9 ms·
Canadian tech worker here. Base salary is 120k CAD in Calgary which is far above market rate but I am educated, experienced etc. That is 93k USD. I am looking
by r-s 8y ago
Canadian tech worker here. Base salary is 120k CAD in Calgary which is far above market rate but I am educated, experienced etc. That is 93k USD.
I am looking to move to the USA because of higher salaries, but I am not 22 years old anymore and moving a family (with 2 earners) is no easy task.
It falls on deaf ears though, 120k CAD is a good income, I can afford a house, cars, no debts etc so there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay.
- fusiongyro 8y agoGet ready to spend a good deal of the difference in pay on healthcare.
- rconti 8y agoIt'll be almost entirely covered by your employer, and that number doesn't show up in the headline salaries they're looking at, anyway.
- briandear 8y agoMy insurance costs me personally about $250 per month covering a family of 6. My employer pays the rest — AND I make 2-3x a Canadian salary excluding stock. The health argument is completely invalid when it comes to Canadian salary comparisons because the Canadian employer doesn’t have to pay health insurance costs — so they should have more money available for salaries.
- toasterlovin 8y agoHealth care is not that expensive for upper middle class earners. We are a family of five and insurance costs us $11k/year in premiums and, worst case, another $16k/year in out of pocket maximum. And you’re also forgetting that stuff costs less in the US. Groceries, gas, etc. are all much cheaper down here.
- wolco 8y agoBut the differences in taxes reflect not covering health care. If you include that 20,000 a year spent on health care doesn't feel like a great deal anymore
- padobson 8y agoDo Canadian companies make that much less money than American ones? Why should they get to pad their profit margins because 120k CAD is "good income"?
- badpun 8y agoA lot of the tech industry is about burning through investors' money in search of new profitable ideas. I'm guessing there's much less investor money in Canada.
- s2g 8y agoLots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same. So they just pay what it takes to fill the spot. Of course they are also incredibly resistant to changing this, preferring to complain about how we need to fix brain drain and/or make immigration easier.
- pm90 8y ago> Lots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same. So it seems like they're not losing devs at a fast enough pace to warrant increasing dev salaries? Or perhaps there are just enough developers for the Canadian market, to not have to increase compensation to attract better talent? From what I've seen, American based companies with offices in Canada do seem to pay very well, but Canadian companies are unabashedly poorly compensating. I talked with a few hiring managers at some Canadian startups and what they were offering would be less than what I made right out of college. It left me wondering how talented folks can continue to work for Canadian firms?
- pembrook 8y ago"Burning through investors money in search of profitable ideas" has nothing to do with it. There's this huge misconception on HN about the size of the venture capital market. Start-ups are a miniscule portion of the tech economy by any measure of value. The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. The combined market cap of FAANG is fluctuating around $3 trillion right now. That's about 2X the entire GDP of Canada...in just 5 American companies. No large-ish tech company in Canada is near that level of profitability or size. Combine that with currency fluctuations and with the greater tax/regulatory burden of having a full-time employee in Canada, and you will never have a Canadian company that can afford to pay engineers $250K+ en masse like FAANG can.
- throwaway5752 8y agoDefinitely be aware of the current value/cost of CPP and OAS and the difference typical medical expenditures (both the normal ones things that contribute to out-of-pocket maximums, and catastrophic care risks). Not to discourage you, the pay difference might cover it and then some. Sounds like you know what you're doing, but just in case.
- woolvalley 8y agoThere is a totalization agreement between the US and Canada for social security: https://www.ssa.gov/international/Agreement_Pamphlets/canada.html https://www.ssa.gov/international/Agreement_Pamphlets/canada...
- tanilama 8y agoIn Silicon Valley, most likely you are not going to afford a house anyway.. .
- Tiktaalik 8y agoWell you can't afford a house in Vancouver either so why not go to the USA and earn more. The spot with the best balance seems to be Seattle. High salaries and housing relatively affordable when compared to Vancouver or SF.
- s2g 8y agoNo. it's the worst. don't come here.
- mynameisvlad 8y agoSeattle's housing market is going up really quickly, though. Last time I moved, I definitely noticed higher rents and more expensive purchase prices compared to a few years ago. It's not yet at the level of Vancouver, and far from SF/NY levels, but its trajectory isn't great.
- jonny_eh 8y agoSounds like a good time to buy a house in Seattle then, if you can afford it.
- trhway 8y agoSunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) median is close to 2M - that is only 5x of $400K which a lot of FANG and other engineers pull yearly (and that is the main reason for current SV home prices as, during such low mortgage rates, the market is naturally self-adjusting to 5-6x of prevalent salaries. In 2008 those houses were $700-800K+ - the 5-6x of those $120K-150K salaries back then).
- jseliger 8y agoIf only there were some way to put more houses on a given plot of land, perhaps by stacking one on top of another, we could somehow break this dynamic. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
- eloff 8y agoI do remote work for this reason. Although I did manage to recently find a contractor position that pays competitively here in Canada, I find that very rarely. If you do remote contract work, mostly for US or Swiss companies, you can make 2-3x a top Canadian salary. Just throwing that out there as an alternative to moving to the US.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoHow did you find your way into rates like that?
- eloff 8y agoWithout really planning it or advertising myself much. I don't have a website even. So I'm not the right person to ask. All I can say is just be persistent, don't sell yourself short, and most importantly always do an excellent job that wows your client. Work harder than your peers. I've always worked 6-7 days a week (always working challenging side projects after work), and after 15 years of doing that I'm better than most of my peers - it's like making a slowly compounding investment in yourself. I haven't enjoyed life as much as my peers perhaps, although I do have a good time and I love what I do. But I'll retire early in my fourties and spend the rest of my life working on whatever I find interesting, traveling, or whatever else catches my fancy.
- xenihn 8y agoCan I ask what sector and languages/frameworks you use?
- rlabrecque 8y agoNot the person you're responding to, but C++ for me. I make a normal Seattle salary while living in Toronto. Which after conversion seems to put me higher than people with 3x my experience in much better paying sectors than I'm in... It's stupid, and it sucks, I wish my company was local, I don't prefer remote. I do much prefer making literally double than I'd make locally though. :/
- hourislate 8y agoI left Toronto Canada 25 years ago. Earned more in the first 10 years than I could have earned in my entire life in Toronto, Canada. The USA is the Land of Milk and Honey.
- thirduncle 8y agoSo there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay. Have you calculated what salary you'd have to earn to afford an equivalent configuration of {house, cars, debt, schools, commute, sanity} in the BA? That may be where the lack of understanding comes from.
- s2g 8y agoI would think the experienced engineer contemplating moving their entire family to another country has done the basic math. I really do get tired of this "but the cost of living!" argument being tossed out. People get it. It's not complicated.
- bgirard 8y agoI think people don't understand how their cost of living can be different then someone else's. Your COL calculation will be very different based on what standard of livings you want to preserve (house vs renting, downtown SF vs commute, sending kids to private school). So the COL delta is different for everyone.
- titanomachy 8y agoYeah, it's a knee-jerk response that's been trained into people to help them rationalize staying in Canada. I explain to friends/family/etc.: "I was offered 3x my salary to move to Seattle [from Vancouver]" and every goddamn time I hear "Oh, but I've heard Seattle is very expensive these days, so it probably cancels out!" Yes, Seattle is more expensive than Vancouver! About 25% more. And I make 3x as much money. I put literally 10x as much money into savings every year than I did when I lived in Vancouver.
- systemBuilder 8y agoYou are probably earning a better income than $250k in silicon valley where housing is $700-$1600 a sq ft to buy.
- solitus 8y agoWait what. 120k base salary? That's wayyy better than Montreal. Base salary in Montreal is probably between 50k and 60k...