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> The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions I'm so

> The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions I'm so tired of hearing this complaint. This is often stated as a problem, but the simple fact is that people can move to almost any other developed country and make as much or more than they would make in Canada. Canada doesn't have a problem with talent exodous, they have a problem that Canadian employers are stingy and then complain when all they have left are people willing to settle for half they'd make in the US, or 2/3rds of what they would make in Europe. [0] Here's a free tip for any Canadian employers reading: want to have Silicon Valley level talent at your company in Canada? Open your wallet. People are more than happy to stay in Canada if you pay them what they're worth. [0] Anecdotal evidence, I'm Canadian, living and working in Europe. I make as much as people 10 years older than me make in Canada. Taxes are similar, cost of living is similar, social benefits are similar, and 5 weeks paid vacation (real vacation, not PTO).

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Agreed. Canada seems like a fine place to live. I'm from Upstate New York so the climate isn't a big deal for me. But the low pay and insane housing costs are almost comical.
RodericDay 9y ago
I don't know if it's just the money. I vastly prefer Montreal to SF, and I willingly took the paycut + taxation trade-offs because I prefer the way society works here (entertainment, health care, education, social status of non-white-collar jobs, etc.) However, attempting to switch jobs, I find the gelid pace at which recruitment works here incredibly frustrating. People take weeks to reply. Sometimes they don't reply at all. When I visited SF I got offered an interview + a job in a single day. Companies need to pay more, but currently they're failing at more than just that.
potatolicious 9y ago
Agreed, this is the elephant in the room and by far and away the primary cause of the tech exodus. In my experience compensation in the US (comparing major cities to major cities) is 2-5x higher than in Canada. I'd hazard a guess and say I'm right now making 4x what my job would be paying in Canada. Another big problem is that cost of living continues to rise in Canadian tech hubs - Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are all astronomically expensive relative to compensation, and costs continue to rise rapidly. Despite some upwards movement in recent years in tech salaries, the COL increases have often outpaced it. To Canadian employers who are serious about reversing the brain drain: you have to find ways to pay talent more, everything else is just details.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  But this is the problem everywhere. In the states that's the reason outsourcing is such a huge boner for companies. They refuse to pay the market rate for Americans who will not work six jobs in IT for the pay of one. So they then claim they can't get enough skilled American workers to fill their jobs so they outsource for cheap. It's been like this since at least the early 90s. They want a DBA, network engineer, security engineer, sysadmin, tech support in one person for the price of one of those jobs. When those are individual jobs. But they want you to do it all and pay you for only doing one of those jobs. It is rediculous. So that's why Canada and the US claim there are shortages, you are correct that it comes down to unrealistic salaries by companies. They simply need to realize how hard, and complex IT is and that they MUST pay more to get the talent to develop and maintain this insanely complex world of technology we are in.
- branchless 9y ago
  Disagree on Montreal. Cost of living here is good.
allengeorge 9y ago
It's not just money (though it is a big factor). The lower variety of jobs, the smaller startup pool, the more risk-averse investment community and proximity to the US all play a role. I'd also wager it's harder for consumer-focused companies to take off in Canada: geography and our small population work against gaining scale. It's much easier for a US company to gain scale and move North. To do the equivalent, a Canadian company would have to learn to become global fairly early. Oh, and, apropos of nothing, Canadian management talent is poor.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  The money is a sine qua non. You won't have the startup pool, therefore investors, without the well-paid employees who go on to start the startups.
- TimPC 9y ago
  I think starting a company in Canada has a first addressable market problem which leads to a revenue problem which leads to a VC investment problem which leads to a talent problem. I want this to be fixed because I like living in Canada better than the US but won't do it at less than half the savings per year.
cheez 9y ago
Anecdotal evidence 2: I live in Canada and make US salary. It's amazing. Canada is a joke when it comes to software salaries. For the last 10 years, you'll get $110K tops as a senior dev. In 2009(?) I had an offer for $110K. Last year I had an offer for $100K. Haven't made a Canadian dollar since 2007, but figured I'd try. If anything, Canada should be an offshoring panacea. We are among the best educated, most creative, stable countries in the world and our developers are stupid enough to work for peanuts.
- tamersalama 9y ago
  Care to chat about your experience?
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    Sure. Send me an email. Username @ gmail
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions Yup. I moved to Europe directly after my undergrad and was offered the equivalent of 90k CAD for a junior position. And I was entitled to 20 days paid vacation per year, by law. Not Paid Time Off (PTO) like they have in Canada. Get sick? Go to the doctor and stay home. It's not vacation (since you're sick) so you keep your vacation days. I've heard if you get sick while on vacation you can reclaim the days, though that's never happened. I've thought about moving back occasionally. But if I took my current European contract to any Canadian employer I'd be laughed out of the interview. Besides, it's nice here. Nearly the whole continent is <3 hours away by plane, so there's always somewhere new and interesting to visit with your copious annual vacation ;-)
- scorown 9y ago
  What kind of development work do you do?
  - 9y ago
jgmjgm 9y ago
Just curious, where in Europe do you live? Clearly, not the UK. The salaries there seem ridiculously low.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  Germany. As of March 2019 the UK won't be Europe anymore ;-)
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Was it difficult to make the move to Germany from Canada? (I'm a tech worker in the US interested in going expat at some point)
    - kogepathic 9y ago
      > Was it difficult to make the move to Germany from Canada? From a visa perspective, it's so freaking easy. Take a copy of your university degree, and your employment contract from a German company. Go to the Foreigner's office (Ausländerbehörde) and get a work visa or Blue Card, depending on your salary level. Took me 6 weeks to get a work visa. Total cost was around 150€. From a cultural perspective, it might be difficult. There are a lot of companies who will hire people with only English (especially startups, though expect less money) but the society is very German. The language isn't terribly easy either, so you'll probably have to invest in language courses to learn it. Unless you are very self-motivated and good at self study. If you're American though, things get a lot harder. Lots of banks here won't deal with you because of FINCEN/FBAR, and you have to file IRS taxes every year (and from what I hear from friends, they're too complicated to manage yourself). It can still be done, but is more difficult due to taxation requirements.
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Thank you!
  - Kurtz79 9y ago
    I wasn't aware that Brexit involved relocating the island to another continent... There doesn't seem to be a huge difference in salaries between Germany and Canada, at least on average. https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-trends-2016-2017 https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-... Salaries vary wildly across Europe (and probably across different areas of the same country), if you get to choose, move to Switzerland :)
tamersalama 9y ago
I came to Canada as software professional from the middle east. At one point, Canada had a glimmer of hope in attracting tech talent. However, on the ground, tech professionals are 'forced' to start up their consulting companies, get hunted down by taxes, threatened daily with outsourcing initiatives (extremely low caliber), and have no prospect of career advancement. Either this or accept a meager pay. Why wouldn't they look elsewhere?
splintercell 9y ago
> Canada doesn't have a problem with talent exodous, they have a problem that Canadian employers are stingy and then complain when all they have left are people willing to settle for half they'd make in the US, or 2/3rds of what they would make in Europe. [0] That's not how prices work. Labor isn't a consumer good, wages aren't determined by the employer, they are determined by the goods they're eventually producing which the end user or consumer is willing to pay. If they pay less than what end user is willing to pay, then they lose labor to competition, if they pay more, than the increased price of the final good results in consumers going to the competition. Canadian employers can't control the fact that their consumers don't pay higher prices for the things they producing/providing.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > Canadian employers can't control the fact that their consumers don't pay higher prices for the things they producing/providing. I disagree with your logic, because: 1. Multinational companies pay Canadian engineers doing the same quality of work much less than American counterparts. The original article is from the former CEO of BlackBerry, a multinational company which could pay Canadians an equivalent salary, if they chose to. 2. Canadians do pay more for things than Americans do. Do a currency conversion from CAD to US and products sold in Canada (e.g. iPhone) are still significantly more expensive than US prices. We joke this is the "Canadian tax"
  - splintercell 9y ago
    > Multinational companies pay Canadian engineers doing the same quality of work much less than American counterparts. So tell me why don't multinational companies pay less to their American engineers, the same as their Canadian engineers? > Canadians do pay more for things than Americans do I oversimplified when I said "paying higher", it's more about profit margin. So lets say if a market is located in a much more geographically difficult area then people of that market could be paying more, but still that wouldn't result in higher profit margins when compared to a market which is easier to access. These restrictions could be geographical, economic, political, regulatory, etc or a combination of these.
TimPC 9y ago
When I worked in Canada, I started a consulting company because high salaries were very hard to find. Now Trudeau is making it harder to make money in consulting by going after corporations aggressively. There is a severe salary shortage problem in Canada and instead of fixing it we end up with articles talking about how $60K CDN in Waterloo is better than $105K US in the Valley. We also end up with the idea that it's fair to compare base to base as if the valley didn't have bonus and RSU's (I've seen a lot of companies in Canada that don't have bonus or stock payments, enough that I'd even say it's the norm). I think at it's core Canada is a smaller market so most companies have a Revenue or Potential Revenue problem which turns into a fundraising problem which turns into a Salary problem. I have sympathy for start-ups trying to make it in a tough market, but it's pretty ridiculous to think about this as a HR style recruiting/retention when you generally talk to the right people but they pass on comp.
- amit_m 9y ago
  Wow, $60k CAD is really low. I don't think the smaller market is enough to explain it. In Israel the market for most startups is practically nonexistent, yet typical salaries are >$100k with Google/MSFT senior devs making more than $200k CAD. Many of the Israeli startups are structured as dual US-Israeli companies with sales and marketing in the bay area and R&D in Tel-Aviv. Canadians could pull this stunt a lot more easily, since the geographical distance timezone and culture are much closer to the bay area.
  - TimPC 9y ago
    The idea is that $60k CDN in a market where $300K CDN buys a semi-detached and $500k CDN buys a detached house is a good rate. To me I say if you really want to live there consider doing a 3-year tour on a TN in SV on a frugal budget and move back with your house paid off. Or do 15 years in SV then retire to a nice environment in Canada in your 40's.
0xbear 9y ago
Then there's also 40%+ of taxes that you need to fork over. No wonder people are leaving.
- pwthornton 9y ago
  If you are a highly-compensated American worker, add up your federal income, state/local income, property taxes (which are often incredibly high in some American jurisdictions), social security taxes and medicare taxes. And then look and see if the taxes are actually higher in Canada.
  - woud420 9y ago
    I mean it's not fair to add property taxes if you're not gonna do the same but you do have a valid point. It's way different if you're in Alberta (flat provincial tax) vs NY than for example Quebec (biggest tax burden in North America) vs FL for example. Those things do need to be considered. In my case, the difference between Quebec and <insert any state> was a no brainer.
    - pwthornton 9y ago
      The reason I bring up property tax is that it varies so much in the U.S., and places without income taxes often have onerous property taxes. I live in MD, right outside of DC, and my property taxes are about 1/3rd of my parents in Ohio for very similarly priced homes.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    I am a "highly compensated worker" who doesn't live in CA. My effective tax rate over the past 2 years was 28%. That's the grand total without any weasel moves to avoid taxation. I pay ~10k/yr in property taxes.
    - pwthornton 9y ago
      The reason I bring up property taxes is that the vary wildly in the U.S. I paid about $3,500 for my place in the DC area area. We have industry and income tax, so my property taxes are rather low. My parents live in Ohio and pay around $12,000 a year for a similarly priced home.
asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
Same. Canadian working in the US. Make 2-3X what I would have made in Canada, and have moved up very quickly. I'd love to come back to Canada and pay taxes to Canada instead of the US. But won't happen unless the $ is there.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

Agreed. Canada seems like a fine place to live. I'm from Upstate New York so the climate isn't a big deal for me. But the low pay and insane housing costs are almost comical.

RodericDay 9y ago

I don't know if it's just the money. I vastly prefer Montreal to SF, and I willingly took the paycut + taxation trade-offs because I prefer the way society works here (entertainment, health care, education, social status of non-white-collar jobs, etc.) However, attempting to switch jobs, I find the gelid pace at which recruitment works here incredibly frustrating. People take weeks to reply. Sometimes they don't reply at all. When I visited SF I got offered an interview + a job in a single day. Companies need to pay more, but currently they're failing at more than just that.

potatolicious 9y ago

Agreed, this is the elephant in the room and by far and away the primary cause of the tech exodus. In my experience compensation in the US (comparing major cities to major cities) is 2-5x higher than in Canada. I'd hazard a guess and say I'm right now making 4x what my job would be paying in Canada. Another big problem is that cost of living continues to rise in Canadian tech hubs - Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are all astronomically expensive relative to compensation, and costs continue to rise rapidly. Despite some upwards movement in recent years in tech salaries, the COL increases have often outpaced it. To Canadian employers who are serious about reversing the brain drain: you have to find ways to pay talent more, everything else is just details.

X86BSD 9y ago
But this is the problem everywhere. In the states that's the reason outsourcing is such a huge boner for companies. They refuse to pay the market rate for Americans who will not work six jobs in IT for the pay of one. So they then claim they can't get enough skilled American workers to fill their jobs so they outsource for cheap. It's been like this since at least the early 90s. They want a DBA, network engineer, security engineer, sysadmin, tech support in one person for the price of one of those jobs. When those are individual jobs. But they want you to do it all and pay you for only doing one of those jobs. It is rediculous. So that's why Canada and the US claim there are shortages, you are correct that it comes down to unrealistic salaries by companies. They simply need to realize how hard, and complex IT is and that they MUST pay more to get the talent to develop and maintain this insanely complex world of technology we are in.
branchless 9y ago
Disagree on Montreal. Cost of living here is good.

allengeorge 9y ago

It's not just money (though it is a big factor). The lower variety of jobs, the smaller startup pool, the more risk-averse investment community and proximity to the US all play a role. I'd also wager it's harder for consumer-focused companies to take off in Canada: geography and our small population work against gaining scale. It's much easier for a US company to gain scale and move North. To do the equivalent, a Canadian company would have to learn to become global fairly early. Oh, and, apropos of nothing, Canadian management talent is poor.

whipoodle 9y ago
The money is a sine qua non. You won't have the startup pool, therefore investors, without the well-paid employees who go on to start the startups.
TimPC 9y ago
I think starting a company in Canada has a first addressable market problem which leads to a revenue problem which leads to a VC investment problem which leads to a talent problem. I want this to be fixed because I like living in Canada better than the US but won't do it at less than half the savings per year.

cheez 9y ago

Anecdotal evidence 2: I live in Canada and make US salary. It's amazing. Canada is a joke when it comes to software salaries. For the last 10 years, you'll get $110K tops as a senior dev. In 2009(?) I had an offer for $110K. Last year I had an offer for $100K. Haven't made a Canadian dollar since 2007, but figured I'd try. If anything, Canada should be an offshoring panacea. We are among the best educated, most creative, stable countries in the world and our developers are stupid enough to work for peanuts.

tamersalama 9y ago
Care to chat about your experience?
- kogepathic 9y ago
  Sure. Send me an email. Username @ gmail
kogepathic 9y ago
> The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions Yup. I moved to Europe directly after my undergrad and was offered the equivalent of 90k CAD for a junior position. And I was entitled to 20 days paid vacation per year, by law. Not Paid Time Off (PTO) like they have in Canada. Get sick? Go to the doctor and stay home. It's not vacation (since you're sick) so you keep your vacation days. I've heard if you get sick while on vacation you can reclaim the days, though that's never happened. I've thought about moving back occasionally. But if I took my current European contract to any Canadian employer I'd be laughed out of the interview. Besides, it's nice here. Nearly the whole continent is <3 hours away by plane, so there's always somewhere new and interesting to visit with your copious annual vacation ;-)
scorown 9y ago
What kind of development work do you do?
- 9y ago

jgmjgm 9y ago

Just curious, where in Europe do you live? Clearly, not the UK. The salaries there seem ridiculously low.

kogepathic 9y ago
Germany. As of March 2019 the UK won't be Europe anymore ;-)
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Was it difficult to make the move to Germany from Canada? (I'm a tech worker in the US interested in going expat at some point)
  - kogepathic 9y ago
    > Was it difficult to make the move to Germany from Canada? From a visa perspective, it's so freaking easy. Take a copy of your university degree, and your employment contract from a German company. Go to the Foreigner's office (Ausländerbehörde) and get a work visa or Blue Card, depending on your salary level. Took me 6 weeks to get a work visa. Total cost was around 150€. From a cultural perspective, it might be difficult. There are a lot of companies who will hire people with only English (especially startups, though expect less money) but the society is very German. The language isn't terribly easy either, so you'll probably have to invest in language courses to learn it. Unless you are very self-motivated and good at self study. If you're American though, things get a lot harder. Lots of banks here won't deal with you because of FINCEN/FBAR, and you have to file IRS taxes every year (and from what I hear from friends, they're too complicated to manage yourself). It can still be done, but is more difficult due to taxation requirements.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Thank you!
- Kurtz79 9y ago
  I wasn't aware that Brexit involved relocating the island to another continent... There doesn't seem to be a huge difference in salaries between Germany and Canada, at least on average. https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-trends-2016-2017 https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-... Salaries vary wildly across Europe (and probably across different areas of the same country), if you get to choose, move to Switzerland :)

tamersalama 9y ago

I came to Canada as software professional from the middle east. At one point, Canada had a glimmer of hope in attracting tech talent. However, on the ground, tech professionals are 'forced' to start up their consulting companies, get hunted down by taxes, threatened daily with outsourcing initiatives (extremely low caliber), and have no prospect of career advancement. Either this or accept a meager pay. Why wouldn't they look elsewhere?

splintercell 9y ago

> Canada doesn't have a problem with talent exodous, they have a problem that Canadian employers are stingy and then complain when all they have left are people willing to settle for half they'd make in the US, or 2/3rds of what they would make in Europe. [0] That's not how prices work. Labor isn't a consumer good, wages aren't determined by the employer, they are determined by the goods they're eventually producing which the end user or consumer is willing to pay. If they pay less than what end user is willing to pay, then they lose labor to competition, if they pay more, than the increased price of the final good results in consumers going to the competition. Canadian employers can't control the fact that their consumers don't pay higher prices for the things they producing/providing.

kogepathic 9y ago
> Canadian employers can't control the fact that their consumers don't pay higher prices for the things they producing/providing. I disagree with your logic, because: 1. Multinational companies pay Canadian engineers doing the same quality of work much less than American counterparts. The original article is from the former CEO of BlackBerry, a multinational company which could pay Canadians an equivalent salary, if they chose to. 2. Canadians do pay more for things than Americans do. Do a currency conversion from CAD to US and products sold in Canada (e.g. iPhone) are still significantly more expensive than US prices. We joke this is the "Canadian tax"
- splintercell 9y ago
  > Multinational companies pay Canadian engineers doing the same quality of work much less than American counterparts. So tell me why don't multinational companies pay less to their American engineers, the same as their Canadian engineers? > Canadians do pay more for things than Americans do I oversimplified when I said "paying higher", it's more about profit margin. So lets say if a market is located in a much more geographically difficult area then people of that market could be paying more, but still that wouldn't result in higher profit margins when compared to a market which is easier to access. These restrictions could be geographical, economic, political, regulatory, etc or a combination of these.

TimPC 9y ago

When I worked in Canada, I started a consulting company because high salaries were very hard to find. Now Trudeau is making it harder to make money in consulting by going after corporations aggressively. There is a severe salary shortage problem in Canada and instead of fixing it we end up with articles talking about how $60K CDN in Waterloo is better than $105K US in the Valley. We also end up with the idea that it's fair to compare base to base as if the valley didn't have bonus and RSU's (I've seen a lot of companies in Canada that don't have bonus or stock payments, enough that I'd even say it's the norm). I think at it's core Canada is a smaller market so most companies have a Revenue or Potential Revenue problem which turns into a fundraising problem which turns into a Salary problem. I have sympathy for start-ups trying to make it in a tough market, but it's pretty ridiculous to think about this as a HR style recruiting/retention when you generally talk to the right people but they pass on comp.

amit_m 9y ago
Wow, $60k CAD is really low. I don't think the smaller market is enough to explain it. In Israel the market for most startups is practically nonexistent, yet typical salaries are >$100k with Google/MSFT senior devs making more than $200k CAD. Many of the Israeli startups are structured as dual US-Israeli companies with sales and marketing in the bay area and R&D in Tel-Aviv. Canadians could pull this stunt a lot more easily, since the geographical distance timezone and culture are much closer to the bay area.
- TimPC 9y ago
  The idea is that $60k CDN in a market where $300K CDN buys a semi-detached and $500k CDN buys a detached house is a good rate. To me I say if you really want to live there consider doing a 3-year tour on a TN in SV on a frugal budget and move back with your house paid off. Or do 15 years in SV then retire to a nice environment in Canada in your 40's.

0xbear 9y ago

Then there's also 40%+ of taxes that you need to fork over. No wonder people are leaving.

pwthornton 9y ago
If you are a highly-compensated American worker, add up your federal income, state/local income, property taxes (which are often incredibly high in some American jurisdictions), social security taxes and medicare taxes. And then look and see if the taxes are actually higher in Canada.
- woud420 9y ago
  I mean it's not fair to add property taxes if you're not gonna do the same but you do have a valid point. It's way different if you're in Alberta (flat provincial tax) vs NY than for example Quebec (biggest tax burden in North America) vs FL for example. Those things do need to be considered. In my case, the difference between Quebec and <insert any state> was a no brainer.
  - pwthornton 9y ago
    The reason I bring up property tax is that it varies so much in the U.S., and places without income taxes often have onerous property taxes. I live in MD, right outside of DC, and my property taxes are about 1/3rd of my parents in Ohio for very similarly priced homes.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  I am a "highly compensated worker" who doesn't live in CA. My effective tax rate over the past 2 years was 28%. That's the grand total without any weasel moves to avoid taxation. I pay ~10k/yr in property taxes.
  - pwthornton 9y ago
    The reason I bring up property taxes is that the vary wildly in the U.S. I paid about $3,500 for my place in the DC area area. We have industry and income tax, so my property taxes are rather low. My parents live in Ohio and pay around $12,000 a year for a similarly priced home.

asdfasdfasd333 9y ago

Same. Canadian working in the US. Make 2-3X what I would have made in Canada, and have moved up very quickly. I'd love to come back to Canada and pay taxes to Canada instead of the US. But won't happen unless the $ is there.