8 ms·
The wages in Toronto are laughable. In the praries it's possible to make maybe 10 to 20k less than Toronto salaries but the houses are half the price.
by kirbypineapple 8y ago
The wages in Toronto are laughable. In the praries it's possible to make maybe 10 to 20k less than Toronto salaries but the houses are half the price.
- thinkingkong 8y agoThis is a Canada wide problem. Rather, Id even say its a !valley problem. Canadian businesses keep making this weird assumption that theres some kind of market capture but it’s really only true for people who have to stay in the city or country for some reason. The addressable hirable market is the people who chose / have to stay and havent realized being employed by a US business is as easy as switching github organizations and slack teams.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- acchow 8y ago"!valley problem"? Seattle and New York aren't in the "valley" and have the same compensation as the valley.
- thinkingkong 8y agoI guess we’re both in the same boat data wise. What Ive seen with my last set of searches is that the valley tops the list in terms of comp. If you take the next top 10 cities things drop off pretty quickly from there. Its not to say “no other place pays as much as SF”. Just on average the salaries are way off.
- jandrewrogers 8y agoAs someone that regularly deals with comp in all of these cities in the US and globally (unfortunately), there are a small number of cities, like Seattle, that literally go toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley on comp in practice. This was not always the case but it is in 2018. And in the case of Seattle, they don't have income tax either, which makes it brutal to suggest people relocate from Seattle. Hence why Seattle is the fastest growing city in the US. There may be some areas where the Valley tops the comp list, the kind of software engineering that goes on in cities varies. But for many types of software engineering where Seattle excels, such as core infrastructure code, expected hiring costs are astronomically by any general metric.
- jandrewrogers 8y agoI do think it reflects more of a "not US" than a "not Silicon Valley/Seattle" problem these days. Anecdotally, I've discovered that most sufficiently large companies in the US now recognize and will credibly attempt to compete with the stratospheric Silicon Valley wages for the upper echelons of tech talent no matter where the company is located. For example, I've seen many cases of the Fortune 500, most of which are in inexpensive flyover metros in unsexy States (the US has ~55 metros with at least a million people), offering the upper end of the six-figure range for an individual contributor with exceptional skills. Seeing old, non-tech companies headquartered in Missouri or wherever doing this is a sea change. For American software engineers, this is a brilliant change of condition. A decade ago, if you lived and wanted to work in the flyover metros, you were lucky to get six-figures at all no matter who you were or what you'd done. These days, big non-tech companies are willing to push toward a seven-figure comp package in flyover country for top tech people, in cities where almost no one makes six-figures. It has been really interesting to see.
- ummonk 8y agoWow, that's good to hear. As someone who would like the option of settling down outside the Bay Area down the road, but wouldn't want to miss out on the opportunities available at top companies in the Bay Area, I'm curious how much and what kind of experience they're looking for in making these offers.
- thesimon 8y ago>I do think it reflects more of a "not US" than a "not Silicon Valley/Seattle" problem these days. Yeah, I agree, I've seen similar high offers in other US regions as well. And as the US visa policies are becoming more strict, european companies won't have to compete against people leaving for the US, so the Salary/CoL ratio will stay bad over here.
- jgh 8y ago> offering the upper end of the six-figure range for an individual contributor with exceptional skills how does one find companies with this sort of pay scale? (edit: maybe I misunderstood what you meant by "upper end")
- 8y ago
- ninjakeyboard 8y agoThe wages in toronto have skyrocketed in the last couple years. I'm looking for functional programming people if you're interested I can pay at least $120k/year and offer considerable equity to work on realtime systems. We're profitable and not funded. We have a couple seats to fill and I'm having a hard time because people in Scala circles are expecting $150k/year in Toronto. Many of my peers are making $150k no problem in the city as full time employees at your average tech company. If you have elixir or scala experience, like FP, like realtime problems...
- kevintb 8y agoBut you’d have to live in the Prairies.
- dang 8y agoThat's not nice. Please don't do regional dissing here.
- DKnoll 8y agoIt's a legitimate argument dang, just not expressed in the best way. The Canadian praries (AB, SK, MB) are rough. The crime rate and suicide rate is much higher than other provinces, especially Ontario, and there is very little to do. It's cheap because people don't want to live there.
- refurb 8y agoWhat? The Calgary-Edmonton corridor has the highest salaries in Canada and over 1M people in each city.
- DKnoll 8y agoI didn't mention the marginally higher average wage (across all industries, not specifically IT, which does not average higher) or population of Calgary. For reference the Toronto metro area has a population of 6.4 million with the Calgary metro area having 1.3. If we're talking about the praries as a whole which the parent was, that also includes Winnipeg and Regina.
- ibopm 8y agoI live in Toronto and work for a well-known US company. It's the best.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adriand 8y agoThese conversations, which appear every time a post appears on HN that talks about what a great place Toronto is (along with many other places in Canada), make me sad. There is so much more to life than money.
- TomMarius 8y agoThere definitely is, but at the same time, you need money to have a comfortable life for you, your parents, your partner and your children (and then their children).
- jgh 8y agoSure but Toronto is expensive and they pay isn't very good considering. If it were people lamenting only being paid $300k instead of $400k then we could be like "it's just money!" but I heard when I was there a few months back CAD$120k is pretty typical for a senior dev, which is roughly $90k USD, and the housing and whatnot isn't all that much cheaper than in big US cities.
- nasalgoat 8y agoI would go as far to say that $120K is exceptionally high for a senior dev and in fact $100K is an upper boundary.
- ccccccccccccc 8y agoThere is definitely room for improvement among pay in Canada, but it really is an exceptionalist view to base the pay in USD. Especially so because I always see people convert salary in CAD to USD, then not convert the cost of goods and living to USD as well. There are also certain nuances living in Canada that decrease your expenses compared to the US such as decent public transit (unheard of in the west coast), decent healthcare of which health benefits from the company then boost the healthcare quality way higher than what I was able to find in America, and a much more collectivist culture than America which, in my opinion, is the biggest draw to living in Canada. On the other hand, there are expenses that are higher! Taxes are higher for one as well as the cost of goods such as groceries. Although, the groceries case doesn't really hold because I find that groceries in SV or Seattle to be higher than where I am now in Canada. The main point I'm trying to make is that is that straight up converting salary in another country straight to USD is a bad comparison of wealth.
- wintorez 8y agoIt depends. They are not bad if you're a contractor.
- apercu 8y agoAgreed, I don't even code anymore (I provide business and integration strategy primarily) and have no problem getting $100-150/hr and for 4 years have had as much work as I've wanted.