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- Director and above level PM can earn above: $140K CAD and beyond in major cities like Toronto.
- Sr. PM can earn: above $100K CAD easily but harder to be above $150K CAD.
- Bay Area - based on the current conversations I have: - Sr. PM or PM in a FAANG type company or startup: around $170K USD - Director level PM can be above $200K USD
Salaries are a different story in Canada compared to the USA. They are far less in Canada, a $200K CAD ($150K USD) tech job is rare, actually, $150K CAD ($112K USD) are also uncommon. Best job opportunities are in high COL locations (Vancouver, Toronto), followed by Montreal. But unlike the USA the compensation (for MOST employees) in those markets is only moderately higher than lower COL locations. (Calgary, Edmonto…
On top of the lower base salaries, the compensation you receive in the form of stocks is also a good bit lower.
London, I know is about half of US if you look at FAANG comps and you have higher taxation compared to a city like Seattle.
Zurich, is about 70% with lower tax but a very high CoL
I'm a Canadian software that moved from Victoria, BC to San Francisco, CA to begin my career two years ago. My top earning friends in Canada of the same experience level earn 2 - 4 times less than me and my peers here. I'm saving significantly more here than them too even after a much higher cost of living. The quality of life here is worse though in some ways. Most of all I miss the politeness and generally less hos…
So what you need to think about is this: if you would be putting away, say, $50k less a year in Vancouver, it's essentially like you're paying $50k more to live there. Is it worth it to you?
Compared to San Fran, it has a more hospitable and interesting climate, the culture is perhaps less vivacious but definitely safer and more genteel, the outdoors and recreation opportunities nearby blow away anything in California, and the fact that the local institutions and governments are still relatively well-run has a positive impact on the long term stability of the place.
The question is: are you looking for somewhere to _live_, to settle, to raise a family, to put down roots? Are you looking for somewhere to be _from_? Or are you a member of the globetrotting class, working wherever you feel like, being _from_ nowhere?
If the latter, then you may as well follow the money for as long as you can. If the former, then it may well be worth some numeric financial sacrifices in order to actually have a better life. There's probably plenty of equivalents in "flyover" states and the like, where you can live for cheap and be safe and stable relative to the major cities.
You can make a living and have a comfortable lifestyle in Canada, but it is not the best place to create or build wealth. It's where to be if you bring it with you.
Given the small and dispersed distribution of the population, startup level growth mainly comes from access to the US market. Access to the US market tends to mean being HQ'd there, so you get quite a few "offshored," engineering and development shops to take advantage of the currency, SRED tax credits, COL and salary differences, where the US HQ handles the revenue, product management, marketing, equity, M&A and other business decisions.
The two main markets for enterprise products and dev are Toronto and Ottawa. There are only five notable banks with offices across the country and around the world, who share a largely homogeneous enterprise tech culture. Health care is a public sector business, and there is lots of opportunity to make a living in health care tech, but it is managed as a sprawling enterprise centralized economy that acts as a ceiling on growth. There are some notable examples, but they use Canada as a proving ground before going to market in the US.
The way most entrepreneurial money appears to be made in Canada is by operating "recruiting and consulting firms," which provide institutions with arms length contractors that they can add and remove at will instead of dealing with the challenges of employees.
Quality of life compared to american cities in decline is incomparably better. The hard part is affording it. Owning a an actual house near a metropolitan area is out of reach for first time home buyers, and places with affordable housing are outside commuting distance from anywhere that does software development. Short term rentals have sent rents skyrocketing everywhere within a 90-minute drive to Toronto.
If you are already on the property ladder where you are, using that as leverage to buy a place here is the best way to do it. If you are not, it's smarter to get the capital from selling your first house as a downpayment to get you into something in Canada, as real estate is basically the only way for working people to build wealth.
Compensation is lower, but if you have a family it's probably worth it. It's education, health care, and access to parks and such are generally easy to come by, cheap/free and good; particularly in Metro Vancouver. Those things make a world of difference when raising kids.
Expect the pay to be half or less, but you get better overall benefits, a higher standard of living, in exchange for long winters and a mostly car-based society.
> a mostly car-based society. I haven't commuted by car in ... 17 years. I work in the Metro Vancouver area.
If you're considering Montréal, do your research before. French language is not a requirement to get by day-to-day in the city (though elsewhere in the province is another story). We have a decent tech sector with some big companies like CAE, Mindgeek, and Hopper. There is also a respectable AI research scene and an incresing amount of startups in the city. If you're open to learning French (a good chunk of jobs requ…
Been working here for a decade and the tech economy is the best it's ever been.
Big cos like Amazon, Microsoft have set up shop in Vancouver and are here to stay. They provide a nice fallback option to any sort of smaller startups that don't pan out.
The games industry has bounced back in a big way too. The multi thousand capacity EA Games studio in Burnaby is full and they've had to get off site offices.
Add on the standard benefits of Canada:
* free universal healthcare means being an entrepeneur is easy.
* reasonable gun regulations (no concealed carry nonsense)
* generally more progressive governments than USA.