Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#471

Post by 52-6F-62 » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:12 AM UTC

brandon272 wrote: post #324

_xzxj wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian here (who lives outside of Canada but recently did a stint there for a bit) and this will sound negative but f-it. Canadian culture sucks when it comes to trying new things. Canada has some extra safety net but the culture is puritanical and conservative and nobody wants to go out on a limb and try something new and crazy. Not like Americans. Those that do are constantly questioned by everybody. The idea of…

> Those that do are constantly questioned by everybody. My exposure is more western Canada than eastern Canada, but I find that your statements couldn't be further from the truth. People here are constantly trying new things and exploring and experimenting with new business ideas. I see great optimism and people who see potential. And in terms of being constantly questioned, I just don't see that where I am, but I al…

I have to say, Brandon, in spite of all of my criticisms in other comments under this larger thread, that I agree with you.

Ambition toward innovation is not tightly coupled with remuneration here, but it does not mean that Canada is averse to innovation. America has loved that myth since the Avro Arrow and has sought to suppress it after that, or at least it can seem that way.

It's not just western Canada, though western Canada is no small contributor (after having lived in Alberta, and loving and longing for return to BC but originating from rural Ontario and now living in the "center of the universe"/Toronto).

I grew up with farmers, and they were/are consistently more liberal in all regards than what I hear in American news and forums. Those were the first places I saw solar panels and wind farms popping up to contribute to the larger energy grid as well as supplement extraneous local power consumption by isolating supplies to certain devices. They never seemed to care so much about asserting their opinions about how society should run except that people should generally treat each other with decency no matter who you are. I liked that. I could go on for hours. It's not to say conservative types (as expressed in this thread—against change) exist, nor other groups of social conservatives, but they don't occupy the majority. That's another subject altogether...

I also agree that being questioned isn't a problem. It can reach a severely challenging point, but most decent people will hear you out as well. It's a challenge— it challenges you to be better. Just as you've said.

Refining an idea isn't a problem, nor is it censorship, nor is it an aversion to innovation. It's fundamental to science.

I only wanted to speak up because of the majority comments opposing your own.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#472

Post by masonic » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #366

pm90 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what they usually say, but they also usually oppose policy which would make legal immigration easier and relieve pressure that creates illegal immigration, and frequently support policies to restrict legal immigration. And it's not just 10% of conservatives supporting this kind of policy. Look, I'm a liberal but I will call out the Dems when I need to. Most of the reforms to legal immigration have always bee…

> Democrats haven't proposed a bill which purely targets legal immigration. Perhaps, but conservatives have frequently put forward bills (or, when in the executive, instituted executive policy without Congressional action) that further restrict currently-legal immigration and non-immigrant entry and privileges, which is more significant sign of opposition to legal immigration than merely voting against expansions to…

  further restrict currently-legal immigration

In fact, it was never-legal immigration that just was not enforced under the prior administration. The executive branch lacks those powers.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#473

Post by DrScump » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #236

tanilama wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Silicon Valley, most likely you are not going to afford a house anyway.. .

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).

  Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple)

The Sunnyvale housing market may be "ground zero" for Apple due to supply, but Apple's "Spaceship" HQ is in Cupertino. Homestead is the border, except for a small chunk just west of Wolfe.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#474

Post by dghughes » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

In my small town I'm trying to find a junior sysadmin/network admin job but 99.8% of the jobs are developers. I say nay to the news people leaving in fact they seem to be hiring!

And anytime I see news about Canada it seems Waterloo is mentioned making amazing things, quantum radar was the last story I read about.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#475

Post by wolco » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

turingcompeteme wrote: post #105

Maven911 wrote: post #58

And better weather and the cachet of being in a world city. The brain drain has been going on for decades now... But lately, the general Canadian media has claimed there is a reversal. One case in point is Montreal being proclaimed an "AI Hub". It's considered an "AI hub" mainly because of one of the fathers of AI is from there (and one his students coming up with the concept of Adversial networks) and a few companie…

Better weather, definitely. But is anyone claiming San Franciso or Seattle are more 'world city' than Toronto or Montreal? By almost any definition of world city, they would be very wrong.

I'm from Toronto and San Francisco is a world class city. Last time I visited it felt like a city from the future. It felt alive even the homeless have evolved trying to get you to buy poetry instead of just begging.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#476

Post by adventured » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #270

badpun wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Burning through investors money in search of profitable ideas" has nothing to do with it. There's this huge misconception on HN about the size of the venture capital market. Start-ups are a miniscule portion of the tech economy by any measure of value. 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…

> The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc

The reason engineers in the US make so much, is because four to five decades ago US tech companies combined with globalization and scaled out into the entire planet as a market. That premise has remained intact, while the global economy has gotten a lot larger and richer. That's something most other nations have failed to do at a large scale (S.Korea has Samsung but not many other companies that have gone hyper global for example).

Go all the way back to Fairchild, Intel, HP, IBM in the 1950-1980 era. Nobody has done globalized tech like the US, probably only Japan got close (and they've largely missed out on the huge margins in software).

Without the ability to tap into the rest of the planet, Netflix wouldn't be able to pay what it does. The rest of the planet is half their market now, and will be 2/3 or 3/4 of it in the near future.

Europe only has three or four major tech companies that managed to go substantially global (eg SAP, ARM, Spotify, or Booking.com which got swallowed by Priceline). ARM & Booking got taken out, Spotify will be acquired next. The same kind of problem Canada often faces with its tech companies (Shopify is very likely to end up in the belly of a US tech or retail company, especially once their valuation normalizes).

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#477

Post by dkasper » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:33 AM UTC

dghughes wrote: post #474

In my small town I'm trying to find a junior sysadmin/network admin job but 99.8% of the jobs are developers. I say nay to the news people leaving in fact they seem to be hiring! And anytime I see news about Canada it seems Waterloo is mentioned making amazing things, quantum radar was the last story I read about.

Think you've got it backward. It's not that there aren't jobs in tech in Canada, it's that the people who could fill them are leaving.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#478

Post by mmt » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:34 AM UTC

JibJabLab wrote: post #211

Kluny wrote: post #56

Canadian here. I get $65,000 USD from my remote American job. That's low enough that people on this forum snicker at me, and high enough that companies in the "tech town" that I live in physically wince when I tell them my salary expectation. I'd rather work locally, but what can I do?

I really don't understand that. There's so many places across the U.S. where that's very decent money. Anyone who says otherwise is living in some kind of bubble. Exceptions would be if you're living in cities.

According to https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS 82% of the US population lives in cities, and even over 50% of the world population now does, so I think your "exceptions" is a bit ironic at best.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#479

Post by sverige » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:37 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #443

ahelwer wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I gotta agree with you here, bud. When I was growing up in Canada I had to keep my dreams a secret. If you had any grand goals people thought you were an egomaniacal weirdo. It wasn't until I seriously dated someone here in the US that I realized the difference: as part of the "delving into each others' inner lives" phase of the early relationship, I sheepishly admitted I had dreams of doing some pretty big…

> Here in the USA it's normal for everyone to have big dreams, and weird if they don't. I think I like it It makes Americans easily manipulated and exploited.

I agree with this observation. There are countless examples of companies making big money by taking advantage of that trait.

Re: Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

#480

Post by caenorst » Sat, May 05, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #469

bgirard wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Canada is socially liberal and financially conservative.

Socially liberal in some ways, but not in everything. 4 states decriminalized and/or legalized marijuana before any Canadian provinces. 2 of them did it years before Canada was even planning to do it. That is very telling of the two cultures.

Summarizing the social liberal aspect of Canada by the legalization of marijuana seems very narrow minded. There are far more important social aspects than marijuana legalization.