They've gotten significantly more picky about what qualifies as R&D, however. Just building some software generally doesn't qualify, and they've had years of firms sending in R&D claims for their CRUD app that they've gotten incredibly dubious. It isn't pleasant when the CRA investigator calls (I've received one of those calls, being at a firm that decided to drink some of those delicious credits for our web app, imagining how every aspect was actually some new invention).
If you're legitimately doing bonafide R&D -- like a team doing serious AI work, etc -- it's glorious, but it is a false hope for a lot of copy/paste type shops.
There appears to be a lot fewer very high paying jobs too. I have known some people who have made $250+, but it (anecdotally) seems very rare and was usually related to oil and gas money that is disappearing lately
I advise anyone in Canadian tech to move to the states if they can. The rise in pay is so enormous it overcomes all objections. Move from Canada to Austin and you get higher pay, affordable housing because of zoning is not controlled by a rent-seeking gerontocracy, and far less taxes, too. Also, Canada has many indirect taxes in the form of crony capitalism. Grocery chains and phone providers have extremely cushy relationships with regulators there, increasing their ability to extract rents. Health insurance is not as big a deal as everyone says, at least for people making tech salaries.
Except you are now living in the States and all that comes with it. Gun violence + gun mentality, racism, ridiculous politics, and more. It's not enough of a pay raise to make me consider the move. I'd consider doing remote work with a US based company, taking the occasional trip down, but never moving there. If you make 6 figure in Canada, those extra "taxes" and "costs" aren't really an issue any more as they are only a few hundred bucks.
Maybe I'm just fed up with the US's bullshit to ever want to deal with them, but I know lots of people who feel the same. If you are a fresh grad, it's almost impossible to not go however, which sucks for us here, but that's just how it is. Not all decisions are based on big piles of money. I also live in Waterloo and have an awesome house, but if you are stuck in GTA or Vancouver, then good luck I guess no matter what you do if you want real housing. Prices here have also gone up a lot, but still affordable with a dev job.
You're being absurd. The 'gun mentality' don't affect life for almost anybody who's not a hobbyist. I know many Canadians in the US, none of them think that the US has more racism than Canada - many will tell you that we're just better at being aware of it.
ok well maybe I just don't feel comfortable walking around where everyone has a gun and could kill me for any reason possible or by accident, even if it's very unlikely. I'll take my risk management strategy to heart and you take yours. Also, what's with the constant mass shootings in the US? Doesn't seem to be a problem anywhere else and it doesn't seem to be a downward trend, so again, risk management.
There are idiots everywhere, I just prefer to be surrounded by idiots without guns than idiots with.
From the outside it probably looks like gun violence and racism and ridiculous politics are the worst things about living in the US, but when I moved I found that the IRS's byzantine tax policy and the inherent difficulty of moving countries were worse.
I'm a Canadian in the GTA who turned down numerous offers to move to the US for jobs.
Because this is my home. It's where my family and friends are. I have a sometimes misled sense of pride, etc. The same sorts of reasons most Americans wouldn't want to move to Canada for a job. I mean, I'd be more likely to move to Japan or France or something for a job because it's different enough to make it novel.
But let's be real -- there are great areas all over the US. They have far more weather and geographical diversity. There are great cities like Portland, Austin, etc. It isn't all crime[1] or violence. And we're probably exposed to US politics more here than the average American (given Canada's inferiority complex and our profound focus on the US). And I've never had a problem with Canadian healthcare, but if you're taking a job in the US you'll probably be on a great plan that gets you great service there as well.
[1] - Especially given that property crime tends to be much worse in most areas of Canada, and gun crime in the major cities is as bad as many American cities.
Having just done what you suggested (Calgary -> SF), healthcare _is_ that big of a deal.
When you are from the states, you honestly can’t know how massive it is to never have to worry about paying for healthcare. It is truly transformative.
It is shocking as that puts the salary way below that of London/UK and close to senior dev salaries in est europe. Hence my serious question wether way will go up, if not in the short term at least medium term.
The really shocking thing to me is that nobody's camping outside the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Ubisoft offices in Canada with offers of 50% pay increases.
These companies vetted these employees for free, seems like a pure arbitrage opportunity to me.
canada seems to be lagging in terms of new startups. Also google/amazon etc employees doesn't meant they are necessarily great. Canada needs startups and startups need all round devs, and large companies usually need specialised workers.
The article fails to mention the exchange rate from USD to CAD. No employee in Canada is paid in American dollars, that would be ridiculous The Canadian dollars is .75 to the USD. Hence the much lower pay.
I don't really know what that $74k average number is based on, but it's nowhere near accurate for the large companies they've mentioned in Toronto (which is what matters since the article is about them).
I work for a tech company in Toronto and no single engineer in the company would make less than that (maybe some recent grads). I also know from my network that Uber, Amazon, Google, etc have been raising the average salary in Toronto.
> North America’s fourth-largest city is also cheaper: Its computer engineers and programmers earn salaries that are on average $71,000 a year lower than their counterparts in San Francisco
It's $71,000 lower than engineering salaries in SF according to the article
Seems like the logical thing to do with a totally unpredictable president and a spineless republican party, especially if they get elected for another four years.
If you look at the points needed to get a Canadian work visa, it’s shot up dramatically. Our company had to move some employees from the US to Canada (that’s what not giving them the ability to work for 6 months, to still be resolved, will do...) and over that span of time the requirements have shot up. Which indicates there has been a significant increase in the number and quality of people moving there (and since they have some special tech program, it’s tech people moving).
> We are squandering our future,” said Jim Balsillie, former co-CEO of BlackBerry Ltd., whose smartphones were once ubiquitous. Canada isn’t benefiting from recent innovations local researchers have made in artificial intelligence, voice- and image-recognition and self-driving automobiles because they are employed by foreign firms that own the intellectual property, said Mr. Balsillie.
For many years, policy in Canada seems to have been to attract foreign companies to set up offices and factories here. The bold dream seems to be of being the foreign high-skill labour capital of the world. Instead of finding ways to promote local entrepreneurship, the government worries whether Canadian law will scare big tech from creating jobs for us.
At least we have Shopify. Apparently PlentyOfFish, Ashley Madison, and PornHub too :facepalm:
Canadian tech scene is not bad given the small population and relatively recent investments in this area. That is, compared to EU where there's pretty much no tech other than Spotify, and any promising upstarts are getting preemptively destroyed by EU and local governments.
It takes decades to build Silicon Valley, and Canada's focus on foreign talent, business friendly regulation, and general North American enterprising culture might get it there over time.
In the EU, London, Uk a nodejs developer earns around 800 cad per day as a consultant, and there so many jobs that usually you find a new one in 1-2 days max a week. Tho much lower, Germany is also a good tech market. I am not sure what your statement is based on. When i assessed moving to Canada from the uk, not only were there far less companies but tech was a bit out date as well and pay was way way lower. Care to support your statement with evidence?
Edit: you can find eu jobs on cwjobs.co.uk and stepstone.de to get an idea of how large the gap between canada and the eu is.
Paywalled. Not sure how to feel about this. Toronto has changed substantially in the last decade and a half, going from a place where property was affordable and socialized resources like community centres and healthcare were accessible to a place that's overcrowded and worse in many ways if you were used to the high quality of life it used to offer. I don't see a silver lining in a potentially higher salary because it will just be captured by landlords / rising cost of living. I also don't think all these competing companies will cause salaries to rise that much since its much easier to bring immigrants over here and improve the pool of job candidates. My company in particular has doubled the people in our office with ex H1-Bs that have been converted to something like TFWs I imagine.
The only positive I see is the potential of working on something I like more from a subject matter point of view.
Former immigrant to the uk from the eu, manager, head of and consultant. I feel like your comment should not have been downvoted because it is and understandable worry.
Here is why.
In the uk immigrants from non eu countries, and thus on restrictive work visas (somewhat similar to h1b) usually earned way less than locals or eu citizens because they had no option but to take any offer only to be allowed to stay in the country. Example: ai engineers from south korea would earn 35k gbp a year, while their uk or eu counterparts could earn well above 70k gbp.
Restrictive visas and abusive employers are a wage depressing mix, unfair to both locals and new comers. My guess would be that if your employer underpays your former h1b colleagues then that is not an employer you want to work for because indeed your pay will stay low.
Eu citizens however were free to work without restriction and as such compete on equal terms as locals. Much like in Canada where immigrants under express entry are able to change jobs as they wish, eu citizens could change jobs as they wish. The result was that instead of outsourcing to india or other countries, uk companies suddenly started growing at home as they had plenty of resources. Thus job opportunities and pay went up both for locals and eu immigrants. As a hiring manager, demand was so high that either eu immigrants or locals had to be payed more and more each year.
Similarly, in Canada, the more resources companies will find, the less they will outsource and the more pay will go up over time.
As brexit is biting in and less devs are on the market, some of those companies are now either outsourcing or opening new branches in other eu countries to hire the same people as they would have in the uk, simply because there are not enough devs left. This means less opportunities for locals.
Another thing is that more devs, means more ideas floating around, and that means more skills you can get.
It can be frightening and if there are many abusive employers and restrictive visas wages can go down, but something tells me they will go up as indeed canada is a country with a north american business mindset. And if you mix tech and capital the result will be job and pay growth which i have seen in london/europe. You should embrace this if you want your pay to double in the next 5 years. Mine did in london as when i moved there the “revolution” was only starting and it was an awesome ride.
I am not an optimist. It doesn't matter to me if my salary doubles in the next five years unless it improves my quality of life living here. After seeing the major cities here change so much over the last 15 years, I am convinced that an expanded presence of large tech companies will make things worse in every metric I care about: housing; healthcare; affordable education; transportation; etc. Great, I can afford the latest iPhone! Who cares?
Another good point, re quality of life. In london the quality of life is quite low, despite high salaries. I am wondering if toronto can do something different and learn from mistakes made by other tech boom cities. I.e. how to avoid congestion, how to keep house process at an affordable level, etc. It would be interesting to have tech companies located outside the city centre as a starting point. Of course there is the solution of not welcoming these companies and immigrants, but is there a way their presence can be leveraged for the greater good, by learning from mistakes made by others?
Come to think, what you describe are exactly the issues i had around london. Yay i could get a new iphone, but buying a property would mean an enormous loan and the size of that property would have been tiny. Overcrowding was another issue, trains were filled to the point where people would stick their noses in other peoples armpits, roads jammed, loads of small shops with low quality products, and ofc loads of crime. I ended up leaving, and one option was toronto, but gave up at the thought it might become another london. Left back for my home country, but my nature is to explore and experience new places, it’s just that the thought of yet another london is unbearable. And most tech jobs are centred around such cities. I just dont want to be a part of the tech worker scene that “changes the world and are the best” but cant afford even basic things in life such as owning a decent property with plenty of room for kids to grow up happily. So i am working remote and working on a side project. Maybe once it takes off i will retire in a small city in a developed country and buy a big ass mansion and enjoy life as it should be.
> Though Toronto lost the bid, Amazon still opened a 113,000 square-foot office in the downtown core in December and said it would hire 600 new employees.
Wow, they really didn't do any research on this.
Amazon's first Toronto office opened almost 8 years ago. I moved to the office 7 years ago, when it was 25 people Growth has been constant or accelerating since then. We now have over 1000 full time employees- mostly devs, but also some AWS and Ads sales folks now too. Every department seems to have at least a couple teams here. There's two buildings, both running out of space.
And it's not like it's all "couldn't get a US visa, send them to Canada" either. Most of those folks, after a year with Amazon, could probably qualify for an L-1 and transfer to Seattle- but they don't. And a lot of the people being hired are local talent.
Like most of my coworkers, I could definitely get an increase in total comp if I moved to a US office. My wife and I don't want to live in America though- the culture isn't one we like, the politics are terrifying, the gun obsession and violence... Toronto's not perfect, but it's where we want to stay.
> the culture isn't one we like, the politics are terrifying, the gun obsession and violence
Life in the US isn't like that for most people who live here. It's fine you don't want to live here, that's okay. But the idea that the majority or even many Americans are gun toting nutjobs is false. If you live in a major US city your life is almost exactly the same as any major Canadian city. Vancouver might as well be a larger Seattle. Having lived in both countries, your day to day differences are fairly minor.
There are outliers of course, Texas and Florida are very unique places. The South is generally higher crime. But living in Chicago, Seattle or NYC isn't that different from Toronto or Vancouver.
Even relatively liberal Washington State, which is culturally similar to BC, is an open carry state. Many Canadians would be uncomfortable to find some random dude walking around the super market with a gun.
I've lived in Washington my entire life (except for a stint in Vancouver) and have never seen anyone walk around with open carry in public. Technically it's on the books but once again the average day to day experience isn't people walking around at Costco strapped up. This is what I'm talking about, everyone talks about how insane the US is, but our day to day life isn't that different.
I wonder how many have actually been?
edit:
this is not to take away from the serious challenges that the US has when it comes to many issues. I am by no means excusing our income inequality or absurd healthcare system. Just trying to convey a perspective from someone who lives there. There's a lot we need to improve but this isn't the wild west either.
For what another anecdote is worth, I lived in Washington state for 3 months and have seen it twice. (Once in a Seattle food court). As a Canadian it was quite a culture shock.
I live in Toronto. I wish companies would choose cities other than Vancouver and Toronto. The housing/family costs in those two cites are pretty crazy. Pro-tip to any people looking to expand north: try Halifax on the east coast. NS is low cost and has a bunch of universities. Also, Calgary is nice too.
56 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadIf you're legitimately doing bonafide R&D -- like a team doing serious AI work, etc -- it's glorious, but it is a false hope for a lot of copy/paste type shops.
Maybe I'm just fed up with the US's bullshit to ever want to deal with them, but I know lots of people who feel the same. If you are a fresh grad, it's almost impossible to not go however, which sucks for us here, but that's just how it is. Not all decisions are based on big piles of money. I also live in Waterloo and have an awesome house, but if you are stuck in GTA or Vancouver, then good luck I guess no matter what you do if you want real housing. Prices here have also gone up a lot, but still affordable with a dev job.
There are idiots everywhere, I just prefer to be surrounded by idiots without guns than idiots with.
Because this is my home. It's where my family and friends are. I have a sometimes misled sense of pride, etc. The same sorts of reasons most Americans wouldn't want to move to Canada for a job. I mean, I'd be more likely to move to Japan or France or something for a job because it's different enough to make it novel.
But let's be real -- there are great areas all over the US. They have far more weather and geographical diversity. There are great cities like Portland, Austin, etc. It isn't all crime[1] or violence. And we're probably exposed to US politics more here than the average American (given Canada's inferiority complex and our profound focus on the US). And I've never had a problem with Canadian healthcare, but if you're taking a job in the US you'll probably be on a great plan that gets you great service there as well.
[1] - Especially given that property crime tends to be much worse in most areas of Canada, and gun crime in the major cities is as bad as many American cities.
Is it, though? I can't remember the last time I heard of a gun crime in Vancouver, but that's anecdotal, of course.
These companies vetted these employees for free, seems like a pure arbitrage opportunity to me.
I work for a tech company in Toronto and no single engineer in the company would make less than that (maybe some recent grads). I also know from my network that Uber, Amazon, Google, etc have been raising the average salary in Toronto.
It's $71,000 lower than engineering salaries in SF according to the article
For many years, policy in Canada seems to have been to attract foreign companies to set up offices and factories here. The bold dream seems to be of being the foreign high-skill labour capital of the world. Instead of finding ways to promote local entrepreneurship, the government worries whether Canadian law will scare big tech from creating jobs for us.
At least we have Shopify. Apparently PlentyOfFish, Ashley Madison, and PornHub too :facepalm:
It takes decades to build Silicon Valley, and Canada's focus on foreign talent, business friendly regulation, and general North American enterprising culture might get it there over time.
Edit: you can find eu jobs on cwjobs.co.uk and stepstone.de to get an idea of how large the gap between canada and the eu is.
Could you give examples? I'm curious.
> any promising upstarts are getting preemptively destroyed by EU and local governments.
What kind of silliness is this comment?
The only positive I see is the potential of working on something I like more from a subject matter point of view.
Here is why.
In the uk immigrants from non eu countries, and thus on restrictive work visas (somewhat similar to h1b) usually earned way less than locals or eu citizens because they had no option but to take any offer only to be allowed to stay in the country. Example: ai engineers from south korea would earn 35k gbp a year, while their uk or eu counterparts could earn well above 70k gbp.
Restrictive visas and abusive employers are a wage depressing mix, unfair to both locals and new comers. My guess would be that if your employer underpays your former h1b colleagues then that is not an employer you want to work for because indeed your pay will stay low.
Eu citizens however were free to work without restriction and as such compete on equal terms as locals. Much like in Canada where immigrants under express entry are able to change jobs as they wish, eu citizens could change jobs as they wish. The result was that instead of outsourcing to india or other countries, uk companies suddenly started growing at home as they had plenty of resources. Thus job opportunities and pay went up both for locals and eu immigrants. As a hiring manager, demand was so high that either eu immigrants or locals had to be payed more and more each year.
Similarly, in Canada, the more resources companies will find, the less they will outsource and the more pay will go up over time.
As brexit is biting in and less devs are on the market, some of those companies are now either outsourcing or opening new branches in other eu countries to hire the same people as they would have in the uk, simply because there are not enough devs left. This means less opportunities for locals.
Another thing is that more devs, means more ideas floating around, and that means more skills you can get.
It can be frightening and if there are many abusive employers and restrictive visas wages can go down, but something tells me they will go up as indeed canada is a country with a north american business mindset. And if you mix tech and capital the result will be job and pay growth which i have seen in london/europe. You should embrace this if you want your pay to double in the next 5 years. Mine did in london as when i moved there the “revolution” was only starting and it was an awesome ride.
Wow, they really didn't do any research on this.
Amazon's first Toronto office opened almost 8 years ago. I moved to the office 7 years ago, when it was 25 people Growth has been constant or accelerating since then. We now have over 1000 full time employees- mostly devs, but also some AWS and Ads sales folks now too. Every department seems to have at least a couple teams here. There's two buildings, both running out of space.
And it's not like it's all "couldn't get a US visa, send them to Canada" either. Most of those folks, after a year with Amazon, could probably qualify for an L-1 and transfer to Seattle- but they don't. And a lot of the people being hired are local talent.
Like most of my coworkers, I could definitely get an increase in total comp if I moved to a US office. My wife and I don't want to live in America though- the culture isn't one we like, the politics are terrifying, the gun obsession and violence... Toronto's not perfect, but it's where we want to stay.
Life in the US isn't like that for most people who live here. It's fine you don't want to live here, that's okay. But the idea that the majority or even many Americans are gun toting nutjobs is false. If you live in a major US city your life is almost exactly the same as any major Canadian city. Vancouver might as well be a larger Seattle. Having lived in both countries, your day to day differences are fairly minor.
There are outliers of course, Texas and Florida are very unique places. The South is generally higher crime. But living in Chicago, Seattle or NYC isn't that different from Toronto or Vancouver.
Toronto's murder rate is 3.11 per 100,000 people, which is higher than NYC and Seattle: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/stats-show-sharp-uptick-in-tor... Many Canadian cities are on par with their US cousins.
The major difference is actually healthcare.
I wonder how many have actually been?
edit: this is not to take away from the serious challenges that the US has when it comes to many issues. I am by no means excusing our income inequality or absurd healthcare system. Just trying to convey a perspective from someone who lives there. There's a lot we need to improve but this isn't the wild west either.
Seattle is bigger, actually.