261–270 of 715 posts
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Coming from BC (west coast) I believe the taxation rate would work out about the same.
Income taxes BC CA are pretty similar, but other taxes aren't. Gas is the equivalent of $6/gal in Canada right now (due to taxes), sales tax is 12% and a lot of products (electronics, etc) are just generally more expensive in Canada.
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Well.. grabbing the light rail in the Bay Area and changing at Santa Clara around 9pm was an eye opening experience. Let’s just say an old man snapping at my geeky reading would’ve been the least of my concerns. I had one guy pushing a cart trying to sell me drugs, a bunch of school kids leering at everyone and making a nuisance of themselves and just a general feeling that everyone with any sort of reasonable level…
Which train was this? There are two major train systems going through the area. There's Caltrain, which will be full of professionals if you ride it close to working hours. Then there's VTA Light Rail, which is effectively "the bus on rails." Later in the evening it will be full of the type you describe.
See, that's the difference with much of Europe, including London.
Those financiers probably don't use the bus that often, as they have a home just a couple of minutes walk from the station. But they won't have a prejudice against using the bus.
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…
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…
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"?
I live in Germany, which has similar wages for software engineers as Canada. And in a 2 hours train ride I can be in Poland, where software engineers earn 1/3 their German counterparts.
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…
I do remote work for this reason. Although I did manage to recently find a contractor position that pays competitively here in Canada, I find that very rarely. If you do remote contract work, mostly for US or Swiss companies, you can make 2-3x a top Canadian salary. Just throwing that out there as an alternative to moving to the US.
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…
So there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay. 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.
I really do get tired of this "but the cost of living!" argument being tossed out. People get it. It's not complicated.
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Engineer with 5 years experience earning $117k CAD ($91k USD) in North York. I don't see a lot of jobs under $85k CAD in Toronto.
From what I've seen... If you consider stock options and bonuses, you could be making at least double that in the valley. Canadians getting a raw deal by comparison. Cost of living in Toronto is not half of that of the Bay Area. Most like 2/3rds.
I'm not willing to lose a quarter of my household income because my wife cannot work.
Canada is in a really tough spot here. I've always admired Canadian culture/values, and in the abstract, would love to live in Canada one day. However, as a Software developer, the compensation and opportunities that one can find in SF/Seattle/NYC dwarf anything in Canada. Until this changes, Canada is always going to lose its brightest engineers, which will in turn worsen the problem even further. Some solutions I c…
They tried that a few times. I know because I was an advisor to one of the biggest incubators in Canada. The government even gives cash grants to startups.
But as soon as the company gets big, they either 1) open an engineering office in the Bay Area or 2) Sell, and the move to the Bay Area because they were just acquired by a Bay Area company who is making them move (or they just want to move now that they can afford it).
The startup scene in Canada has huge demand from Canadian engineers who want to start startups there, but they have a really hard time attracting local capital. Most of their capital comes from SV VCs who like the fact that it is cheaper to start a company there because of the low salaries, and a lot of the successful exits leave.
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In Silicon Valley, most likely you are not going to afford a house anyway.. .
Well you can't afford a house in Vancouver either so why not go to the USA and earn more. The spot with the best balance seems to be Seattle. High salaries and housing relatively affordable when compared to Vancouver or SF.
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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"?
A lot of the tech industry is about burning through investors' money in search of new profitable ideas. I'm guessing there's much less investor money in Canada.
The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. The combined market cap of FAANG is fluctuating around $3 trillion right now. That's about 2X the entire GDP of Canada...in just 5 American companies.
No large-ish tech company in Canada is near that level of profitability or size. Combine that with currency fluctuations and with the greater tax/regulatory burden of having a full-time employee in Canada, and you will never have a Canadian company that can afford to pay engineers $250K+ en masse like FAANG can.