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Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

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Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#121

Post by cmrdporcupine »

buzzkillington wrote: post #25
kaaie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, if wages were competitive in Canada (even considering cost of living and health care) there would be no reason to move. Personally, I'd much rather be in Canada to be near my family but I'd be making 1/2 the wage and have less talent to learn and grow from.

Half is pretty generous, for mid/seniour developers it starts at a quarter and gets worse. I was looking to move because I like colder weather/climate change related reasons and I had one recruiter tell me "You can't possibly ever make that much, that's CEO pay!".

Come work at Google Waterloo.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#122

Post by jariel »

balfirevic wrote: post #118
jariel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually just proved the opposite: your TN was the thing that got you a job paying 2x as much, gave you your foot in the door and exposure, and some time to establish longer-term plans. Without the TN it's likely you may not have been hired because it's not worth the effort for most companies: T1 is easy, then once you're in they can process it more. FYI this is not an argument for or against TN.

You might not have meant it like that, but to me it sounds like a great argument in favor of TN (I'm from neither Canada nor US, for what it's worth).

From a classically liberal perspective, it would seem like an argument for TN.

i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'.

But from almost any other perspective it's not.

TN visas are mostly 'one way' - to America. It's an opportunity to suck out the best talent (the fruit of public education) for no cost.

Without real reciprocity, there's no benefit to Canadians who wouldn't use the opportunity.

Shockingly, neither government really keeps that much data on TN. Our incompetent governments have really little insight into what works and what does not. A TN is a 'stamp on your passport' that you get at the airport, it should be more centralized.

An easy solution to the asymmetry would simply be to make it '1 for 1', i.e. one American goes to Canada for every reverse.

I don't believe these are 'national/communitarian' vs. 'liberal' arguments, there's many situations we can have our cate and eat it.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#123

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ma2rten wrote: post #16
blazespin wrote: post #13

The best thing that could ever happen to Canada would get rid of that god awful TN-Visa. TN - Talent Nuke. Completely sucks us dry of people moving to the US.

I don't think keeping people in your country by making it harder to leave is a good strategy.

IMHO when education is subsidized by public funds (which it is here), those funds should have to be repaid if you're leaving the country within a certain number of years or before you've paid some amount in income tax.

That would improve the talent situation here.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#124

Post by ericmay »

zozbot234 wrote: post #101
jonathankoren wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also with easier immigration, Canada’s talent pool will only get better. Already the US is losing people to Canada due to overly restrictive immigration laws. I’ve even heard immigration offices offering to help with Canadian immigration on the radio in the SF Bay https://www.csmonitor.com/EqualEd/2019/0304/Go-north-young-g... https://movnorth.com/

Yes, Canada's bet on skilled immigration is really smart of them, and it's a neat way of side-stepping the usual social tensions that we hear about wrt. "anti-immigrant" sentiment from socially marginalized or low-income natives.

Why does Canada always get a pass on this but the US doesn’t?

(This being points-based skilled immigration)

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#125

Post by balfirevic »

jariel wrote: post #122
balfirevic wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not have meant it like that, but to me it sounds like a great argument in favor of TN (I'm from neither Canada nor US, for what it's worth).

From a classically liberal perspective, it would seem like an argument for TN. i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'. But from almost any other perspective it's not. TN visas are mostly 'one way' - to America. It's an opportunity to suck out the best talent (the fruit of public education) for no cost. Without real reciprocity, there's no benefit to Canadians who wouldn't use the opportuni…

I don't want to get into long discussion here, but I want to nitpick about this:

> i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'.

Classically liberal perspective would be "how does this law help individuals now", not me specifically.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#126

Post by gyulai »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #93
gyulai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infineon is a publicly-traded company. A part of Infineon was sold to Intel, who in turn sold a part of that to Apple. Anyway: The long-standing presence of Infineon and a whole ecosystem around it (business partners, educational opportunity, etc.) means that Munich has hardware talent, and despite Munich being the most expensive and high-paying city in Germany (next to Frankfurt), salaries are still low, and real es…

>real estate is still cheap, compared to the valley Everything in the world is cheap compared to the Valley, that any comparison is pretty much a meme at this point. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that Munich real estate is cheap even when you account for local salaries. Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany when accounting for living costs, except without the high paying jobs. I have m…

First off: I have lived & worked in Munich and done exactly what you describe (now live in the countryside working for a remote company) but it is still only a minority of people who [can] do that. It is certainly not the case that everybody is doing it. The ecosystem is alive and well.

In my various data sources tracking job advertising, Munich has been and continues to be where almost all of the interesting jobs are based in Bavaria, and I'm not seeing falling real estate prices at all.

> Munich is the embodiment of the Bay Area in Germany

I'd argue that in many ways it is worse than the Bay Area in the sense that the pay-differential, though in existence, is not nearly as pronounced. Stack Overflow keeps pestering me with emails about jobs that it has classified as "high pay jobs" for Munich. The salary beneath those job ads is usually something like €80k/year before taxes (which are extremely high in Germany). This must seem like a steal to a company like Apple. And this is in a city that has one of the best technical universities on the planet, an extremely vibrant engineering scene, and offers a better quality of life than the Bay Area at lower prices to any senior Apple executive who might want/need to move there from the Bay Area. -- My initial statement holds in that this is a "special opportunity" for Apple, that must be worth capturing for them.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#127

Post by nahname »

buzzkillington wrote: post #47
ttul wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get into a senior role at one of the big tech firms, pay matches the valley. For lesser roles, Canada is cheaper, but the gap is closing rapidly as talent runs dry.

Senior roles in SF/NY pay >600k in total comp. I was flat out told there are no such jobs in Canada two years back. Has that changed?

I know people who joined post IPO and make more than that at Shopify as Senior Developers. Is primarily equity though. Salaries do lag in Canada vs USA.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#128

Post by andrewzah »

ttul wrote: post #45
ajayyy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people in this field are leaving to the US. It's surprising how many. See https://s3.amazonaws.com/chartprod/Lb7EHT9ksyZyjHqo5/thumbna... . I am in a Canadian software engineering program right now, and it is a goal of many people here. Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/article-...

I graduated in 2000 from Computer Engineering (in Canada). A solid fraction of my peers ended up in Silicon Valley. It’s not just for the wages. Silicon Valley just where most of the jobs are and it remains the best place in the world if you’re an engineer.

The grass is always greener, I guess. I’m a software engineer from the US and I’d never move to SV in a million years. There are more things in life than money.

There are so many cities here with better quality of life and lower cost of living.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#129

Post by graeme »

jariel wrote: post #107

As a Candian, it seems to me so very pathetically and predictably Canadian to literally herald the surrender of your own industries to foreign takeover. Canada is (often) to tech what Mexico is to cars. Mexican 'assembly' of cars is fine and good, but they don't exactly move up the value chain from there. Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2/3 the wages, unfortunately, this doesn't map to…

This seems shortsighted. Auto assembly workers don’t start car companies. But tech company workers do start companies.

If people immigrate to canada instead of the us to work in tech, I would expect there to be more companies founded here eventually. Further, fewer caandians will go to the us if hiring rises. I can only imagine it will have upwards pressure on wages too, which will eventually help create a pool of people with some capital for angel investing.

Re: Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay

#130

Post by sandworm101 »

lucidone wrote: post #2

The cheap labour pool as a consequence of the weak Canadian dollar certainly helps, alongside having identical time zones and nearly identical culture to the United States. Lots of Canadian consultancies butter their bread with USD.

>> nearly identical culture to the United States.

Lol. Maybe a similar culture to some parts of California or Washington, and that is a stretch, but Vancouver is very very different than "the United States". Live in both for a while and all the little difference (the guns, health care, government, police, civil-military relations, the environment, land use, education etc) add up to markedly different approaches to life.

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