17 ms·

Canada's new tech talent strategy

36 points by rbrown 3y ago

shortrounddev2 3y ago
I guess permanent residency is better than an H-1B, but Canadian salaries are pretty low, from what I hear. I figure most people in (e.g) India would keep trying for the US
- icpmacdo 3y ago
  Quality of life can be commensurate so it depends on priorities
  - underdeserver 3y ago
    From what I hear, salaries can be 2-3x lower than in the bay area, NYC, and Seattle, and cost of living is 70%-80%, especially in the Vancouver area.
    - filoleg 3y ago
      > cost of living is 70%-80%, especially in the Vancouver area. If you check housing prices, the picture gets even worse. Even with seeing how crazy Seattle housing market is, Vancouver beats us easily with their residential property pricing.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Speaking for Vancouver, it's really not. Here are the differences: - Weather is much worse in Canada than in SF (comparing with this because Balaji tweet did) - 20% foreigner tax on home ownership - crime in Vancouver is about as bad as SF - rent to income ratio is higher, so less disposable income - lower tech in general, less fiber penetration, worse wireless telecom - job switching is harder because of sparse job market OP described Indians so mentioning that there is a massive backlash in the mainstream against Indian immigration. Long healthcare waits and overall poor patient experience isn't a problem since doesn't apply to emergency care in either place and Indians can get better care in Indian private system for elective.
    - bpye 3y ago
      - Weather is personal preference - personally? I wish Vancouver didn’t get quite as warm. - The foreign buyers tax doesn’t apply to those with PR. - A very quick search doesn’t support the claim that crime is as high [0]. - Rents in Vancouver absolutely are high, but tech pays significantly over the median. I’m not sure there are good statistics to compare here. - Vancouver itself has pretty broad fibre coverage, I get gigabit for ~$70/mo, but yes mobile telecom is more expensive. - I don’t really have enough data to comment on that last point. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Canada&city1=Vancouver&country2=United+States&city2=San+Francisco%2C+CA https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Can...
      - throwaway019254 3y ago
        > I get gigabit for ~$70/mo Which provider? I will be arranging internet in my new home in a few weeks and it would be great to have this rate.
        voisin 3y ago
        I pay this much for Telus Fibre in BC.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - downrightmike 3y ago
    Yeah, but if you want one of these jobs, it'll likely be in Toronto and the housing market there is insane. So QoL goes out the window
- preommr 3y ago
  Canadian immigration is way easier and many people use it as a stepping stone. There are even companies that hire people and park them in Canada because it's easier and sometimes cheaper.
  - TeeMassive 3y ago
    Never heard an immigrant say that immigrating to Canada was "easy" I don't know where you'd get that idea.
    - agnosticmantis 3y ago
      Maybe they mean it’s less random and less uncertain. The criteria are more transparent. US immigration literally runs lotteries for various streams including H1b. It doesn’t feel great when your work/future/life depends so heavily on a coin toss. And we’re not yet even talking about being at the mercy of an immigration officer.
Graziano_M 3y ago
I guess it's good they'll ostensibly be able to attract more talent from other countries, but I think they need to fix their own brain drain problem in the first place. - A Canadian living in the US
- MikeTheRocker 3y ago
  It all comes down to wages. Sure, you can argue Canada has some stronger social programs or quality of life per dollar, but when you can earn 2-4x the wage for the same work by moving 200km south from Vancouver to Seattle, it's a no-brainer.
  - jakeinspace 3y ago
    I’m a US citizen, but moved to Montreal a few years back. I’m earning roughly 40% of what I would be if I moved back even to Philly where I grew up, let alone the west coast. But y’a know, I fell in love with someone here, so it’s tough. I definitely enjoy this city more than any US city I’ve lived in, but on paper it’s easily the dumbest decision of my life.
    - droobles 3y ago
      Sounds like the best decision if you enjoy it and found love. I only ever hear great things about Montreal, my wife and I plan to visit from the US in a couple months on vacation, we're really excited!
      - jakeinspace 3y ago
        It really is a great city. Learning French from zero takes a lot of time and effort though, but I can see it’ll be very worth it.
  - throwboatyface 3y ago
    As a Canadian who makes ~250k working for bay area companies from Canada, where can I make 500k-1M in the states?
tamersalama 3y ago
The land where “Software Engineers” can’t be named Engineers.
- sefrost 3y ago
  My job title in Canada is Software Engineer and it was also that in the National Occupation Classification I used for immigration: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/eligibility/find-national-occupation-code.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
  - chrisfosterelli 3y ago
    Canada is in a strange moment where most professional engineering bodies are taking the position that any use of the term 'engineer' by a non-professional engineer (someone with a P.Eng degree) is illegal but US tech companies, which have a lot of influence into Canada's market and aren't affected by the same laws, don't really care. This means it is often used in Canada despite the position taken by the engineering bodies. The law is sort of vague on it. It says that you aren't allowed to mislead people into thinking you are a professional engineer or use terms that would lead people to think you are a professional engineer if you are not. Whether or not 'software engineer' does this can depend on your viewpoint and whether you're building software for web stacks or for airplane control. But the engineering bodies have tried to make examples of companies or individuals that don't have big enough legal resources to want to go to court over it. IMO I understand the professional bodies wanting to ensure nobody is misrepresenting themselves as licensed P.Eng holders but claiming a monopoly on the engineering mindset is a bit of gatekeeping and nothing else.
    - afterburner 3y ago
      P.Eng is not a degree. You get it by writing a pass/fail ethics exam for the local regulatory board after completing an actual Engineering degree (BASc/BEng), and paying yearly dues. P.Eng is not required for most engineering activities. One notable exception being civil engineers, since there's so much signing off on blueprints for infrastructure.
objektif 3y ago
Does anyone take him seriously still?
paddw 3y ago
What are the large software companies in Canada, that aren't connected to something like a bank? Not many I could think of.
- fidotron 3y ago
  Shopify These days everyone with a pulse is remoting for US companies as the salaries are enormously better than offered locally.
markus_zhang 3y ago
I earn about 60% of the salary comparing to my US colleagues in the same position and level. Good luck.
- Marsymars 3y ago
  I'd be around 60% if the dollar was at parity.
rapind 3y ago
Tech salaries in Canada are already ridiculously low compared to the states. 10k new tech workers is not insignificant in Canada, so this will just lower them further. Not to mention our housing is in a ridiculous bubble and our economy in general isn’t in great shape. I suspect there may be an increase of TN visa applications / brain drain of existing Canadian tech workers.
- api 3y ago
  How can housing possibly be that expensive in Canada? The median salaries are lower than the US.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Higher immigration per capita combined with poor planning for the future.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Concentration in two or three cities which can't sprawl much further anymore, poor planning, policies intended to inflate house prices, and higher building and infrastructure costs due to the winter complicating construction (as well as criminal involvement in construction)
  - dpc050505 3y ago
    Our banking regulations kept the bubble from popping in 2008 and international capital figured out canadian real estate was a very safe bet. Housing prices never corrected and they kept growing at the same-ish rate as american housing. Add demographic (we increased our population by 3% this year, 1.2 million extra people while building 200k new houses) and geographic (most of our land is barely livable frozen rock where you can't just go park a camper) factors and you get the perfect storm. An enormous chunk of our GDP growth comes from real estate transactions, we don't have much productive endeavours other than natural resource extraction. Canada is still very much a colony.
    - dalyons 3y ago
nine_zeros 3y ago
A lot of folks complaining about Canadian wages make a fair point - CoL is too high. But, they are only comparing against the US. If you start comparing against the rest of the world, Canada is the only non-declining large economy. Wages in Canada are second only to the US. AI (industry of the future) has a base in Canada that is non-trivial. Canada is getting more internationally connected, which means more business. Compare with UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, where else is the economy looking at the industries of the next decade? Tech is the easiest industry to bootstrap - just get more tech people to create the ecosystem. And Canada was looking for immigrants. This move to poach h1bs from the US is no different from Meta poaching from Google back in the 00s.
- sefrost 3y ago
  This is true, I moved from the UK (London) to Canada and receive a higher wage. AND in the UK I was working as a contractor which is a way of avoiding a lot of tax. What I would like to know is what can Canada do, tangibly, to increase wages to USA levels?
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > What I would like to know is what can Canada do, tangibly, to increase wages to USA levels? Now this is a great question. Imo, they should follow the strategy of Asian countries. Asian countries started creating competitive ecosystems when they went through the manufacturing boom in the 70s-00s. What kind of competition? They incentivized and allowed many small companies to come up. They killed large megalocorps so that competition survived. They allowed creating international linkages for their people and businesses. They created massive infrastructure to aid these companies to trade among themselves, thus building an ecosystem. Then, they invited foreign companies to open shop locally. In the Canadian context of today, they'd need to incentivize creation of companies, perhaps through tax breaks. Build more roads, more houses, higher speed internet, create efficient ports and business laws that allow things to move faster. Dismantle some monopolies. Allow people to trade faster. E.g. a lot of Canadian businesses don't realize that they could leverage their businesses to create outposts in Dubai, Singapore, and other such financial hubs. Just opening offices there allows business to come into the company. Easier said than done of course. But of all the rich countries (minus USA), only Canada managed to achieve anything in the last decade, thanks largely to the immigration reform.
deskamess 3y ago
Canada is a tough cell. This story from a couple of weeks ago. "I respect myself too much to stay in Canada" was an article that got a lot of traction. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-myself-too-much-to-stay-in-canada-why-so-many-new-immigrants-are-leaving.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-mys... Just remember, Canada is geographically situated near the US but their attitudes to innovation, risk taking, rewarding talent, and merit based promotion are not the same. Even if they say that it is - the reality is very different.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Europe is just like Canada except it's main "advantage" is not bordering the US to prevent massive brain drain.
bamfly 3y ago
... they gonna make it easier for US citizen remote tech workers to pursue PR status without having to find a Canadian employer first (and, so, take a big pay cut)? I'd love to move my family there and start paying our way-above-median-income taxes to Canada instead of the US, but struggle to make the minimum score for immigration in any Canadian province despite having the advantages of the right kind of career and degree (and, actually, I think we've aged out of making the cut in any of them, now, as of the last year or two). [EDIT] To be clear, I get why this narrow slice of the population isn't one they're worried about bending their immigration system to accommodate, and I'm not mad about it, it'd just be really cool if we accidentally got helped by some other, larger reform.
- deskamess 3y ago
  They do not want US citizens because you all have a strong exit path when you realize the marketing does not match the reality. When people lift and immigrate from across an ocean the proposition for going back is not as strong or easy. There are a lot of 'sunk cost' issues and 'image' that come into play.
mparnisari 3y ago
Oh dear lord please don't come here. Our housing situation is horrible right now.
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  Do you vote accordingly?
  - Fervicus 3y ago
    And which political party has a sane immigration policy? None, last I checked.
    - peanuty1 3y ago
      The housing crisis peaked under Trudeau, who is currently backed by the NDP. That leaves the Conservatives as the remaining choice for Canadians.
      - Fervicus 3y ago
        Their policy doesn't seem any different, sadly. We just have an illusion of choice.
TeeMassive 3y ago
I don't even earn 50% of the equivalent job in the US. And I'm not even talking about jobs in huge tech hubs like SF. Add to that ~35% taxes that are deduced from my salary plus 15% of sale taxes on everything that I buy that are already priced higher than in the US plus insane housing price plus gas that costs nearly two times more, plus, plus, plus.... Nearly everyone that was in the top 30% of my university cohord moved abroad. I'm only staying because of my family but I'm planning to leave soon if the economy doesn't turn to crap. Canada is just a very badly managed country overall. The tech industry basically thrives off goverment subsidies and tax credits. This can't go on forever.
manesioz 3y ago
Canadian tech jobs are slim, wages are low (especially when compared to the CoL). Not exactly a great sell
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 - June 2023 (232 comments)
motohagiography 3y ago
This is a maquiladora strategy. A maquiladora is "a foreign-owned factory at which imported parts are assembled by lower-paid workers into products for export" What's frustrating about it is that it's an expression of contempt for Canada's nationals by a governing class whose capital is already managed globally, so in their view, what does it matter if they import cheap labour and disincentivize capital growth with new industry when they can just tax farm income from a permanent underclass of workers who bring in salaries from foreign revenue? It would be great if the H1-B's were coming here to do startups, but startups are the artifact of a uniquely American capital ecosystem that just doesn't exist anywhere else, and you can't reproduce something that was the effect of factors that were a moment in time. The strategy is just another expression of contempt of the citizenry by Ottawa. This cohort of government always goes on about how "diversity is our strength," but the emphasis has always been on the our part, meaning theirs, and increasingly at the expense of everyone else.
appleaday1 3y ago
But where will these new people stay? There is not enough housing being built for people, you are going to see people come here only to leave when they realize that they can't afford the housing for their families there. Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came_to_canada_3_years_ago_and_now_leaving_due_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/ontario_get_readyyoure_going_to_lose_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta... I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up. If you are in a TN-1 visa, I strongly recommend doing the math to see if you want to spend a significant amount of your income on rent, definitely do your research.
bilange 3y ago
So, on one hand we have that "Tech Talent Strategy", which I assume comes from the demand for more IT workers globally. On the other, we have Canadians such as yours truly who would like to upgrade from a Helpdesk position sooner rather than later. I realize that sample size=1, but why don't we properly train permanent residents instead? (Also don't forget the IT job market which has slowed practically to a halt, as a direct opposite of that Strategy)

36 points by rbrown 3y ago

I guess permanent residency is better than an H-1B, but Canadian salaries are pretty low, from what I hear. I figure most people in (e.g) India would keep trying for the US

icpmacdo 3y ago
Quality of life can be commensurate so it depends on priorities
- underdeserver 3y ago
  From what I hear, salaries can be 2-3x lower than in the bay area, NYC, and Seattle, and cost of living is 70%-80%, especially in the Vancouver area.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > cost of living is 70%-80%, especially in the Vancouver area. If you check housing prices, the picture gets even worse. Even with seeing how crazy Seattle housing market is, Vancouver beats us easily with their residential property pricing.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Speaking for Vancouver, it's really not. Here are the differences: - Weather is much worse in Canada than in SF (comparing with this because Balaji tweet did) - 20% foreigner tax on home ownership - crime in Vancouver is about as bad as SF - rent to income ratio is higher, so less disposable income - lower tech in general, less fiber penetration, worse wireless telecom - job switching is harder because of sparse job market OP described Indians so mentioning that there is a massive backlash in the mainstream against Indian immigration. Long healthcare waits and overall poor patient experience isn't a problem since doesn't apply to emergency care in either place and Indians can get better care in Indian private system for elective.
  - bpye 3y ago
    - Weather is personal preference - personally? I wish Vancouver didn’t get quite as warm. - The foreign buyers tax doesn’t apply to those with PR. - A very quick search doesn’t support the claim that crime is as high [0]. - Rents in Vancouver absolutely are high, but tech pays significantly over the median. I’m not sure there are good statistics to compare here. - Vancouver itself has pretty broad fibre coverage, I get gigabit for ~$70/mo, but yes mobile telecom is more expensive. - I don’t really have enough data to comment on that last point. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Canada&city1=Vancouver&country2=United+States&city2=San+Francisco%2C+CA https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Can...
    - throwaway019254 3y ago
      > I get gigabit for ~$70/mo Which provider? I will be arranging internet in my new home in a few weeks and it would be great to have this rate.
      - voisin 3y ago
        I pay this much for Telus Fibre in BC.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- downrightmike 3y ago
  Yeah, but if you want one of these jobs, it'll likely be in Toronto and the housing market there is insane. So QoL goes out the window
preommr 3y ago
Canadian immigration is way easier and many people use it as a stepping stone. There are even companies that hire people and park them in Canada because it's easier and sometimes cheaper.
- TeeMassive 3y ago
  Never heard an immigrant say that immigrating to Canada was "easy" I don't know where you'd get that idea.
  - agnosticmantis 3y ago
    Maybe they mean it’s less random and less uncertain. The criteria are more transparent. US immigration literally runs lotteries for various streams including H1b. It doesn’t feel great when your work/future/life depends so heavily on a coin toss. And we’re not yet even talking about being at the mercy of an immigration officer.

Graziano_M 3y ago

I guess it's good they'll ostensibly be able to attract more talent from other countries, but I think they need to fix their own brain drain problem in the first place. - A Canadian living in the US

MikeTheRocker 3y ago
It all comes down to wages. Sure, you can argue Canada has some stronger social programs or quality of life per dollar, but when you can earn 2-4x the wage for the same work by moving 200km south from Vancouver to Seattle, it's a no-brainer.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  I’m a US citizen, but moved to Montreal a few years back. I’m earning roughly 40% of what I would be if I moved back even to Philly where I grew up, let alone the west coast. But y’a know, I fell in love with someone here, so it’s tough. I definitely enjoy this city more than any US city I’ve lived in, but on paper it’s easily the dumbest decision of my life.
  - droobles 3y ago
    Sounds like the best decision if you enjoy it and found love. I only ever hear great things about Montreal, my wife and I plan to visit from the US in a couple months on vacation, we're really excited!
    - jakeinspace 3y ago
      It really is a great city. Learning French from zero takes a lot of time and effort though, but I can see it’ll be very worth it.
- throwboatyface 3y ago
  As a Canadian who makes ~250k working for bay area companies from Canada, where can I make 500k-1M in the states?

tamersalama 3y ago

The land where “Software Engineers” can’t be named Engineers.

sefrost 3y ago
My job title in Canada is Software Engineer and it was also that in the National Occupation Classification I used for immigration: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/eligibility/find-national-occupation-code.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
- chrisfosterelli 3y ago
  Canada is in a strange moment where most professional engineering bodies are taking the position that any use of the term 'engineer' by a non-professional engineer (someone with a P.Eng degree) is illegal but US tech companies, which have a lot of influence into Canada's market and aren't affected by the same laws, don't really care. This means it is often used in Canada despite the position taken by the engineering bodies. The law is sort of vague on it. It says that you aren't allowed to mislead people into thinking you are a professional engineer or use terms that would lead people to think you are a professional engineer if you are not. Whether or not 'software engineer' does this can depend on your viewpoint and whether you're building software for web stacks or for airplane control. But the engineering bodies have tried to make examples of companies or individuals that don't have big enough legal resources to want to go to court over it. IMO I understand the professional bodies wanting to ensure nobody is misrepresenting themselves as licensed P.Eng holders but claiming a monopoly on the engineering mindset is a bit of gatekeeping and nothing else.
  - afterburner 3y ago
    P.Eng is not a degree. You get it by writing a pass/fail ethics exam for the local regulatory board after completing an actual Engineering degree (BASc/BEng), and paying yearly dues. P.Eng is not required for most engineering activities. One notable exception being civil engineers, since there's so much signing off on blueprints for infrastructure.

objektif 3y ago

Does anyone take him seriously still?

paddw 3y ago

What are the large software companies in Canada, that aren't connected to something like a bank? Not many I could think of.

fidotron 3y ago
Shopify These days everyone with a pulse is remoting for US companies as the salaries are enormously better than offered locally.

markus_zhang 3y ago

I earn about 60% of the salary comparing to my US colleagues in the same position and level. Good luck.

Marsymars 3y ago
I'd be around 60% if the dollar was at parity.

rapind 3y ago

Tech salaries in Canada are already ridiculously low compared to the states. 10k new tech workers is not insignificant in Canada, so this will just lower them further. Not to mention our housing is in a ridiculous bubble and our economy in general isn’t in great shape. I suspect there may be an increase of TN visa applications / brain drain of existing Canadian tech workers.

api 3y ago
How can housing possibly be that expensive in Canada? The median salaries are lower than the US.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Higher immigration per capita combined with poor planning for the future.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Concentration in two or three cities which can't sprawl much further anymore, poor planning, policies intended to inflate house prices, and higher building and infrastructure costs due to the winter complicating construction (as well as criminal involvement in construction)
- dpc050505 3y ago
  Our banking regulations kept the bubble from popping in 2008 and international capital figured out canadian real estate was a very safe bet. Housing prices never corrected and they kept growing at the same-ish rate as american housing. Add demographic (we increased our population by 3% this year, 1.2 million extra people while building 200k new houses) and geographic (most of our land is barely livable frozen rock where you can't just go park a camper) factors and you get the perfect storm. An enormous chunk of our GDP growth comes from real estate transactions, we don't have much productive endeavours other than natural resource extraction. Canada is still very much a colony.
  - dalyons 3y ago

nine_zeros 3y ago

A lot of folks complaining about Canadian wages make a fair point - CoL is too high. But, they are only comparing against the US. If you start comparing against the rest of the world, Canada is the only non-declining large economy. Wages in Canada are second only to the US. AI (industry of the future) has a base in Canada that is non-trivial. Canada is getting more internationally connected, which means more business. Compare with UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, where else is the economy looking at the industries of the next decade? Tech is the easiest industry to bootstrap - just get more tech people to create the ecosystem. And Canada was looking for immigrants. This move to poach h1bs from the US is no different from Meta poaching from Google back in the 00s.

sefrost 3y ago
This is true, I moved from the UK (London) to Canada and receive a higher wage. AND in the UK I was working as a contractor which is a way of avoiding a lot of tax. What I would like to know is what can Canada do, tangibly, to increase wages to USA levels?
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > What I would like to know is what can Canada do, tangibly, to increase wages to USA levels? Now this is a great question. Imo, they should follow the strategy of Asian countries. Asian countries started creating competitive ecosystems when they went through the manufacturing boom in the 70s-00s. What kind of competition? They incentivized and allowed many small companies to come up. They killed large megalocorps so that competition survived. They allowed creating international linkages for their people and businesses. They created massive infrastructure to aid these companies to trade among themselves, thus building an ecosystem. Then, they invited foreign companies to open shop locally. In the Canadian context of today, they'd need to incentivize creation of companies, perhaps through tax breaks. Build more roads, more houses, higher speed internet, create efficient ports and business laws that allow things to move faster. Dismantle some monopolies. Allow people to trade faster. E.g. a lot of Canadian businesses don't realize that they could leverage their businesses to create outposts in Dubai, Singapore, and other such financial hubs. Just opening offices there allows business to come into the company. Easier said than done of course. But of all the rich countries (minus USA), only Canada managed to achieve anything in the last decade, thanks largely to the immigration reform.

deskamess 3y ago

Canada is a tough cell. This story from a couple of weeks ago. "I respect myself too much to stay in Canada" was an article that got a lot of traction. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-myself-too-much-to-stay-in-canada-why-so-many-new-immigrants-are-leaving.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/06/11/i-respect-mys... Just remember, Canada is geographically situated near the US but their attitudes to innovation, risk taking, rewarding talent, and merit based promotion are not the same. Even if they say that it is - the reality is very different.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Europe is just like Canada except it's main "advantage" is not bordering the US to prevent massive brain drain.

bamfly 3y ago

... they gonna make it easier for US citizen remote tech workers to pursue PR status without having to find a Canadian employer first (and, so, take a big pay cut)? I'd love to move my family there and start paying our way-above-median-income taxes to Canada instead of the US, but struggle to make the minimum score for immigration in any Canadian province despite having the advantages of the right kind of career and degree (and, actually, I think we've aged out of making the cut in any of them, now, as of the last year or two). [EDIT] To be clear, I get why this narrow slice of the population isn't one they're worried about bending their immigration system to accommodate, and I'm not mad about it, it'd just be really cool if we accidentally got helped by some other, larger reform.

deskamess 3y ago
They do not want US citizens because you all have a strong exit path when you realize the marketing does not match the reality. When people lift and immigrate from across an ocean the proposition for going back is not as strong or easy. There are a lot of 'sunk cost' issues and 'image' that come into play.

mparnisari 3y ago

Oh dear lord please don't come here. Our housing situation is horrible right now.

Nifty3929 3y ago
Do you vote accordingly?
- Fervicus 3y ago
  And which political party has a sane immigration policy? None, last I checked.
  - peanuty1 3y ago
    The housing crisis peaked under Trudeau, who is currently backed by the NDP. That leaves the Conservatives as the remaining choice for Canadians.
    - Fervicus 3y ago
      Their policy doesn't seem any different, sadly. We just have an illusion of choice.

TeeMassive 3y ago

I don't even earn 50% of the equivalent job in the US. And I'm not even talking about jobs in huge tech hubs like SF. Add to that ~35% taxes that are deduced from my salary plus 15% of sale taxes on everything that I buy that are already priced higher than in the US plus insane housing price plus gas that costs nearly two times more, plus, plus, plus.... Nearly everyone that was in the top 30% of my university cohord moved abroad. I'm only staying because of my family but I'm planning to leave soon if the economy doesn't turn to crap. Canada is just a very badly managed country overall. The tech industry basically thrives off goverment subsidies and tax credits. This can't go on forever.

manesioz 3y ago

Canadian tech jobs are slim, wages are low (especially when compared to the CoL). Not exactly a great sell

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries permits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505152 - June 2023 (232 comments)

motohagiography 3y ago

This is a maquiladora strategy. A maquiladora is "a foreign-owned factory at which imported parts are assembled by lower-paid workers into products for export" What's frustrating about it is that it's an expression of contempt for Canada's nationals by a governing class whose capital is already managed globally, so in their view, what does it matter if they import cheap labour and disincentivize capital growth with new industry when they can just tax farm income from a permanent underclass of workers who bring in salaries from foreign revenue? It would be great if the H1-B's were coming here to do startups, but startups are the artifact of a uniquely American capital ecosystem that just doesn't exist anywhere else, and you can't reproduce something that was the effect of factors that were a moment in time. The strategy is just another expression of contempt of the citizenry by Ottawa. This cohort of government always goes on about how "diversity is our strength," but the emphasis has always been on the our part, meaning theirs, and increasingly at the expense of everyone else.

appleaday1 3y ago

But where will these new people stay? There is not enough housing being built for people, you are going to see people come here only to leave when they realize that they can't afford the housing for their families there. Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came_to_canada_3_years_ago_and_now_leaving_due_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/ontario_get_readyyoure_going_to_lose_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta... I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up. If you are in a TN-1 visa, I strongly recommend doing the math to see if you want to spend a significant amount of your income on rent, definitely do your research.

bilange 3y ago

So, on one hand we have that "Tech Talent Strategy", which I assume comes from the demand for more IT workers globally. On the other, we have Canadians such as yours truly who would like to upgrade from a Helpdesk position sooner rather than later. I realize that sample size=1, but why don't we properly train permanent residents instead? (Also don't forget the IT job market which has slowed practically to a halt, as a direct opposite of that Strategy)