241–250 of 715 posts
So all you people making $100K+ salary, how much are you actually saving per month? I make half that, live in Vancouver, own a car, and still invest $1,000 a month. I already have more money saved than 99% of Canadians and I'm only 27. I imagine you Americans with six figure salaries are saving 3-5K per month? Crazy.
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> I've learned how to drive stick shift It's a well known fact that the amazing opportunity of learning to drive stick shift is something you can't do in Canada. Luckily the US are there for that!
You haven't driven stick shift until you have driven stick shift in Europe. Extra points if you change gears with the left hand.
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The big tech hubs in CA (Toronto, Vancouver) are expensive and traffic is absolutely awful. A quick glance online shows average apartment prices are nearly $2000/mo. So it's almost like you're living in Seattle anyway. I don't think CA has many technical equivalents to Ohama or Columbus that combine high salaries from numerous F500 companies with Midwestern COL.
Isn't Montreal bigger than Vancouver? Also Montreal is cheap to live in.
MIDI, the immigration department of Quebec which has fully autonomy for selecting immigrants to Quebec fails to attract or retain the foreign talents. A highly skilled worker is not given any kind of priority in their immigration application.
On the other hand, if you only have a school diploma, but can speak fluent French, you get the top priority in Quebec immigration.
If you are highly skilled, but do not know a word of French, it will take a minimum of 4 years to immigrate to Quebec [2]. Montreal is just riding on their old inertia. There is a huge shortage of talent in Quebec. The policies of immigration dept. of Quebec and Quebec's language policies will drive Quebec down the drain. Some politicians have even announced that if they get elected, they will deport all the non French speaking immigrants out of Quebec.
So any startups looking to start their business in Quebec, you have been warned. Montreal is a great tourist city, no contest. But not so great to live or work for tech. If you immigrate to Quebec, your kids should go to French school only.[4]
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/pastagate-reve...
[2] http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2018/02/27/des-travailleurs...
[3] https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/caq-s-new-immigration-policy-lea...
[4] http://unbelavenir.gouv.qc.ca/en/whychoosequebec-foreducatio...
http://www.jfgagne.ai/canadian-ai-ecosystem-2018-en
I'm a sucker for California weather but other than that I'd much rather work in a lower-cost country with universal healthcare and without the stigma associated with the United States when traveling abroad.
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> who are hesitant to move to USA because of immigration restrictions. Where does this perception come from? Canada has stricter immigration rules than the USA. EDIT: Specifically what I'm talking about is that Canada only allows in immigrants who are economically desirable and speak English or French.
Kinda unrelated to immigration, but I've heard Canadian border patrol is actually more harsh than American border control. Anyone with experience that can verify?
The only two times I've been aggressively grilled including accusations of smuggling and personal questions that were intrusive were coming back into Canada.
Even when I only had a green card, most of the time the US CBP just said "welcome home" and waved me on.
Canadian tech worker here. Base salary is 120k CAD in Calgary which is far above market rate but I am educated, experienced etc. That is 93k USD. I am looking to move to the USA because of higher salaries, but I am not 22 years old anymore and moving a family (with 2 earners) is no easy task. It falls on deaf ears though, 120k CAD is a good income, I can afford a house, cars, no debts etc so there is very little unde…
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.
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Do Canadian companies make that much less money than American ones? Why should they get to pad their profit margins because 120k CAD is "good income"?
It really depends, but if a Canadian company operates in the US market and charges US prices, that puts them at a huge advantage.
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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).
If only there were some way to put more houses on a given plot of land, perhaps by stacking one on top of another, we could somehow break this dynamic. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
The housing prices are rising across the globe - one has to put somewhere all this money sloshing around. So, even to just stabilize the prices, one has to build faster than the money are printed - like Alice in Wonderland where you have to run fast just to stay at the same place.
Basically all that NIMBY vs. YIMBY fights is just 2 poor hobos fighting for a penny and completely distracted with that fight while a nice rich gentleman sells them both to slavery and makes away with the money and all the rest of their possessions.
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Not really. The vast majority of those 35 million live in 3 really small areas. Just like the vast majority of california lives on the coast. California is a physically huge state by the way, that is fairly sparsely populated in big swaths of the state.
Unlike Canada, California benefits from a pool of ~290 million other people who self-select to move there with 0 barriers other than having a few dollars to buy a gray hound ticket.