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I can't help but notice right now that Toronto's name has been increasingly pushed as some sort of "next tech centre" (well, many cities in the world want to be
by vtange 9y ago
I can't help but notice right now that Toronto's name has been increasingly pushed as some sort of "next tech centre" (well, many cities in the world want to be something like that). Can someone who's actually there fill me in on what's happening there? How does Toronto's scene compare to say, New York or Seattle?
- win_ini 9y ago"Toronto is like New York, but without all the 'stuff'" - Steve Martin, SNL. Toronto has grown up a lot in the pst few years. The canadian dollar is about 20% less than USD, so VC dollars go further - and while competitive, hiring engineers is nothing like the bay. That said, there is a shallow pool of senior SaaS startup folks in Toronto compared to SF or New York.
- tormeh 9y ago>The canadian dollar is about 20% less than USD, so VC dollars go further How expensive a nation is and the exchange rate of its currency is independent.
- bigmanwalter 9y agoIn this case it isn't though. Canadian engineers make less than American engineers
- walshemj 9y agoExactly its why London is popular UK Engineers are cheap speak English natively and are used to being treated like second class profesionals.
- matthewrudy 9y ago20% cheaper since last June too.
- matthewrudy 9y agoThe point that's being made is that the currency exchange rate and the cost of an engineer (converted to USD) are independent.
- paulgb 9y agoYes, this fallacy always bothers me. The Canadian Toonie trades strongly against the US dollar; using the half-Toonie as a benchmark is an arbitrary choice.
- snrplfth 9y agoForget about the Loonie, look at the yen - one US Dollar is worth an incredible 114 yen! Quick everybody, throw all your investment at Japan!
- goatforce5 9y agoThat quote was from 30 Rock, when Steve Martin's character was trying to convince Liz Lemon to move to Toronto. http://www.hark.com/clips/ssxbqzctpx-toronto-is-just-like-new-york http://www.hark.com/clips/ssxbqzctpx-toronto-is-just-like-ne... One of the local TV stations used it in their station IDs for a while, which I thought was hilarious.
- rckrd 9y agoThe University of Toronto is home to Geoffrey Hinton and his research lab. Hinton was the first to use backpropagation for machine learning and a lot of the techniques used today were pioneered by his lab. He is also manages the Google Brain team in Toronto. Yann LeCun, the director of AI at Facebook, also did a postdoc at Toronto. [0] http://learning.cs.toronto.edu:40292/people#Faculty http://learning.cs.toronto.edu:40292/people#Faculty [1] http://yann.lecun.com/ http://yann.lecun.com/
- halflings 9y ago+ Yoshua Bengio in Montreal.
- miraj 9y agoand some more. here is a neat little article re: Hinton's network effect! "Six degrees of separation: how U of T's Geoffrey Hinton is connected to top AI researchers around the world" https://www.utoronto.ca/news/six-degrees-separation-how-u-t-s-geoffrey-hinton-connected-top-ai-researchers-around-world https://www.utoronto.ca/news/six-degrees-separation-how-u-t-...
- scosman 9y agoAlso, Hinton (and others) are launching a giant AI labs. Lots of government and partner funding (Google, Nvidia, etc). http://vectorinstitute.ai/ http://vectorinstitute.ai/
- speedplane 9y agoI would trace it back to the early 2010s when Professors at University of Toronto (Geoffrey E. Hinton in particular) came up with many of the advances in training deep neural networks. That, along with the hype of deep learning, began a snowball of activity that put Toronto on the radar in a significant way. I remember reading the below article. Prof. Hinton can probably claim quite a bit of credit for his city's successes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-adv...
- jensvdh 9y agoMore and more companies are turning towards Canada after all the immigration bullshit the US government is pulling.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoI think this is it, and it does nothing to help the tech companies' reputations to move these jobs. The "immigration bullshit" was in response to outsourcing, immigration, and exploitation of visa programs to exploit cheap labor and keep wages down. By shipping these jobs overseas at the first sign of a worker/employer leverage shift, it shows us that these companies don't care about providing for its employees, they just care about their corporate profits and nothing else. Why should we allow employers in our country that don't provide growth for its employees?
- aaaawweeeee 9y agoUnless you have strong unions who can wrestle with the tech strong-arms, tech companies, or any company, don't have to pander to your basic necessity for a decent working life. The unions in the US are pathetic, and corrupted by the mafia, and workers are suffering humiliations because of that. Here's a tragicomic anecdote that illustrates my point: Recently in Germany, Tesla has been struggling with the German unions because Tesla has been paying below union wages to a German company they bought. So far, Tesla offered each employee a one-off €1,000 ($1,090) bonus, an extra €150 a month, and €10,000 of Tesla shares distributed over four years to calm the situation, but the negotiations are still on-going. In the US, where they're facing worker revolt for the low wages and bad working conditions but currently aren't unionized, they promised free frozen yoghurt and, Musk claimed this is his favorite, a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster.
- mistermann 9y agoTesla workers are revolting? Why isn't this in the news?
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- redthrowaway 9y agoToronto is the finance & arguably tech centre of Canada. Great universities & access to VC cash, lots of startups. It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US, due to the weaker dollar, lower wages, cheaper medical insurance, and SR&ED credits that let you write off developer salary costs.
- tenpies 9y ago> It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US Should add that this works both ways. Most Canadians who can, do end up leaving for the US since they can easily make 2 - 4X the income, even after CoL and insurance. There is a non-trivial amount of brain drain happening in Canada.
- redthrowaway 9y agoAbsolutely. The talent in the US is certainly higher than it is in Canada, due in no small part to the brain drain which has been happening for decades.
- parasubvert 9y agos/most/some I was an expat in the US for many years, the story was the same in the mid-90s. Many try it, some stay, some come back. I still work for a US company but moved back. The current political climate has a big impact on encouraging people to stay in Canada, especially with NAFTA and the H1B programs hanging by a thread. Imagine thousands of Canadians with TN status getting told they need to move back immediately (More likely 30-60 days after a status change application) upon withdrawal from NAFTA. It will be a chaotic brain drain in reverse. Amazon, Microsoft, Google all have large Canadian outposts lately for a reason.
- lawnchair_larry 9y agoThat reason has nothing to do with those. It's to get around H1-B Visa caps by transferring them after a year.
- parasubvert 9y agoToronto and Waterloo have long been tech centres, though not as large as New York or Seattle. Probably it has been most similar to Chicago's tech scene evolution, just smaller scale. A big factor are the quality of schools here and increased (though not universal) desire for Canadians to stay in Canada since 2001.
- jacquesm 9y agoToronto has had a pretty good high-tech scene since the mid 90's. The area around the old carpet factory and Front street as well as a good part of King street going into town have housed and are housing many high tech companies. Front 151 was a major hub for North America and allowed co-location and cheap fiber so a lot of DC activity sprang up around it and that in turn led to many start-ups choosing Toronto. The fact that there are two excellent universities nearby (Waterloo and UFT) helped a lot in that it sourced a stream of very capable programmers. The only thing that stopped Toronto from developing further as a high tech city is the brain drain to the valley were engineers could easily make double of what they could make in Toronto. http://www.151frontstreet.com/ http://www.151frontstreet.com/
- pm90 9y agoThis seems like an easy fix: just raise the salaries, and attract all the developers!
- hourislate 9y agoThere are 1000's of underemployed CS Grads earning a pittance compared to their American counterparts. You get access to a large talent pool that makes less than what you would pay an H1B person. ATM there is about a 37% difference in CAD-USD. So that is just a bonus. It is also Canada's biggest city and business capital. The only real cons is the price of real estate and high taxes but Google has all kinds of money so that shouldn't be an obstacle. There is also the an issue of poor transportation infra but since this will be developed downtown that shouldn't be an issue either. I am sure the Provincial/Federal Gov will throw in quite a few enticements since there is an election coming up and they are desperate for some kind of meaningful employment gains. It's a nice city to visit but you have to be wealthy to live there. It's Canada's version of NYC (a much, much, much smaller version).
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI had to try and explain this to my girlfriend and her visiting sister last night. They're from Victoria and Vancouver and want us to move there. I can barely afford to live in Toronto on my salary, never mind Vancouver and the cost of moving across the country. To my knowledge -- in spite of the higher cost of living -- Vancouver-based software professionals don't make any more than they do here. That and most people here still equate software = computers = IT department = "Can you fix my laptop?"/"Why doesn't the projector work?"
- pm90 9y agoHelp me understand this but if Software Engineers can't afford to live in the city, then ... who can? Serious question.
- verelo 9y agoIt's not that they cannot, it is that they do not want to. Seriously, any software dev saying they "cannot live" on their salary is simply out of touch with the rest of the world. Not to say they should take a below market salary, but comparing a hyper-crazy salary of SF to Toronto is unreasonable.
- lhorie 9y agoI know of more than a few companies that are growing tech teams here in Toronto (while primarily having US-based clients) because average salaries are lower than in the US tech centers. My impression is that the tech workforce here is healthy for a few reasons: 1) the presence of tech giants such as IBM in Markham (plus Toronto's fame for multiculturalism and for having high quality of life) means it attracts a lot of Indian, Chinese and eastern Europe talent. There's also a fair amount of ex-IBMers etc spilling over into growing mid-sized companies that need senior level tech workers with large corp experience. 2) there's a relatively healthy startup scene, but investment here is fairly conservative. Startups without profit strategies tend to die quickly, so as a result, startups here tend to be less pie-in-the-sky than SF unicorn wannabes. Because companies grow steadily and conservatively, they often provide high job security environments that encourage long single-company careers. This creates an incentive for experienced tech workers to stay in Toronto, rather than chase higher salaries elsewhere. I know many tech people that have been in a single company for 7+ years (some even 16+ years!) 3) there are some strong tech education options like Waterloo, which often collaborates with big name organizations like Mozilla. Internships to help get new grads get their foot in the door of the industry are also fairly common
- surfmike 9y agoI would definitely say U of Toronto and Waterloo are strong competitive advantages. Working in Silicon Valley I'm surrounded by Canadian engineers, many from one of those two schools.
- wmil 9y ago- It's generally easier to bring in immigrants if there's a tech job waiting than in the US. - The border is a barrier to moving to NYC or SF for a higher paying job. So salaries are lower. - There are more agencies than product companies. Toronto has always had a lot of ad agencies, but the CAD has been trending down since 2013 without a major bump in salaries. So there are many ad agencies and contract app shops that take advantage of the spread. So in general the Toronto tech scene is smaller and lower paying than either of those cities. But it's the best in Canada, so it attracts a lot of the local talent.
- jtmcmc 9y agoTech pay seems terrible relative to most good tech places in the US (sf/nyc/sea).