A caution if you're considering Quebec. You might be caught off guard by the draconian French language laws, and restrictions on where you can send your children to school. (Ex-Quebecer here)
sigh
(Current Quebecer here)
Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
151–160 of 177 posts
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit higher a than 40K, but not that much. For example, I would have said around 60K and after some research, it seem I'm not wrong : http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/State=Qu%C3%A9bec/Salary AVG: Software developer : 58K Also in Quebec, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you want to an engineer school and are part of their order.
This is a very good thing that I wish the US would adopt. We have people with three months total programming experience jumping from sales jobs to programming and calling themselves engineers. It's an insult to those who actually perform engineering professionally.
It might be a good thing if university graduates from computer science programs could apply for software engineering positions... Consequently, most educated hiring managers don't hire for engineers, which brings us back to square one.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#153I'm currently a beneficiary of SRED in a startup context in Canada. The first thing to note is that it doesn't solve many major problems. The lack of development talent is the biggest one; trying to get someone to move from California to Canada isn't something that's solved as simply as offering more money. And in my experience (as a recent graduate), the talent that would have studied computer science or has an inte…
I'm a Canadian who moved to SV. I, personally, would have preferred to stay in Canada but finding a job is a right pain in the ass. American companies will fly you in on their dime, while Canadian firms won't even give you a phone call. It would even help if these companies were even offering competitive wages.
There are also plenty of American firms that won't give you a phone call or offer competitive wages. Silicon Valley strip mined its own local talent pool long ago, so they have to do well at courting potential relocation candidates if they aren't able to poach from the other valley companies.
Finding a job anywhere else is still a right pain in the ass. Entering through the back door using your personal network is still the best way. Otherwise, the process of resume submission to phone screen to technical screen to in-person interview to negotitations to at-will employee is horrible, and no company does it well from end to end. Being dropped without any further contact can happen at any stage in the process. I was flown out to Denver for a half-day, multipart interview ordeal and after I returned, it was as though I no longer existed to them, which was odd, because I thought I did rather well at the interview, at least enough for someone there to return an e-mail or tell me that I was cut.
It isn't being American that excepts SV from the rule, but the supply and demand for technical specialists. In that context, perhaps the Canadian program might not raise your pay directly, but it might make it easier for you to get hired in Canada.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#154I'm currently a beneficiary of SRED in a startup context in Canada. The first thing to note is that it doesn't solve many major problems. The lack of development talent is the biggest one; trying to get someone to move from California to Canada isn't something that's solved as simply as offering more money. And in my experience (as a recent graduate), the talent that would have studied computer science or has an inte…
Lack of talent or lack of US-comparable salaries? A lot of U of Waterloo people get snatched by American companies, I bet if we paid them about the same many would stay here.
UWaterloo grad in the US here - I'd go back in a heartbeat if the salaries were comparable and the market healthier (i.e., a substantial number of players paying US-comparable salaries, so you're not golden-handcuffed).
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The lack of development talent is the biggest one My opinion is that it's less about lack of talent and more about hiring being hard (in general).
Hiring is really hard, but from anecdotal experience and hearsay, I still think the number of Canadian tech workers leaving for the US is a depressingly major factor. A large number of my ambitious Canadian peers ended up moving to the US, and Canadians are really well-represented among US tech companies. Many end up moving back (or plan on moving back), but it's almost always for personal reasons at significant cost…
I consider myself to be an above-average software developer, but I found the hiring processes at many start-ups (Wave, Freshbooks, Tophat, etc) in Toronto would reject me to weird reasons. E.g.:
- I had never used the functools library in Python before, so because I couldn't answer trivia questions about it, my Python skills were low. (FYI: You can read the entire documentation on the functools library in ~3 minutes). And this was after an initial interview where I apparently got the trivia question that 'no one' gets (which I'll note was actually more relevant to general Python knowledge as it was about keyword args).
- I had 'amazing technical skill' but because I didn't have enough side-projects to prove that I "love the web" enough to work with them.
I eventually ended up in my current position of lead developer at an early-stage startup, but it frustrates me a bit when I hear about a lack of talent while at the same time feeling like my own experience is that startups are being very picky in their hiring practices (i.e. looking for any chink in the armor, no matter how small, and then flat-out rejecting someone because of it). If they were rejecting me for such those kinds of reasons, then either:
1. They had someone better than me that they decided to hire instead.
2. They really aren't that hard up to talent, and decided to wait for someone "better"[1] to come along.
[1] For various definitions of "better," as in this case it just means jumps through the hiring hoops correctly.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit higher a than 40K, but not that much. For example, I would have said around 60K and after some research, it seem I'm not wrong : http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/State=Qu%C3%A9bec/Salary AVG: Software developer : 58K Also in Quebec, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you want to an engineer school and are part of their order.
"[...] In Quebec, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you went to an engineering school [...]" That is actually true in most (all?) provinces.
It's true, except in BC some use it casually as just another job title (e.g., software engineer), and I don't recall anyone saying anything about it.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#157One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…
I'm from Vancouver and have lived in Los Angeles for three years now.
There are 'hidden costs' to living in LA/California.
It just depends on what you prefer and where your priorities are.
I would love to move back to Vancouver, because when you consider gas (living close to work vs living in a suburban sprawl), property (yes, you get a bigger house here, but unsafe neighbourhoods are just around the corner, and bad air), quality of education (Canadian primary and secondary schools outperform American ones), then is it really worth the trade off?
For example, in LA, the concept of 'you get what you pay for' is truly taken seriously. You want the best? Get ready to pay thousands and thousands of dollars (more expensive than Canada, usually). If you just want mediocrity and barely get by, LA is super cheap, affordable, and you can raise 10 kids here, no problems.
EDIT: With regard to poutine, that looks like the fancy poutines you get in Santa Monica. Savages! All of them!
EDIT2: Added clarification
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#158Although I worked for several startups that benefited from SRED credits, I always found the system appalling and prefer the way it works in US with VCs. No government should take hard working folks's money and give them to white middle-upper class, well educated founders that will possibly just get wealthy even more and the class division cycle will continue. I would bet if you pay this money directly to the engineer…
A while ago, I daydreamed the possibility that some government could, by way of international competitive advantage, establish by law a favorable tax situation for corporations that had a "Gov Class" stock. This would represent no less than 10% of the total ownership interest, and would be proxyless and nonvoting, but would have preferred treatment for dividends. Any distributions to Gov Class shareholder would be deductable from any taxes otherwise owed to it, but would not be refundable.
That would allow the government, or anyone in its federation or confederation or otherwise under it in the hierarchy, to invest in startup businesses in such a way that favors local development and limits tax jurisdiction shopping.
If Chicago bought 15% of a new local company as Gov Class shares, it retains 15% of the value of the company and 15% of the profits, at the expense of tax revenues, even if the company moves to San Francisco. In that case, taxes would ordinarily drop to nothing, but as a stockholder, the municipal government retains its investment. But perhaps the State of California buys out City of Chicago to sweeten the deal. Chicago now has that money back to reinvest, instead of pissing away tax dollars to develop companies that just leave when they get big enough.
Of course, that assumes governments could be responsible investors, which is a proposition very difficult to prove. As it is, straight subsidies seem like a far stupider and more bureaucratic way to just waste tax money and enrich business owners without producing the intended effects. If the government is enriching the business owners anyway, wouldn't it be more cost effective to actually be one of the owners?
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#159I don't understand why all countries require startups to have investment. For one, most tech start ups don't need significant investment and can be boostrap. The average 30 year old has enough saving to get by for a year or two without any investment. I feel require investment is really a cruft of the past and shouldn't be a necessity for visas.
26. $3k in the bank.
I had more at that age, but now have less. I probably would have been better off marrying a startup instead of a spouse. Either one alone can drain away all the time and money you have, and then some, but only one is likely to make your bank account any larger later on.
Now they say that money can't buy happiness, but not having enough of it is a great way to get miserable. Think about that before you choose.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has actually used the SR&ED program for many years, I have to say that you've got it a bit wrong... SR&ED will cover a percentage of capital expenditures essential to the work and a percentage of $ paid to contractors so it's salary plus SOME eligible expenses. Salaries make up the biggest part though. I got about 65% back, using the proxy method - a simpler way of calculating SR&ED overhead on eligibl…
They've recently removed the ability to claim capital equipment. My experience, which is probably less than yours, is that the R&D requirement is real and omnipresent - anything that's spent on production or that will go into production can't be claimed. Furthermore I've been asked for lab notebooks and experiment designs to justify the materials I used that I claimed were for R&D purposes.
They used to have an "Account Executive" program where you could talk to a reviewer BEFORE you started work to explain what you were doing and get tips on what was eligible and what was not. I did that when I started and it was an eye opener!
The reviewer I spoke to was the one who handled all our claims, so it didn't hurt that he already knew about us. It made his job, and mine, a lot easier.
Wait... okay, found a link to the services they offer and Account Executive is still in there, plus a bunch of others...
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/srvcs-eng.html
If you're at all uncertain about what you can/should be claiming then you should definitely talk to a SR&ED professional or use one of these services to get definitive answers from the source.