Canada’s vanishing tech sector

This is indicative of Dutch disease, the process by which a country's natural sources drain investment from its human capital, producing a structural competitive disadvantage in the latter.

It usually manifests through resources firms pushing the exchange rate too high for manufacturing et al to compete. In a country with restricted and/or irregularly risk-averse capital supply, however, it could also arise as such, i.e. with limited capital seeking low-risk resources assets. This would imply regulatory constraints on Canada's capital markets.

It'll be an interesting discussion point at next week's Startup Festival in Montreal.

I started out working for (big surprise) a start up telecom company as a co-op student. I loved it. Then tried the government. I wanted to kill myself. So I tried hard to stay in the private sector. I got a job at Newbridge, which had just been acquired by Alcatel, a company from France. (Alcatel is now Alcatel-Lucent). I was there when they started laying off people. It was around 2001 when things started going south. The start up I worked for went bankrupt shortly after.

So now I was done school. Quite a few friends from different universities had gone south to Cisco, Nvidia, etc. Meanwhile, I tried to get into QNX, but then money became an issue for them and nothing materialized. Jobless, I waited and took anything I could get my hands on, including the dreaded Government, which turned out to be OK. I told myself I'd do this until things settle down and then I'd jump right back to the private sector.

Boy was I wrong. Most of the people, as mentioned in the article, were still put-off by the Nortel debacle. I knew people my senior, who had 20+ years of Engineering who couldn't get hired because they had too much experience. Pretty funny. They took off to the US, eventually returning to start their own company, but swearing never to work for a big corp again. They said the were tired of making other people rich.

In fact, they never really cared at that point to grow a company into a giant one. They just wanted enough to enjoy life. Management in the high tech had a sort of arrogance about them. Too much of a show off in my opinion.

And here we are years after Nortel sunk. Nortel was full of mismanagement. Quite the ego they had. They would have keg parties almost every Friday. Where the hell was the money coming from?!?

The tech sector had been saturated with Engineers and Comp Sci people with the promise of big money. A dime a dozen they were. Most didn't really have what it took, but they did it for the job. We all know that's not sustainable.

It's as though the Canadian high tech people need to go see a Psychologist. They're stuck like a sports team who just had a bad losing streak. They love looking and emulating the US in the aesthetics and show, but don't realize that there's more to it than that. I don't know, I shouldn't speak on behalf of an entire sector, I don't know that much. But something about how they went about things.

Needless to say, the risk taking and drive is no longer here because most of the people that had it aren't here either. And the ones that did remain, are still a bit jaded and don't want to play that game anymore. You need risk takers, and our society is not that anymore. We've all been scared into taking the safe route. This includes myself. Yup, I changed to a different position in the government (really, really boring - but I have a baby now) and at the moment, don't plan to leave. Maybe once the mortgage is paid off, and the kid is older I'll take risks again, but until then, I'm not willing to take a risk. Working for a corporation is silly to me because you have ZERO control. That may be one reason why there aren't going to be many RIMs or Nortels coming up in Canada. People don't trust large corps anymore, so the odds of building one isn't going to get any better.

My 2 cents on this issue. Hopefully I'm wrong and people with guts (not like me) will take some risks. Who knows what the future holds.