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Not only do you make more as a software developer in the USA, the living costs are much less (I believe the average price of a home in Canada is currently close

Not only do you make more as a software developer in the USA, the living costs are much less (I believe the average price of a home in Canada is currently close to double that in the USA [1]) I think a person is more likely to pursue a startup and succeed at it when they can spend less time/energy covering their basic living expenses. A lot of SV giants were started by people in their garages, they simply had enough surplus resources to pursue their ideas[2]. [1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/06/05/business-oecd-housing.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/06/05/business-oe... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Garage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Garage

potatolicious 13y ago
In general this is not actually true. Software developers as a whole do not make much more in the USA than they do in Canada. Only certain geographies tend to have a large number of high-paying software jobs, and those places (see: Seattle, SF, NYC, etc) tend to have inflated housing prices. Ditto Canada, there are plenty of places where housing is cheap - but that's not where the tech jobs are. The bulk of the tech work is concentrated in cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal where housing is expensive. That being said, being a Vancouver native I try to keep an eye out on salaries in the city vs. cost of living. Vancouver has the double whammy of being extremely expensive but not nearly making it up in pay - this is a somewhat uniquely Vancouver phenomenon though... housing in other parts of Canada is less insane.