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"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 c
by pembrook 9y 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.
- vonmoltke 9y agoFAANG can only hire so many engineers, the positions tend to be highly competitive, they pull them from all over the world, and the drop-off in compensation at the next level is pretty significant.
- xeromal 9y agoBut they push other tech firms to make their offerings more palatable.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoThey have an anchoring effect.
- netheril96 9y agoCan Canadian programmers good enough to be hired by FAANG be paid similar salaries in Canada?
- jonny_eh 9y agoNo, that's the whole point of this discussion.
- netheril96 9y agoIt's a rhetorical question.
- querulous 9y agothey can work for FAANG in canada at a 30-40% discount (well not FN, but AAG)
- minwcnt5 9y agoI have a hard time understanding the comparison of aggregate market cap (a valuation) to GDP (an annual output). These seem like two very different quantities, with different units. How do you intend for us to interpret that comparison? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the aggregate revenues of those companies? (I'm not an economist, so I'm not sure those two quantities are comparable either, but they seem closer at least.)
- ummonk 9y agoIt's several hundred billion in revenue per year - i.e. about half the Canadian GDP for the FAANG companies.
- adventured 9y ago> The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc The reason engineers in the US make so much, is because four to five decades ago US tech companies combined with globalization and scaled out into the entire planet as a market. That premise has remained intact, while the global economy has gotten a lot larger and richer. That's something most other nations have failed to do at a large scale (S.Korea has Samsung but not many other companies that have gone hyper global for example). Go all the way back to Fairchild, Intel, HP, IBM in the 1950-1980 era. Nobody has done globalized tech like the US, probably only Japan got close (and they've largely missed out on the huge margins in software). Without the ability to tap into the rest of the planet, Netflix wouldn't be able to pay what it does. The rest of the planet is half their market now, and will be 2/3 or 3/4 of it in the near future. Europe only has three or four major tech companies that managed to go substantially global (eg SAP, ARM, Spotify, or Booking.com which got swallowed by Priceline). ARM & Booking got taken out, Spotify will be acquired next. The same kind of problem Canada often faces with its tech companies (Shopify is very likely to end up in the belly of a US tech or retail company, especially once their valuation normalizes).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]