5 ms·

This is true for tech work as well. Pay is higher in east european countries after a certain level of seniority. All in all Canada is noth worth it for the mone

This is true for tech work as well. Pay is higher in east european countries after a certain level of seniority. All in all Canada is noth worth it for the money. Everyone I know from the UK moving to Canada came back running as pay was easily higher. That means businesses can't afford people.

jacquesm 3y ago
That and those never ending winters.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Yeah. But also those infinite boreal forest, 10 of thousand of pristine lake… There is something about it.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Agreed, nature is amazing there. I'd go out for solo hikes in the Sault-ste Marie, Wawa, Sudbury triangle and it was incredible.
    - dopidopHN 3y ago
      I found a little paradise on earth near Wawa, on Lake Superior. Well, found, no. There is also petroglyphs there. But damn, the lake has small island, coves, beaches. Absolutely stunning and mostly devoid of intense tourism. ( aka : no stress to find a camping spot, you can also sleep in most places if you are respectful)
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  Our winters here in Victoria are great. A decent amount of clear skies, never too cold, not as much rain as people think, heaps of stuff to do nearby or a day trip away. It’s hard to beat.
  - silisili 3y ago
    Victoria is also the most expensive city in Canada, which - reading the accounts of low pay in this thread, make it seem out of reach for most Canadians.
    - steve_adams_86 3y ago
      Yes. It’s brutal. I earn a somewhat low income by SV standards, but my income (excluding my wife’s) is around 3.5x the city’s household income average. I recently bought a house for $1M and the mortgage eats 40% of my income. This was the low end of the market for a family home. I wonder almost every day what ~70% of the city is doing to survive. We are very diligent about spending and while we’re comfortable, we still need to be careful. That’s insane. The situation is bad. Our local subreddit is loaded with people who are struggling, leaving, venting, etc. over money and work. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it. Also weird: Victoria is the most expensive by many measures, yet remote work salary ranges never consider Victoria an expensive city. Vancouver, Toronto, they’re always on the list of course. But never Victoria. I had to turn down a role recently because it was around $40k per year lower than I’d earn in Vancouver, and I found their inflexibility and unreasonable stance on the matter incredibly concerning. I would pay almost exactly the same amount to live in Vancouver, but their calculator disagreed.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Winter in Toronto (lattitude 43.6) isn't really much different from Chicago (lattitude 41.8) and pretty much the same as most of the US northeast and not nearly as bad as a place like Minnesota (or Vermont or Maine, etc.) etc. Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California, and while it has plenty of very cold days the total length of winter isn't any longer than much of the northern half of the US. It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.
  - jholman 3y ago
    > Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California This is (a) just actually not literally true (41N at the border vs 43N), (b) particularly off-base when you consider that "northern California" is typically a reference to the SF Bay Area (c) completely deceptive. Four months of the year with around two feet of snow, with an average low below freezing. San Francisco has barely ever gone below freezing in its entire historical record (literal record low of −3C a hundred years ago). Yes yes, you don't have igloos in Toronto, fair point. But a person who drives on summer tires year round in Toronto is a homicidal maniac. In Vancouver that's merely lazy, an excuse to call in sick a few days a year. No argument about Minnesota, though, nor about The Texas Of The North. And yes, it's hardly never-ending winters. The summers in T.O. are brutal too.
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      How about the Texas of the South? Here's my observation. I would think there is some comparison between Canada and Texas as major trend-setters of their own unique culture, both philosophically and financially, within a diverse North American continent. For some things there are more similarities than differences. A lot of extractiveness with few owners but excess amounts of resources traditionally trickling down from there. In Texas it's been declining for entrepreneurs starting 40 years ago. The most recent 20 years have been more of the same. There's still bright spots like anywhere else but overall the outlook for independents has only become more negative in the long run. One of the obvious things nobody really looks at, Houston was founded (on an undeveloped floodplain) as a planned center of industry and commerce for Texas when it became a new nation after independence from Mexico. The idea was to replace San Antonio which had been the capital as a Spanish colony and Mexican state, and which had been inhabited by indigenous cultures since prehistoric times. Growth-entrepreneurialism was ingrained and universal in Houston from day one, then put on steriods after the discovery of oil & gas. After the arrival of the telephone most businesses depended on listing in the phone directory. Something I understand many young entrepreneurs have never seen nor utilized, so I digress. By the 1970's (when everybody still had a land line telephone and the phone company was still a monopoly and quite uniform across the US) most cities had a directory format where the "white pages" at the beginning of the book were the fine-print alphabetic listing of all residential and business numbers, with businesses often appearing in bold in order to stand out among the residences, depending on their service agreement. Followed by the yellow pages which were a business listing with alphabetized categories (rather than alphabetized by business name), containing paid display advertisements, so you could look up consumer-oriented things like plumbers and auto mechanics, etc. Unless you knew the correct name of the business, you were probably better off looking for a business number in the yellow pages, which would be maybe about the last half of a fairly massive softcover book. In a place like Atlanta it was getting pretty crowded and they would then issue the white pages and the yellow pages as two separate massive volumes. Atlanta was a pretty hoppin' place. But in Houston there were so many independent businesses that the phone company published a separate one of their huge soft-cover fine-print black & white directories each year just for individual business phone numbers. No display ads, just data, this was not the "yellow pages" which contained the sometimes whole-page paid advertisements, there were so many of those they were issued in two separate massive alphabetical volumes bound from the traditional yellow paper. This was the fine print and there wasn't room for the businesses within the residential directory anyway since that had already been divided into two separate alphabetical volumes of their own residential white-pages. They might have had a set up like this in other crowded places like Los Angeles. Even after the Nixon recession had been suffered miserably by small businesses, the Houston business pages alone were about as big or bigger than the entire phone book of most other American cities, which I attribute to enhanced survival due to unprecedented high oil prices. But eventually after the Reagan recession kicked in, the business pages began to dwindle to a shadow of their former self. We don't have the equivalent documents today to make a valid comparison with, since we're measuring thin pages by the kilo, but the gradual displacement of widespread opportunity with widespread malaise that was apparent in the macro environment has seemed to continue unabated for about 40 years now and it's about time people noticed. Just another thing independent entrepreneurs have to face, they are an endangered species who has been under constant threat since before so many of them were born.
brailsafe 3y ago
Fwiw, I'd still prefer living on the west coast of Canada than an overwhelming majority of other places like the U.K or U.S, even despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer. If I left, and it's possible, it would be because all of those factors got to a point where I had no choice.
- applied_heat 3y ago
  You can get a 3 bedroom townhouse with a garage and a small yard 45 minutes from Vancouver for 900k. Is that really unachievable? Split it with a partner or a friend, rent out the 3rd room for $1k a month, and you need to save 90k for the Downpayment and the mortgage is 5k a month minus the rent, so you need to chip in $2000 a month to the mortgage. Rule of thumb for accommodations to be less than 30% of your income so your income is 6,666/mo or 80000 a year, or $41/hr. Any tradesperson can make that. People are charging $45/hr to clean air bnbs. Doesn’t seem so hopeless to me.
  - jholman 3y ago
    Generally I approve of this type of thinking, it's how I got my start, too. So I'm only quibbling to improve the fidelity of the model for those who are like us. 1) My impression is that it's prettttty tough to get those 10% down mortgages these days. Though, again, that's behind me now, I could be wrong. 2) The bank will not consider your accom to be mortgage-minus-sublet-rent for the stress test, I promise you. They'll count your rent as additional income, at some discount (fuck you, bank), and then count 30% of that against your mortgage payment (for the stress test). I guess if you know someone who actually got this past the bank stress test then let us know, and let us know which bank, because I'll move the next time my mortgage comes up. But I have tried in the past. So you'd need a joint income of 200k (I trusted your estimate of mortgage at present rates on $810k), minus 10k/a for the rent, is $95k each, $46/h. Still. Although it is definitely difficult, it is, as you say doable.
    - applied_heat 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

That and those never ending winters.

dopidopHN 3y ago
Yeah. But also those infinite boreal forest, 10 of thousand of pristine lake… There is something about it.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Agreed, nature is amazing there. I'd go out for solo hikes in the Sault-ste Marie, Wawa, Sudbury triangle and it was incredible.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    I found a little paradise on earth near Wawa, on Lake Superior. Well, found, no. There is also petroglyphs there. But damn, the lake has small island, coves, beaches. Absolutely stunning and mostly devoid of intense tourism. ( aka : no stress to find a camping spot, you can also sleep in most places if you are respectful)
steve_adams_86 3y ago
Our winters here in Victoria are great. A decent amount of clear skies, never too cold, not as much rain as people think, heaps of stuff to do nearby or a day trip away. It’s hard to beat.
- silisili 3y ago
  Victoria is also the most expensive city in Canada, which - reading the accounts of low pay in this thread, make it seem out of reach for most Canadians.
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    Yes. It’s brutal. I earn a somewhat low income by SV standards, but my income (excluding my wife’s) is around 3.5x the city’s household income average. I recently bought a house for $1M and the mortgage eats 40% of my income. This was the low end of the market for a family home. I wonder almost every day what ~70% of the city is doing to survive. We are very diligent about spending and while we’re comfortable, we still need to be careful. That’s insane. The situation is bad. Our local subreddit is loaded with people who are struggling, leaving, venting, etc. over money and work. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it. Also weird: Victoria is the most expensive by many measures, yet remote work salary ranges never consider Victoria an expensive city. Vancouver, Toronto, they’re always on the list of course. But never Victoria. I had to turn down a role recently because it was around $40k per year lower than I’d earn in Vancouver, and I found their inflexibility and unreasonable stance on the matter incredibly concerning. I would pay almost exactly the same amount to live in Vancouver, but their calculator disagreed.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Winter in Toronto (lattitude 43.6) isn't really much different from Chicago (lattitude 41.8) and pretty much the same as most of the US northeast and not nearly as bad as a place like Minnesota (or Vermont or Maine, etc.) etc. Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California, and while it has plenty of very cold days the total length of winter isn't any longer than much of the northern half of the US. It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.
- jholman 3y ago
  > Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California This is (a) just actually not literally true (41N at the border vs 43N), (b) particularly off-base when you consider that "northern California" is typically a reference to the SF Bay Area (c) completely deceptive. Four months of the year with around two feet of snow, with an average low below freezing. San Francisco has barely ever gone below freezing in its entire historical record (literal record low of −3C a hundred years ago). Yes yes, you don't have igloos in Toronto, fair point. But a person who drives on summer tires year round in Toronto is a homicidal maniac. In Vancouver that's merely lazy, an excuse to call in sick a few days a year. No argument about Minnesota, though, nor about The Texas Of The North. And yes, it's hardly never-ending winters. The summers in T.O. are brutal too.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    How about the Texas of the South? Here's my observation. I would think there is some comparison between Canada and Texas as major trend-setters of their own unique culture, both philosophically and financially, within a diverse North American continent. For some things there are more similarities than differences. A lot of extractiveness with few owners but excess amounts of resources traditionally trickling down from there. In Texas it's been declining for entrepreneurs starting 40 years ago. The most recent 20 years have been more of the same. There's still bright spots like anywhere else but overall the outlook for independents has only become more negative in the long run. One of the obvious things nobody really looks at, Houston was founded (on an undeveloped floodplain) as a planned center of industry and commerce for Texas when it became a new nation after independence from Mexico. The idea was to replace San Antonio which had been the capital as a Spanish colony and Mexican state, and which had been inhabited by indigenous cultures since prehistoric times. Growth-entrepreneurialism was ingrained and universal in Houston from day one, then put on steriods after the discovery of oil & gas. After the arrival of the telephone most businesses depended on listing in the phone directory. Something I understand many young entrepreneurs have never seen nor utilized, so I digress. By the 1970's (when everybody still had a land line telephone and the phone company was still a monopoly and quite uniform across the US) most cities had a directory format where the "white pages" at the beginning of the book were the fine-print alphabetic listing of all residential and business numbers, with businesses often appearing in bold in order to stand out among the residences, depending on their service agreement. Followed by the yellow pages which were a business listing with alphabetized categories (rather than alphabetized by business name), containing paid display advertisements, so you could look up consumer-oriented things like plumbers and auto mechanics, etc. Unless you knew the correct name of the business, you were probably better off looking for a business number in the yellow pages, which would be maybe about the last half of a fairly massive softcover book. In a place like Atlanta it was getting pretty crowded and they would then issue the white pages and the yellow pages as two separate massive volumes. Atlanta was a pretty hoppin' place. But in Houston there were so many independent businesses that the phone company published a separate one of their huge soft-cover fine-print black & white directories each year just for individual business phone numbers. No display ads, just data, this was not the "yellow pages" which contained the sometimes whole-page paid advertisements, there were so many of those they were issued in two separate massive alphabetical volumes bound from the traditional yellow paper. This was the fine print and there wasn't room for the businesses within the residential directory anyway since that had already been divided into two separate alphabetical volumes of their own residential white-pages. They might have had a set up like this in other crowded places like Los Angeles. Even after the Nixon recession had been suffered miserably by small businesses, the Houston business pages alone were about as big or bigger than the entire phone book of most other American cities, which I attribute to enhanced survival due to unprecedented high oil prices. But eventually after the Reagan recession kicked in, the business pages began to dwindle to a shadow of their former self. We don't have the equivalent documents today to make a valid comparison with, since we're measuring thin pages by the kilo, but the gradual displacement of widespread opportunity with widespread malaise that was apparent in the macro environment has seemed to continue unabated for about 40 years now and it's about time people noticed. Just another thing independent entrepreneurs have to face, they are an endangered species who has been under constant threat since before so many of them were born.

brailsafe 3y ago

Fwiw, I'd still prefer living on the west coast of Canada than an overwhelming majority of other places like the U.K or U.S, even despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer. If I left, and it's possible, it would be because all of those factors got to a point where I had no choice.

applied_heat 3y ago
You can get a 3 bedroom townhouse with a garage and a small yard 45 minutes from Vancouver for 900k. Is that really unachievable? Split it with a partner or a friend, rent out the 3rd room for $1k a month, and you need to save 90k for the Downpayment and the mortgage is 5k a month minus the rent, so you need to chip in $2000 a month to the mortgage. Rule of thumb for accommodations to be less than 30% of your income so your income is 6,666/mo or 80000 a year, or $41/hr. Any tradesperson can make that. People are charging $45/hr to clean air bnbs. Doesn’t seem so hopeless to me.
- jholman 3y ago
  Generally I approve of this type of thinking, it's how I got my start, too. So I'm only quibbling to improve the fidelity of the model for those who are like us. 1) My impression is that it's prettttty tough to get those 10% down mortgages these days. Though, again, that's behind me now, I could be wrong. 2) The bank will not consider your accom to be mortgage-minus-sublet-rent for the stress test, I promise you. They'll count your rent as additional income, at some discount (fuck you, bank), and then count 30% of that against your mortgage payment (for the stress test). I guess if you know someone who actually got this past the bank stress test then let us know, and let us know which bank, because I'll move the next time my mortgage comes up. But I have tried in the past. So you'd need a joint income of 200k (I trusted your estimate of mortgage at present rates on $810k), minus 10k/a for the rent, is $95k each, $46/h. Still. Although it is definitely difficult, it is, as you say doable.
  - applied_heat 3y ago