is being assessed - the 2016 report separates San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so this is a crucial difference. San Francisco proper is 800,000 people, Silicon Valley is ~3,000,000, Toronto ~3,000,000 and the Bay Area is 8,000,000. The CBRE data does break out Silicon Valley separately, at least in pre-2018 reports. The headline here says "Silicon Valley", but the body gives numbers for the "San Francisco Bay Area".
Working backwards from the publicly-available CBRE report stats, I get 90,000 new tech jobs in Toronto from 2013-2017. That's noticeably higher than HuffPo's 82,000 from 2012-2017, but plausible given that I'm using CBRE's heavily-rounded numbers.
San Francisco apparently had 79,100 tech jobs at the start of 2017, up from 56,800 at the start of 2015. We can back-calculate to 38,600 tech workers in 2013. Calculations from Census Bureau estimates from that time period put the number somewhere very similar in 2013, suggesting that this is correct. CBRE tells us San Francisco also had the highest percentage growth surveyed in 2012, so we can project 2012 growth from the next years. Percentage growth has been slowing, so I used the 2013-2015 rate to get 7,300 new jobs in 2012. Those numbers are for San Francisco itself, population 800,000. If we nevertheless apply the 2017 "San Francisco Bay Area" percentage growth to this number, we get 2013-3017 growth of 65,600, for a 2012-2017 total change of 72,900.
> Toronto... beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000-72,900 = 9,100
This is 2x HuffPo's number, but I'm really working the data to make these rounded percentages workout. Fortunately, all of the other differences we're worried about dwarf this. It's not Silicon Valley, that's distinct, and it can't be the whole Bay Area, because that would imply the non-SF Bay Area of 7,200,000 people gained a total of 4,000 tech jobs in five years.
It looks like HuffPo used CBRE's San Francisco proper numbers, cited raw counts despite a ~4x population difference, and then reported it as the "San Francisco Bay Area" based on CBRE's 2018 language. That, or they failed to notice that CBRE (and other firms like PwC) have changed their region breakdown this year, and simply conflated Bay Area numbers from one year with San Francisco numbers from other years.
It looks like somebody tried for a dramatic-but-misleading story with a useless comparison, confused their subject between headline and body, and ultimately made a numerical statement that's simply false. Failing to link their source was probably a good move given all that.
(And I'll bet this article took half as long to write and publish ...
I don't know any Canadian developer with less than 5 years of experience earning $90k/year. Most developers I know with more than 5 years of experience earn less than $90k/year.
There are very few senior developer jobs over 150k Cad, even with a lot of experience.
I expect that to change as the hiring crunch continues but right now the ceiling has been slow to budge - much slower than the lower end of the spectrum, which is pressured more with average rent in Toronto going up over 15% year over year
The Hired.com annual salary report shows that while Toronto tech incomes have gone up overall in the past year, developer salaries have actually declined.
Canada has an exceptionally strong culture of pushing for workplace training, to the point that the OECD calls Canada the most educated nation, so when a career stands out as having good job prospects (which development has been billed that way for several years now) people flood into it, putting downward pressure on incomes unlike you find stateside where the social dynamics don't push people into those jobs the same way.
If you're doing something really unique perhaps there is still room for upward growth (although you're probably already well past $150k in that case), but generally it is unlikely that developer incomes will climb further at all.
It might be a good time for those devs you know to make a move, if they're at all unhappy with their job situation.
A few devs I know with >5 years experience have moved to new roles lately, and the companies didn't even hesitate when they asked for salaries well over 100k. I know it's just anecdotal, of course. Other probably have good counter-examples. but maybe it's a useful data point regardless.
I'm at $90k with ~3 years experience (located in Toronto). Many of my colleagues are either at 90 or very close (~85) with similar experience. I've lived in Vancouver as well and have seen similar compensation.
I'm a Toronto native and have been working as a dev for the past two years. COL is extremely high compared to salaries. This is likely the biggest problem for anyone looking to move here. For example, a small 1 bedroom condo downtown will run you at least CA$2k a month. For a larger 1 bedroom or 1+den your easily looking at $2-3k in today's demanding market. Public transit is usually a hit or miss during rush hour. I'd suggest looking into Kitchener/Waterloo, Markham or Ottawa area if you're considering moving here. COL in these areas compared to Toronto is drastic and many of the bigN companies (Shopify, Google, IBM, etc..) are located here.
The rates of $2000+ quoted above are for newly built condos with lots of amenities and are walking distance to lots of places filled with 20-30 year olds
You are comparing apples to oranges
Even in port credit you cannot rent a brand new bachelor in a new building that’s not in a basement, which has new stainless steel appliances, dishwasher, air conditioning and at least a gym or pool.
I’m not knocking the idea of paying low rent to save money to get ahead in life, I think that’s something all young people should do.
But comparing port credit bachelor unit life to a new build 1 bedroom in the core is just a bad comparison
I wasn't saying it's the same, I'm saying there are other options. For the record I don't live in a basement, I live street level in a real apt (not a sublet) in the hottest neighbourhood in Mississauga. I'm a half block from Lakeshore and 3 from the GO station. You can find similar apts in Etobicoke, which is also in Toronto.
What's funny is I remember when the downtown waterfront condos were $50,000 each and nobody wanted to buy - long walk to downtown and freezing cold in winter. How things change.
Mississauga has a larger population than Vancouver, it's not some backwater suburb of Toronto. Have you ever been to Port Credit? Come around and I'll buy you a drink. You'll eat your words lol.
I hope for your sake you bought one of those 50k condos. I'm 25 so I missed the boat on cheap real estate.
You lost me at "commute via car". Toronto has a reputation for some of the worst traffic in North America.
It might be cheaper to live that far away, but the cost in quality of life + hours commuting isn't worth the trade. Instead you can just go to a smaller town like Waterloo or a cheaper city like Montreal or Ottawa.
Takes me around an hour each way. I prefer it to public transit which takes me 45 minutes. I've lived in the GTA my whole life, I'm used to the traffic. The KW and Ottawa are cheap but they're really boring. If you're starting a family or something they would be great.
So you pay at the least around $300 a month to commute via GO train and then you need a car which is at the least another $500 when you factor in gas + insurance + lease. That's another $800 to your monthly expense and add commuting time to that.
At least with commuter rail you get a few extra productive hours per day, unlike driving. My uncle commutes from Guelph to Toronto on GO most days and makes full use of the silent railcar for work.
I bought my car outright, and I would have got that and my insurance whether I need it for work or not. For me the GO train + TTC is approx $13 a day. Driving is $18, which includes parking and gas. Why would I pay for the GO and driving daily (500 + 300)? That doesn't make any sense lol. Even if I included the cost of my car, insurance, gas, parking and (to make it fun) my cable bill, I still pay less than the base cost of an entry level apartment downtown. I don't consider my time driving wasted, it's leisure time.
EDIT: On second reading you may be talking about driving to the GO station, in which case I agree... although I can easily walk to the GO station in <5 minutes myself. Your parent comment might also live a short walk or bus ride away from the Clarkson GO station
+1 Waterloo/Kitchener area; As for commuting via car, the TTC hasn't fared well as well. Satisfaction keeps dropping month over month in polls. Driving isn't an ideal option either due to the traffic - it is the worst indeed.
No one is taking account the demographic that are likely to move to Toronto.
If you have a partner or significant other, it's not worth relocating to Toronto. Tech job's salaries are already considered extremely high here, but the majority of other jobs don't come close outside a few industries such as medical. Not to mention, non-tech industries are not booming like the tech industry, so even finding a decent job is a challenge.
Therefore, the demographic of people that would even consider relocation to Toronto are singles. After I graduated college and moved downtown from Etobicoke, I have so much more free time to actually live life. That 2 hours of commuting is extremely valuable, and this is coming from someone who was born and raised in Toronto. If you're a newcomer and single living outside of downtown or at a distance from work, commuting 1 hour to work, then working for 8 hours, and finally commuting 1 hour back - that's already 10 hours gone from your day. Factor in daily tasks and you're left with very little time in the week to find friends or socialize.
For me at least, I like driving so I would probably spend 2 hours driving anyway. I listen to music or podcasts and destress before I get home. I really don't mind it.
People just don’t understand how valuable time is. Commuting 2hrs each way daily x 5 days is 40 hours a month you will never get back.
Also I find that people with long commute times rarely admit how bad it is in the winter. I work from home 70% of my days and when I commute it’s 30 minutes by car each way. On a bad winter day it’s 3x that! Taking an Uber home to port credit after a night of drinking on a winter day would take 3 hours!
I recently spoke to a man who lives in the east end and commutes by car everyday to Cambridge! He said it’s 3 hours each way in the winter, blew my mind! (His wife worked in the east end)
Socialize? People are too busy working to afford living in the big smoke. :)
All joking aside, some folks I've known driven from St Catherine every day to work in the core. Summer wasn't too bad, winter they left at 4am and got home around 10pm just to rinse and repeat. Hardly got to see his kids. Truly not sure what they told themselves to keep doing it every day as to me it was simply insane.
You're right, no one has to. But why would I want to take a job somewhere that pays less, and has me live out in the middle of nowhere if I don't want to live out in the middle of nowhere?
Wow, CDN$2k for a nice 1-bedroom shoebox? That's great! Take a look at San Francisco's equivalents, where you'll pay USD$3k or more for rough equivalence; that's about 2x the price. Things get more extreme when you start talking about home ownership.
Toronto COL might feel expensive now but it can definitely get a lot more expensive.
You need to also take in to account average income when looking at COL, which is significantly higher in SF than in TO. If you're spending 2x the price in SF, but making 3x then you come out way ahead.
The weather in Toronto is god awful compared to San Francisco. Honestly, it's bad compared to almost any US city. I get why Vancouver is so expensive, but never understood Toronto's prices.
Just curious, what cities are you referring to? I've spent time in NY, Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee/Madison, Des Moines, St Louis, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Auston, San Antonio and many more. Toronto's weather is pretty similar to more than half that list. No, it's not California, but neither is 97% of the US.
> I've spent time in NY, Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee/Madison, Des Moines, St Louis, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Auston, San Antonio and many more. Toronto's weather is pretty similar to more than half that list.
Which half? Did you include the rest as an exercise? Lol.
The article is like it's headline copied and pasted twice. Does "tech jobs" mean jobs at "tech" companies or does it also include tech jobs in finance, telco and government? Most of those are also in Toronto.
As a Toronto native, who now lives in Silicon Valley (part of the brain drain from Waterloo), there is a reason why everyone leaves Toronto/Canada - the salaries are simply laughable when compared to the bay area.
The only reason you would stay in Toronto for a job in tech is if you wanted to stay close to family, or your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse.
Or, you just hate money and being at the center of the tech industry...
I moved back after 10 years. While being an immigrant sucks in ways a lot of people don't imagine - its worth it for the initial education and career boost. It will also teach you to "think like an american" which is important when the majority of capital is controlled by US persons.
Are you serious? Canada has a point-based system that requires you have some actual real skills and an education. I wish we had an immigration system like that in the US. Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
> Canada has a point-based system that requires you have some actual real skills and an education.
While based on binary categories rather than point-based system, so does US employment-based immigration. It also often requires a sponsoring employer, as well.
OTOH, Canada, like the US, also has family based immigration—and because it doesn't have per-country limits, it doesn't have decade+ wait times from some high-interest countries in key categories (though it does have smaller multi-year waits in some categories for immigrant visas, but it also has renewable multi-year “visiting family” supervisas which you can apparently take advantage of while an immigrant visa is pending.)
> Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
Canada not only has asylum (and accepts proportionately more refugees than the US even before Trump), but it doesn't seem to have a major political party scapegoating them and illegal immigrants to justify policies cutting back on legal immigration.
> If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
No, they wouldn't; difficulty of immigration isn't the reason people who make that kind of hyperbolic threat every election almost never follow through.
When Trump's travel ban rolled out and people with green cards were being blocked at the border, I was terrified. Thank goodness the courts struck down that version.
My wife and I aren't from any of the blocked countries, but who knows how the list could have grown at Trump's whim and current "enemy of the week".
Personally my H1 was denied by Trump administration citing some BS reason. I have been here for over 12 yrs and work in a decacorn as a PM. I am looking to move to Canada.
Although I find salaries to be lower in Toronto than in small town Canada. Tech professionals prefer the city, so companies outside have to pay a premium to attract people. And that is before accounting for the substantially lower cost of living.
So if it's just a preference for the Canadian political climate, then Toronto still does not seem like the best bet.
There are no big companies in Toronto that have tech jobs. Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc. don't have tech jobs in Toronto. Amazon just started adding tech jobs in Toronto in the past maybe year or two and Shopify is the only exception to this rule.
If any toronto natives know of some big companies in Toronto with tech jobs please prove me wrong.
I'm not sure if you'd count IBM, but they have their Toronto Software Lab here. It's technically in Markham now, but if it were on the south side of Steeles instead of the north side, it would be in Toronto proper. AMD also still has a large office in Markham in what used to be ATI headquarters.
I've seen a few articles about Apple hiring developers in Toronto, so there's that too.
Maybe Waterloo is a bit too far away to count, but Google has a fairly big engineering office there.
Muse, Google, Facebook, Softchoice, IBM, ALL major banks have a tech arm now, like Scotia Banks Digital Factory, CIBC Live Labs ,etc., and other tech companies, Flip, Wave, Freshbooks, Wattpad (raised major vc money), Ritual (raised 75m this year), TribalScale, Worktango, just to name a few.
Amazon has an office, scaling up quickly. UberATG (self driving) has an office. Shopify has a huge presence. People say google, but it's really a marketing office with <20 engineers.
Microsoft and HP are in Mississauga, Honeywell and IBM are in Markham. Uber has a small office right in my neighbourhood. Rakuten Kobo is in the neighbourhood as well. Nvidia is downtown, but their office is relatively small.
There are a few. Most large ones are in the suburbs. Downtown has an overwhelming amount of VC-funded ad-tech companies that I wouldn't go near if my living depended on it. (I'd take up something else to cover the bills...)
I moved from Toronto to SF last year, I think the CoL-adjusted salary is pretty close, or actually better in Toronto. This is comparing good mid-sized company in both cities.
One misconception I think, is that many people moved to SV for big-N companies and comparing that with average Toronto salaries.
> I think the CoL-adjusted salary is pretty close, or actually better in Toronto.
This is a common misconception, and is promoted by a lot of tech companies in Toronto. It actually frustrates me whenever someone says that the compensation in the bay vs Toronto is the same after adjusting for CoL.
It's really not. You will end up with more absolute savings by working in the bay area, than you will in Toronto in a similar living situation.
>>It's really not. You will end up with more absolute savings by working in the bay area, than you will in Toronto in a similar living situation.
Almost every expat Canadian working and saving in the US also has a little voice in the back of their mind reassuring them that even if the absolute number of saved US dollars is the same as saved Canadian dollars, there's a really good chance their US dollars will go further [when|if] they move back home in X years due to the historical exchange rate.
To put things in concrete terms, for a single person living 1br downtown high-rise with one car. Cost of living difference is about 30k higher in SF. At 100-200k range salaries, it's around 50k pre-tax income. (Figures not accounting for exchange rate)
Salary difference between medium no name companies in the two cities are about that much.
I was just in Toronto. It could also be because your buying power is significantly more than in the valley. You make more but everything (house or rent) is also more...
Everything is more in Valley compared to Toronto, including the absolute dollars you save per month. Unless you're saving $0 per month, then you benefit from the higher salary, even if adjusted for cost of living.
Can confirm. Staying in Toronto because prospects are fewer outside of the city. Girlfriend is from the west coast but helps head up a very popular establishment group in town. Family is from ~2 hours outside of the city on Lake Erie.
I've been casually seeking either something more profitable so that I can save, or otherwise a viable remote position so that we can move a little out of the city (or to the coast). (Both profitable and remote would be ideal in this case, but I can take one before the other as either would help get me there).
Hell, I'd probably even move to the right suburb if I could land a substantially compensated job with Honeywell or something for a while.
Judging my present circumstances, you'd probably wager that I do hate money. I used to have a lot more fun here than I do these days.
I hate when economic mobility is measured that way (bottom quintile to top quintile movement). It completely ignore the absolute amount of money earned.
Let's say you're in Canada and you move from the bottom quintile to the top. Top quintile starts at $100K, and you're making $110K. Great!
Those poor American's who don't make it to the top quintile ($150K) and only the 4th quintile are making $125K.
Which one would you prefer? Does the US actually have lower income mobility? Relatively speaking, yes. Not in absolute terms though.
My wife and I really want to move to Toronto one day. I interviewed at a tech startup and got an offer for ~$60k CAD plus some equity. It was a good amount of equity, and they were pretty small. Their product and mission was really awesome, and I think I would have had a good time working there. But I wasn't going to move for that kind of money. That's 2.5 times less than an "entry-level" tech salary in SF ($120k USD.)
I've probably hired around 50-60 tech workers in Toronto. Only entry level (degree plus a year or two of experience) were paid close to $60k. Most of my team was between $75-110k. This is four-five years ago so I imagine it's higher now.
For what it's worth, that's low enough to be near-scam level in Toronto. Someone with even a modicum of experience shouldn't have a problem getting $80-90K (still well below SF levels, but not THAT low). SUPER early stage startup (like pre-seed) might be an exception, but that's almost more of a co-founder situation.
As the others have said, they absolutely low balled you. I got a higher offer for a company in Burlington, which is ~1hr outside of Toronto as a new grad.
I got 84k on first serious tech job in Vancouver, and my case was very weak (that was at the time CAD/USD was around 1.1)
I feel, there is more hype in Vancouver tech scene, with more emphasis on "trendiness bonus"
Local job boards periodically explode with generic "enter the buzzword" specialist/developer jobs. More VC funding spilling over the border. More "1 month startups." Even these days, I heard, generic facebook clones still manage to somehow secure multimegabuck funding.
I think there are really good reasons to be in Ontario and in Canada. (I'm a US citizen) but the ONLY reason I would move to the Bay area would be climate and money. And I've worked in PA/Mountain View before. Didn't like it.
Another reason is abundance of IT talent in and around Toronto with top-class educational institutions (both Universities and Community Colleges) churning out armies of great IT workers.
That and combined with relatively lower salaries...
Also Toronto native; was making just under 100k ~ 3 years ago in SysEng/devops role. Now working in NYC in similar role at ~ 185k (Cdn). Even with CoL (housing) of NYC, my savings is much higher.
Personally I much prefer to live in Toronto but the salary is just too low.
Agreed. I moved from Montreal to SF a few years back and although my rent tripled, so did my income. The net result is much more savings than I would have gotten if I had stayed in Canada.
If you're a saver/investor then it makes much more sense to move to the US for a little while, save up a decent sized nest egg, then move back.
Based on my anecdotal experience, it would depend entirely on you: your experience, your reputation, and your negotiating ability. If you're a top senior engineer or a celebrity like Tim Bray (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/) then you can probably swing something with the BigCos, but for a regular junior/intermediate developer you'll have a tougher time getting a deal like that.
I decided to look for a remote job recently. I went down a list of various job sites specializing in them, and a few days later I had a remote job that pays six figures.
I would say it's not difficult at all - there were hundreds of job listings.
Toronto is a much cleaner and nicer city, I can drive around everywhere (initially I thought I would not miss my car; I was wrong). I am also Canadian so I prefer to stay in Canada if possible.
There are over 350,000 Canadians living and working in Silicon Valley. Canada's total population is only ~35 million. There is good reason for this mass exodus.
The rates for tech workers in Toronto are terrible. An enterprising worker can easily triple their income by working for American companies.
The fact that this report is sourced from a real estate firm should give you a hint to the rent-seeking nature of the Canadian economy.
You all can send some of your tech jobs over here to Buffalo, NY. We're only about 1-2 hour drive from Toronto give or take traffic on the QEW and COL is pretty cheap IMO. When I had a house, it was 1700 sq ft for about $1100 / month mortgage. I'm in an apartment now - 1300 sq ft 3 bedroom / 2 full bath for about $1625 / month. Onsite pool, gym, dog park, attached garage - lots of nice stuff.
And plenty of skilled workers surrounded by 4 or 5 private and public colleges. And some of the best pizzerias lol...
Something doesn't seem right about these stats. From the article:
The report by CBRE Group says Toronto added 82,100 technology-related jobs between 2012 and 2017 to beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
Tech’s annual job growth throttled back to 3.5 percent, or 26,700 new jobs, in 2016. That’s much slower than the 6 percent annual gain of 42,300 jobs in 2015, or the 6.4 percent gain in 2014.
That describes around 110,000 jobs growth in just three years.
These numbers just don't match. The first one is based on a survey by a real estate group, the second one is based on official statistics from the California government. What's the reality here? I can't say, but I do know that you can't trust hypey news articles that don't bother to dig around for the most accurate data sources. My guess is that this survey operated by a real estate group is just bad data.
You can get numbers much like HuffPo's if you compare urban San Francisco (population 800,000) to Toronto (population 3,000,000). Which is grossly misleading to begin with, but they then listed it as "Silicon Valley" in the headline and the "San Francisco Bay Area" in the body. Which are, obviously, three fundamentally different regions.
The CBRE data probably isn't perfect, but projecting their San Francisco percentage change back to 2013 does match Census Bureau numbers surprisingly well. Things get a bit confusing in 2018 because it looks like CBRE changed their grouping from SV and SF separately to the whole Bay combined.
Unfortunately, HuffPo didn't know or care about that distinction, so we got this article instead.
That discussion doesn't mention that when people commonly refer to Toronto from abroad they refer to the GTA which is a population 6,300,000 or the broader Golden Horseshoe urban area which can include the other tech hub (Waterloo) which brings the number to over 9,200,000.
Interesting, thanks. Not knowing Toronto, I didn't know if it described a standard metro area like some cities do. So now we've got three regions on each side, and no sign which of the 9 possible comparisons is being employed?
The only hope the Toronto tech scene has to escape from its mediocrity is, ironically, a renegotiation of Nafta, or a major change in government policy on immigration.
As long as the cost for privileged access to the US market is open season to poach the best and brightest of our labour market, and a local tech scene too addicted what amounts to a subsidy in the form of large immigration numbers that prevent wages here from adjusting upwards to US levels, very little will take root here beyond satellite offices and near-shoring, and the brain drain will continue.
I'll put it in a mildly hyperbolic manner, to match the quality of the source this article came from:
Toronto gets the sloppy seconds of America's tech industry; the Canadian tech grads who couldn't move to the US, the Indian tech migrants who couldn't get US visas, the "startups" who couldn't get US VC funding, tech conferences etc. etc.
That some companies are seeking to lower their costs but retain "North American culture" by transferring some functions to Toronto is not an indication of the strength of Toronto, but its weakness. Cheap dollar, far cheaper salaries, cheap(er) office spaces, far cheaper politicians to buy if necessary, etc.
When anyone in the North American tech industry can name 5 bustling Canadian startups from the top of their mind, then maybe we can talk about the Canadian tech industry doing well. Until then, it's about as relevant in tech as Bangalore and jobs there are as relevant as any of those located in other outsourced, cost-reducing "tech centres".
As a developer who has been working and applying for jobs in the Toronto area for the past 3 years I find the tech ecosystem highly dysfunctional and I'm glad I finally moved out.
Would propose that a better relative measure of salaries is not against cost of living, but the delta between what it costs per year to hire a contractor vs. hire employee for the same role. This would show whether firms are in fact paying more for employees against the contracting cost, which is the real clearing price for the value of the work in the market - unclouded by promises of "stability."
Do we have anecdotes about the delta is between how much it costs to hire a contractor vs. employee for same role in the Bay Area vs. Toronto.
In Toronto, anecdotally, per year a contractor costs between %175 and %200 of an employee. Contractor firms take their %15-%50 cut depending on contractor desperation.
San Francisco builds 1 unit of housing for every 1.8 jobs. This means tons of people commute into the city from elsewhere, and lots of living rooms converted into de-facto bedrooms.
Good question. If someone has a tech career, which should provide sufficient income to be able to afford to leave town and head for a place where housing is more abundant, but decides to stay anyway, then presumably they can be considered to have housing. I am not sure it is fair for us to judge how people choose to live within those houses. If sleeping in a living room is your thing, more power to you.
As some other users have mentioned, salaries could be higher compared to SL or NYC, but it's not like they're shit. Salaries are pretty decent, the only complaint would be the house/condo prices are kinda insane at the moment. Even with all that, Toronto and Canada in general is one of the best places to be in NA, especially if your a visible minority.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadWhat? It's not even remotely close.
The cost of rental housing has jumped up quite a bit recently, too. When I was looking for a place to live in 2015, I saw quite a few condos for rent right downtown for $1700-1800 a month. Now I see units in those same buildings renting for $2300 a month and up.
Still cheaper than SV, I suppose? And if you don't mind a bit of a commute, you can find more affordable accommodation.
Well no-one is saying that Toronto is better than SV "in absolute terms" either. Just that more tech jobs were added.
https://www.cbre.com/research-and-reports/Tech-30-2017
https://www.cbre.us/about/media-center/tech-talent-2018
https://www.cbre.us/research-and-reports/Scoring-Tech-Talent...
I still appreciate the link, though, because HuffPo didn't source their numbers, which look very strange. CBRE's 2017 data says San Francisco has had the highest percentage growth in tech jobs for 6 years running, and it's ~20 points higher than Toronto in each timeframe listed. The 2018 report does list Toronto growing at 51.5%, and the San Francisco Bay Area growing at 31%.
But we need to know what region is being assessed - the 2016 report separates San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so this is a crucial difference. San Francisco proper is 800,000 people, Silicon Valley is ~3,000,000, Toronto ~3,000,000 and the Bay Area is 8,000,000. The CBRE data does break out Silicon Valley separately, at least in pre-2018 reports. The headline here says "Silicon Valley", but the body gives numbers for the "San Francisco Bay Area".
Working backwards from the publicly-available CBRE report stats, I get 90,000 new tech jobs in Toronto from 2013-2017. That's noticeably higher than HuffPo's 82,000 from 2012-2017, but plausible given that I'm using CBRE's heavily-rounded numbers.
San Francisco apparently had 79,100 tech jobs at the start of 2017, up from 56,800 at the start of 2015. We can back-calculate to 38,600 tech workers in 2013. Calculations from Census Bureau estimates from that time period put the number somewhere very similar in 2013, suggesting that this is correct. CBRE tells us San Francisco also had the highest percentage growth surveyed in 2012, so we can project 2012 growth from the next years. Percentage growth has been slowing, so I used the 2013-2015 rate to get 7,300 new jobs in 2012. Those numbers are for San Francisco itself, population 800,000. If we nevertheless apply the 2017 "San Francisco Bay Area" percentage growth to this number, we get 2013-3017 growth of 65,600, for a 2012-2017 total change of 72,900.
> Toronto... beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000-72,900 = 9,100
This is 2x HuffPo's number, but I'm really working the data to make these rounded percentages workout. Fortunately, all of the other differences we're worried about dwarf this. It's not Silicon Valley, that's distinct, and it can't be the whole Bay Area, because that would imply the non-SF Bay Area of 7,200,000 people gained a total of 4,000 tech jobs in five years.
It looks like HuffPo used CBRE's San Francisco proper numbers, cited raw counts despite a ~4x population difference, and then reported it as the "San Francisco Bay Area" based on CBRE's 2018 language. That, or they failed to notice that CBRE (and other firms like PwC) have changed their region breakdown this year, and simply conflated Bay Area numbers from one year with San Francisco numbers from other years.
It looks like somebody tried for a dramatic-but-misleading story with a useless comparison, confused their subject between headline and body, and ultimately made a numerical statement that's simply false. Failing to link their source was probably a good move given all that.
(And I'll bet this article took half as long to write and publish ...
Any thoughts?
Of course you start at $90-$100k as a new grad in Amazon and Google.
I expect that to change as the hiring crunch continues but right now the ceiling has been slow to budge - much slower than the lower end of the spectrum, which is pressured more with average rent in Toronto going up over 15% year over year
Canada has an exceptionally strong culture of pushing for workplace training, to the point that the OECD calls Canada the most educated nation, so when a career stands out as having good job prospects (which development has been billed that way for several years now) people flood into it, putting downward pressure on incomes unlike you find stateside where the social dynamics don't push people into those jobs the same way.
If you're doing something really unique perhaps there is still room for upward growth (although you're probably already well past $150k in that case), but generally it is unlikely that developer incomes will climb further at all.
A few devs I know with >5 years experience have moved to new roles lately, and the companies didn't even hesitate when they asked for salaries well over 100k. I know it's just anecdotal, of course. Other probably have good counter-examples. but maybe it's a useful data point regardless.
Those jobs do exist, but they're hard to get and hard to find.
You are comparing apples to oranges
Even in port credit you cannot rent a brand new bachelor in a new building that’s not in a basement, which has new stainless steel appliances, dishwasher, air conditioning and at least a gym or pool.
I’m not knocking the idea of paying low rent to save money to get ahead in life, I think that’s something all young people should do.
But comparing port credit bachelor unit life to a new build 1 bedroom in the core is just a bad comparison
Mississauga ... lol.
What's funny is I remember when the downtown waterfront condos were $50,000 each and nobody wanted to buy - long walk to downtown and freezing cold in winter. How things change.
I hope for your sake you bought one of those 50k condos. I'm 25 so I missed the boat on cheap real estate.
Big backwater suburb of Toronto?
It might be cheaper to live that far away, but the cost in quality of life + hours commuting isn't worth the trade. Instead you can just go to a smaller town like Waterloo or a cheaper city like Montreal or Ottawa.
EDIT: On second reading you may be talking about driving to the GO station, in which case I agree... although I can easily walk to the GO station in <5 minutes myself. Your parent comment might also live a short walk or bus ride away from the Clarkson GO station
If you have a partner or significant other, it's not worth relocating to Toronto. Tech job's salaries are already considered extremely high here, but the majority of other jobs don't come close outside a few industries such as medical. Not to mention, non-tech industries are not booming like the tech industry, so even finding a decent job is a challenge.
Therefore, the demographic of people that would even consider relocation to Toronto are singles. After I graduated college and moved downtown from Etobicoke, I have so much more free time to actually live life. That 2 hours of commuting is extremely valuable, and this is coming from someone who was born and raised in Toronto. If you're a newcomer and single living outside of downtown or at a distance from work, commuting 1 hour to work, then working for 8 hours, and finally commuting 1 hour back - that's already 10 hours gone from your day. Factor in daily tasks and you're left with very little time in the week to find friends or socialize.
People just don’t understand how valuable time is. Commuting 2hrs each way daily x 5 days is 40 hours a month you will never get back.
Also I find that people with long commute times rarely admit how bad it is in the winter. I work from home 70% of my days and when I commute it’s 30 minutes by car each way. On a bad winter day it’s 3x that! Taking an Uber home to port credit after a night of drinking on a winter day would take 3 hours!
I recently spoke to a man who lives in the east end and commutes by car everyday to Cambridge! He said it’s 3 hours each way in the winter, blew my mind! (His wife worked in the east end)
All joking aside, some folks I've known driven from St Catherine every day to work in the core. Summer wasn't too bad, winter they left at 4am and got home around 10pm just to rinse and repeat. Hardly got to see his kids. Truly not sure what they told themselves to keep doing it every day as to me it was simply insane.
Toronto COL might feel expensive now but it can definitely get a lot more expensive.
Which half? Did you include the rest as an exercise? Lol.
I don't care how much rent costs, what I care about is the delta between income and expenses.
I'm trying to buy a house in Waterloo. Inventory is already staggeringly low.
The only reason you would stay in Toronto for a job in tech is if you wanted to stay close to family, or your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse.
Or, you just hate money and being at the center of the tech industry...
Maybe if you're not a visible minority and never leave the valley you could stick your thumbs in your ears and just cash the cheques.
Are you serious? Canada has a point-based system that requires you have some actual real skills and an education. I wish we had an immigration system like that in the US. Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
While based on binary categories rather than point-based system, so does US employment-based immigration. It also often requires a sponsoring employer, as well.
OTOH, Canada, like the US, also has family based immigration—and because it doesn't have per-country limits, it doesn't have decade+ wait times from some high-interest countries in key categories (though it does have smaller multi-year waits in some categories for immigrant visas, but it also has renewable multi-year “visiting family” supervisas which you can apparently take advantage of while an immigrant visa is pending.)
> Here, you can just sneak across the border or claim asylum citing vague claims of "persecution" and you'll have an entire political party fighting on your behalf to keep you in the country at all costs.
Canada not only has asylum (and accepts proportionately more refugees than the US even before Trump), but it doesn't seem to have a major political party scapegoating them and illegal immigrants to justify policies cutting back on legal immigration.
> If it were truly that easy to immigrate to Canada people would have actually made good on their "if Trump wins I'm moving to Canada" threats.
No, they wouldn't; difficulty of immigration isn't the reason people who make that kind of hyperbolic threat every election almost never follow through.
My wife and I aren't from any of the blocked countries, but who knows how the list could have grown at Trump's whim and current "enemy of the week".
So if it's just a preference for the Canadian political climate, then Toronto still does not seem like the best bet.
If any toronto natives know of some big companies in Toronto with tech jobs please prove me wrong.
I know Apple is hiring some JS devs in Toronto as well.
https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e...
I've seen a few articles about Apple hiring developers in Toronto, so there's that too.
Maybe Waterloo is a bit too far away to count, but Google has a fairly big engineering office there.
Muse, Google, Facebook, Softchoice, IBM, ALL major banks have a tech arm now, like Scotia Banks Digital Factory, CIBC Live Labs ,etc., and other tech companies, Flip, Wave, Freshbooks, Wattpad (raised major vc money), Ritual (raised 75m this year), TribalScale, Worktango, just to name a few.
Replace fb with Autodesk.
Are you sure you're not thinking of kitchener-waterloo?
There are a few. Most large ones are in the suburbs. Downtown has an overwhelming amount of VC-funded ad-tech companies that I wouldn't go near if my living depended on it. (I'd take up something else to cover the bills...)
One misconception I think, is that many people moved to SV for big-N companies and comparing that with average Toronto salaries.
This is a common misconception, and is promoted by a lot of tech companies in Toronto. It actually frustrates me whenever someone says that the compensation in the bay vs Toronto is the same after adjusting for CoL.
It's really not. You will end up with more absolute savings by working in the bay area, than you will in Toronto in a similar living situation.
Almost every expat Canadian working and saving in the US also has a little voice in the back of their mind reassuring them that even if the absolute number of saved US dollars is the same as saved Canadian dollars, there's a really good chance their US dollars will go further [when|if] they move back home in X years due to the historical exchange rate.
Salary difference between medium no name companies in the two cities are about that much.
I've been casually seeking either something more profitable so that I can save, or otherwise a viable remote position so that we can move a little out of the city (or to the coast). (Both profitable and remote would be ideal in this case, but I can take one before the other as either would help get me there).
Hell, I'd probably even move to the right suburb if I could land a substantially compensated job with Honeywell or something for a while.
Judging my present circumstances, you'd probably wager that I do hate money. I used to have a lot more fun here than I do these days.
Let's say you're in Canada and you move from the bottom quintile to the top. Top quintile starts at $100K, and you're making $110K. Great!
Those poor American's who don't make it to the top quintile ($150K) and only the 4th quintile are making $125K.
Which one would you prefer? Does the US actually have lower income mobility? Relatively speaking, yes. Not in absolute terms though.
I feel, there is more hype in Vancouver tech scene, with more emphasis on "trendiness bonus"
Local job boards periodically explode with generic "enter the buzzword" specialist/developer jobs. More VC funding spilling over the border. More "1 month startups." Even these days, I heard, generic facebook clones still manage to somehow secure multimegabuck funding.
That and combined with relatively lower salaries...
Personally I much prefer to live in Toronto but the salary is just too low.
If you're a saver/investor then it makes much more sense to move to the US for a little while, save up a decent sized nest egg, then move back.
I would say it's not difficult at all - there were hundreds of job listings.
The rates for tech workers in Toronto are terrible. An enterprising worker can easily triple their income by working for American companies.
The fact that this report is sourced from a real estate firm should give you a hint to the rent-seeking nature of the Canadian economy.
San Francisco is 124k USD (https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...)
So, it's not triple, but it's more than double.
Also, if you're going from a junior/midlevel role in CA to a senior position in the US, you could pretty easily triple your salary.
And plenty of skilled workers surrounded by 4 or 5 private and public colleges. And some of the best pizzerias lol...
The report by CBRE Group says Toronto added 82,100 technology-related jobs between 2012 and 2017 to beat out the San Francisco Bay Area for the spot by about 4,270 jobs.
82,000 jobs over 5 years, ok. Let's look at some other accounts of Bay Area tech jobs, for example https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slow... :
Tech’s annual job growth throttled back to 3.5 percent, or 26,700 new jobs, in 2016. That’s much slower than the 6 percent annual gain of 42,300 jobs in 2015, or the 6.4 percent gain in 2014.
That describes around 110,000 jobs growth in just three years.
These numbers just don't match. The first one is based on a survey by a real estate group, the second one is based on official statistics from the California government. What's the reality here? I can't say, but I do know that you can't trust hypey news articles that don't bother to dig around for the most accurate data sources. My guess is that this survey operated by a real estate group is just bad data.
You can get numbers much like HuffPo's if you compare urban San Francisco (population 800,000) to Toronto (population 3,000,000). Which is grossly misleading to begin with, but they then listed it as "Silicon Valley" in the headline and the "San Francisco Bay Area" in the body. Which are, obviously, three fundamentally different regions.
The CBRE data probably isn't perfect, but projecting their San Francisco percentage change back to 2013 does match Census Bureau numbers surprisingly well. Things get a bit confusing in 2018 because it looks like CBRE changed their grouping from SV and SF separately to the whole Bay combined.
Unfortunately, HuffPo didn't know or care about that distinction, so we got this article instead.
This just makes it all the more confusing.
But yes, this is unbelievably ambiguous.
What a mess.
Bottom line is, for the basket of goods and services used in their comparison, LPP at San Francisco is 30% higher than Toronto.
As long as the cost for privileged access to the US market is open season to poach the best and brightest of our labour market, and a local tech scene too addicted what amounts to a subsidy in the form of large immigration numbers that prevent wages here from adjusting upwards to US levels, very little will take root here beyond satellite offices and near-shoring, and the brain drain will continue.
Toronto gets the sloppy seconds of America's tech industry; the Canadian tech grads who couldn't move to the US, the Indian tech migrants who couldn't get US visas, the "startups" who couldn't get US VC funding, tech conferences etc. etc.
That some companies are seeking to lower their costs but retain "North American culture" by transferring some functions to Toronto is not an indication of the strength of Toronto, but its weakness. Cheap dollar, far cheaper salaries, cheap(er) office spaces, far cheaper politicians to buy if necessary, etc.
When anyone in the North American tech industry can name 5 bustling Canadian startups from the top of their mind, then maybe we can talk about the Canadian tech industry doing well. Until then, it's about as relevant in tech as Bangalore and jobs there are as relevant as any of those located in other outsourced, cost-reducing "tech centres".
Could you elaborate? curious what you mean.
Do we have anecdotes about the delta is between how much it costs to hire a contractor vs. employee for same role in the Bay Area vs. Toronto.
In Toronto, anecdotally, per year a contractor costs between %175 and %200 of an employee. Contractor firms take their %15-%50 cut depending on contractor desperation.
What's it like in the Bay Area?
San Francisco builds 1 unit of housing for every 1.8 jobs. This means tons of people commute into the city from elsewhere, and lots of living rooms converted into de-facto bedrooms.
> but that still describes enough housing
At what point does it not describe enough housing? 3 bunk beds in the living room and 2 bunk beds per bedroom? Someone living in the bathtub?