Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#551

Post by titanomachy » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:30 AM UTC

s2g wrote: post #266

thirduncle wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay. Have you calculated what salary you'd have to earn to afford an equivalent configuration of {house, cars, debt, schools, commute, sanity} in the BA? That may be where the lack of understanding comes from.

I would think the experienced engineer contemplating moving their entire family to another country has done the basic math. I really do get tired of this "but the cost of living!" argument being tossed out. People get it. It's not complicated.

Yeah, it's a knee-jerk response that's been trained into people to help them rationalize staying in Canada. I explain to friends/family/etc.: "I was offered 3x my salary to move to Seattle [from Vancouver]" and every goddamn time I hear "Oh, but I've heard Seattle is very expensive these days, so it probably cancels out!" Yes, Seattle is more expensive than Vancouver! About 25% more. And I make 3x as much money. I put literally 10x as much money into savings every year than I did when I lived in Vancouver.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#552

Post by titanomachy » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

s2g wrote: post #271

trhway wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) median is close to 2M - that is only 5x of $400K which a lot of FANG and other engineers pull yearly (and that is the main reason for current SV home prices as, during such low mortgage rates, the market is naturally self-adjusting to 5-6x of prevalent salaries. In 2008 those houses were $700-800K+ - the 5-6x of those $120K-150K salaries back then).

Yeah, the argument is a bit ridiculous. You shouldn't go to the bay area because you will never be able to afford a 2 million dollar house on 300k a year. Stay in Vancouver and just buy a 1 million dollar house on 90k instead.

Where in Vancouver did you find this magical house that only cost 1 million dollars? Are you sure you weren't in Burnaby, or Coquitlam?

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#553

Post by isostatic » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:42 AM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #37

pmalynin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edmonton. I worked in MTV for 4 months, 4 months in Seattle, and I'm leaving on Monday to SV again for the summer.

Most of the things you hate about Canada would not be true if you moved DT Toronto or Montreal.

I went to Toronto last summer for a couple of days, the area by the water was fairly nice, but aside from that it felt very oppressive - lots of roads, flyovers, and cars with priority.

I know Canadians like to think of themselves as "different", but I could see more difference between the three cities I'd visited in the previous couple of weeks - NY, DC and LA than I could between Toronto and anywhere else in the US

Perhaps I didn't stay long enough, but if I compare with other cities, like Berlin, Rome, Lisbon, London, Singapore, Nairobi, Sydney, Delhi, Tokyo, etc, Toronto just felt like a typical North American city.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#554

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:51 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #270

badpun wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the tech industry is about burning through investors' money in search of new profitable ideas. I'm guessing there's much less investor money in Canada.

"Burning through investors money in search of profitable ideas" has nothing to do with it. There's this huge misconception on HN about the size of the venture capital market. Start-ups are a miniscule portion of the tech economy by any measure of value. The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. The combined market cap of FAANG is…

[deleted]

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#555

Post by ignoramous » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:55 AM UTC

victorjuluis wrote: post #532

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a New Yorker, grew up there and now living in SF. Brooklyn was cool, but it didn’t “get” the kind of experimental intellectualism that’s needed in a tech startup scene. Not ripping on my old hometown. They have the intellectualism but haven’t applied it to tech. If I were to go back to New York, I wouldn’t go into tech, I’d go into finance because that’s where the nerds would be. If I may, when I visited Vancouve…

I remember this Ted Talk titled “Where Good Ideas Come From” [1] where the speaker suggests that coffee or the combination of coffee and stimulating conversation catalyzed the generation of ideas and the rest is history up to the birth of Enlightenment. It seems like it’s still happening around coffee shops. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_co...

That's a really good talk. Thanks.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#556

Post by isostatic » Sat, May 05, 2018, 7:55 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #436

vram22 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's also why when people do tend to leave the Bay Area, they go to other liberal areas like Seattle/Portland/Boulder/Asheville/Austin/Boston/NYC, even though those areas also have housing crises and the cost of living is rapidly approaching the Bay Wow, that's true for all those cities? I might have guessed it for Boston and NYC, maybe Seattle too, not so much about the others. But don't know a lot about this are…

It's not a "crisis" in the way the Bay Area is, where there is barely any inventory even if you're a double-Googler household, 3BR homes on 1/4 acre go for $2.5M, and if you're a teacher or other non-tech job you're either living with roommates or have an hour and a half commute. However, Portland/Boulder/Denver/Austin have all seen large increases in house prices, driven largely by Californian housing wealth finding…

1/4 acre is a large amount for a 3 bedroom house - where I live in the UK a typical plot size in a semi-rural area, from the 70s is about 1/10th acre, for new houses it's about half that.

The best solution to high demand is a land value tax. That applies not just to houses, but to offices, shops, parking lots, etc. This means that land owners have to use their land efficently. If parking triples in cost, so be it. If road tolling is required, c'est la vie.

The proceeds of those tax must then be pumped into the local economy - funding services and improvements, like new bridges, or metro lines, or higher wages for central services (like schools and police)

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#557

Post by adventured » Sat, May 05, 2018, 8:02 AM UTC

melbourne_mat wrote: post #549

The financial success of the titans of the tech industry is driven by monopolies and heavy use of tax havens. The salaries are generous for these reasons. Canada - and indeed any country - could easily do something about this if it had the political will to do so. Strengthening and enforcing anti trust laws would be one example; cracking down on aggressive tax avoidance would be another. Then you'd at least have a le…

Your tax premise is wrong. The proof is right there in the actual tax numbers.

Average world-wide statutory corporate tax rate: ~22%

National statutory rates: Netherlands 25%; Italy 24%; Norway 23%; Sweden 22%; Portugal 21%; Russia 20%; Estonia 20%; Finland 20%; UK 19%; Czech 19%; Poland 19%; Belarus 18%; Lithuania 15%; Bulgaria 10%; Hungary 9%

Europe statutory average: ~19%

The effective rates are that much lower. I'll be sure to hold my breath until Russia's 20% statutory rate starts producing vast tech giants.

Effective tax rates for 2016 (pre-tax changes):

Amazon 36%; Intuit 33%; Netflix 28%; TI 27%; Apple 25%; Oracle 22%; Priceline 21%; Intel 20%; Google 19%; VMWare 19%; Adobe 18%; Facebook 18%; Cisco 17%; Qualcomm 16%; Microsoft 15%

So your premise is that the tech giants having effective rates comparable to Europe, is what produced their extraordinary successes. Be sure to let Europe in on the secret.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#558

Post by otempomores » Sat, May 05, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #522

xordon wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian who has lived in the US for 1 year (in SF) I have a totally different take away. I noticed that people here are very hard working, almost as they are desperate for success, like if they fail or lost their job they would just die, poor and homeless and healthcare-less. I found that people in Canada were much more focused on happiness and were more willing to make sacrifices to improve their quality of li…

>> like if they fail or lost their job they would just die, poor and homeless and healthcare-less Because they could be very easily if they don't have a family safety net. I think that ultimately puts a damper on peoples' productive and creative ability as they tend to then focus more on keeping their job rather than being the most productive they can be for their employer.

Anything to tie those revolutionary ballons down.. The earlier the better.. which is why the gov created student loans and long-term shot its own industries innovation ability in the foot.. all out of fear of 68 and a cultural revolution..

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#559

Post by adventured » Sat, May 05, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

xordon wrote: post #504

ahelwer wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I gotta agree with you here, bud. When I was growing up in Canada I had to keep my dreams a secret. If you had any grand goals people thought you were an egomaniacal weirdo. It wasn't until I seriously dated someone here in the US that I realized the difference: as part of the "delving into each others' inner lives" phase of the early relationship, I sheepishly admitted I had dreams of doing some pretty big…

As a Canadian who has lived in the US for 1 year (in SF) I have a totally different take away. I noticed that people here are very hard working, almost as they are desperate for success, like if they fail or lost their job they would just die, poor and homeless and healthcare-less. I found that people in Canada were much more focused on happiness and were more willing to make sacrifices to improve their quality of li…

> like if they fail or lost their job they would just die, poor and homeless and healthcare-less

Poor people get free healthcare in the US. I'm not sure how you could not know that after decades of that being the case. Medicaid has existed since 1965. Not only has it broadened out considerably, today there is also CHIP and SS disability to further supplement that along with countless smaller programs.

Just Medicaid + CHIP covers 70 million people, about 22% of the US, or twice the entire population of Canada.

The US also has vast housing subsidization programs for poor people.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#560

Post by otempomores » Sat, May 05, 2018, 8:35 AM UTC

victorjuluis wrote: post #532

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a New Yorker, grew up there and now living in SF. Brooklyn was cool, but it didn’t “get” the kind of experimental intellectualism that’s needed in a tech startup scene. Not ripping on my old hometown. They have the intellectualism but haven’t applied it to tech. If I were to go back to New York, I wouldn’t go into tech, I’d go into finance because that’s where the nerds would be. If I may, when I visited Vancouve…

I remember this Ted Talk titled “Where Good Ideas Come From” [1] where the speaker suggests that coffee or the combination of coffee and stimulating conversation catalyzed the generation of ideas and the rest is history up to the birth of Enlightenment. It seems like it’s still happening around coffee shops. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_co...

Some in my family have a mild form of schizophrenia (mild as in not completely life destroying) and fika always seemed to set the minds flying. Not a breakfast or afternoon went by where not some incredible machine was constructed or some enormous project was discussed. To be honest though for these to become real a pressing need or some cooler minds constant pressure necessary. Usually a prototype was built and then abandoned due to boredom.