Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#171

Post by disbelief » Thu, May 29, 2014, 6:42 AM UTC

amscanne wrote: post #58

xtrumanx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Actually it would take a lot less money than you would think to get many people to move to Canada and take a job offer. There's a whole world of immigrants out there who would love to move to Canada. They're mostly not located in California howeve…

Unfortunately they don't qualify for T-N visas! :)

Though there is mention of the "startup visa" in the article, which applies to people from non-NAFTA countries as well. Though not sure how it works for hiring talent.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#172

Post by maaku » Thu, May 29, 2014, 8:31 AM UTC

disbelief wrote: post #170

maaku wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you live frugally in Silicon Valley your savings can be larger than your annual salary in Montreal.

How does one live frugally when rent is sometimes 60-70% of your income? Plus taxes in California are comparable to those in Quebec, but health care isn't covered.

Don't live in gentrified, high-rent neighborhoods in the city.

I rent in San Jose, have private health insurance, and am sole provider for a family of four. Our necessary expenses to maintain our standard of living for last year totaled around $40k. That year I had been offered (and turned down for unrelated reasons) a $115k job on the peninsula. Even assuming a worst-case tax situation, I still could have been saving $40k/year.

That's approximately the going rate in Quebec for the work I do.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#173

Post by gotrecruit » Thu, May 29, 2014, 12:37 PM UTC

gyardley wrote: post #127

gotrecruit wrote: post #119

I'm moving to Vancouver, BC soon to found a startup, so it's good to hear this. But from comments here, i'm hearing a lot of comments pertaining to Toronto and Waterloo region, but not much about Vancouver or BC in general. Why is that? Is Vancouver/BC not a good place for startups? Am I heading in the wrong direction? I'm still in a position to switch back to Toronto if necessary, so if someone can enlighten me that…

I didn't have a startup in Vancouver, but a prominent angel investor in Vancouver put some money into my NYC-based startup, and I flew out there for a couple of 'portfolio summits', with companies largely-based in Vancouver. I liked the group I saw and people I met, but a) that was years ago, and b) I don't know if they were representative. Hey, if you want to talk to someone in Vancouver about the local start-up sce…

hey, i will definitely shoot you an email. i would be curious to find out more about the vancouver startup scene!

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#174

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, May 29, 2014, 1:44 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #167

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right at the lower-end of the income spectrum, but any non-joke, non-freelance software development job in the US will include health insurance on top of the quoted salary at little or no cost to the employee. I have a chronic health condition that needs some fairly expensive drugs and relatively frequent doctor visits and procedures. My total out of pocket healthcare expenses are less than $500 per y…

Except, before the ACA they could refuse to take you on because of "pre-existing conditions". I know several people who did not switch away from jobs they hated because they risked losing health care. And freelancers, even if they commanded high salaries, also had problems getting reasonable insurance. I'm up-to-date as of 2011, I'm sure things have (and still are) radically changing - but the health insurance situat…

HIPAA in 1996 limited the ability of insurance plans to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. As long as you didn't have a gap of more than 63 days with no insurance coverage, they couldn't deny you coverage.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#175

Post by seestheday » Thu, May 29, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #83

brennanm wrote: post #23

A lot of the talk is on SRED credits. SRED is a large part of the credit program for startups in Canada. Though it's not as simple as "Canada pays 80% of your salaries" You can get up to (off the top of my head) 75% of salaries paid back on hours worked "advancing technology". That means it's only for true R&D. That means UI, business logic, API, App anything, expenses, costs, etc... don't count. It's only for when y…

Plug: the UK govt also has R&D tax credits, and it's what my company, GrantTree, specialises in. They're similar to Canadian tax credits, but can give you up to 25-32% cash back, and are a fair bit more lenient on what passes audits (at least compared to the horror stories I've heard from Canada). Feel free to get in touch with me to find out if/how you can get some of that in the UK.

Are UK salaries even worse than Canadian ones? I've looked at analytics related positions in the UK and was shocked at how bad the average pay seemed to be given what the cost of living was.

It seemed to be the same for software developers.

Given what patio11 says about salaries in Japan, that country also sounds absolutely terrible.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#176

Post by Istof » Fri, May 30, 2014, 3:23 AM UTC

kelvin0 wrote: post #102

Istof wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here is how a standard poutine should look like for anyone who doesn't know: https://www.google.com/search?q=ashton+poutine+images

Yeah, it's not supposed to have a weird 'cheese Whiz' yellowish radioactive gravy (see the Article's picture of an unnameable monstrosity)

You are correct and I never seen a poutine like this before but there is many variations that are good... I like a good "poutine italienne" for example:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-snFyhK5zhAg/UOW2AzMTNEI/AAAAAAAAAR...

or "poutine galvaude" (with chicken and peas):

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s8Qv78uyb88/ToDfKVqZzdI/AAAAAAAAAC...

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#177

Post by MisterBastahrd » Sat, May 31, 2014, 9:30 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #168

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's not. In practice it is a way to give professional associations a monopoly and force people to pay fees to them (because it is membership of those associations which give you the ability to call yourself whatever, not what you completed at university) Fortunately there are multiple job titles in computing that mean the same thing, so this should never be a real problem in computing.

Yes, yes it definitely is. While professional engineering certification might be a monopolistic moneymaking scheme, it also verifies that an engineer has some idea that he knows what the hell he's doing in a way that graduating from a university can't. Standardized tests have a real and valuable purpose. I'm more comfortable knowing that an engineer graduating from Western State has an independent source to test his knowledge against. Accreditation alone can't do this.