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Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

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Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#51

I'll say this everytime Vancouver comes up in HN. It's a stunning city, full of modern amenities (including a public transit system that's actually awesome and very well used) and incredible access to nature. None of this is remotely enticing to young engineers when they make 2x-3x as much in SF and only pay ~30-50% more for housing. Until wages rise in Vancouver, there will be much fanfare about tech companies movin…

2x-3x is excessive, and is changing. Anecdotally, the Amazon/Microsofts of the world pay "only" 30% less in Vancouver than they do in Seattle. I haven't confirmed but supposedly Salesforce no longer discounts. And despite what the local fear-mongering suggests, these companies aren't just using Vancouver as an H1B parking lot - they are establishing real centers of excellence and hiring plenty of local talent. All th…

I think 2x-3x is not excessive at all. The exchange rate is ~1.30 CAD to 1 USD. I work at UBC and most software developers graduating here are in the $60k range.

Taxes are worse for Americans as you have to pay both US and CAD taxes if you make over $100k.

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRT citizenship, if I googled it correctly, C-24 requires a terrorism-related conviction, or having obtained the citizenship by misrepresentation or fraud, in order to strip a dual citizen of their Canadian passport. It doesn't seem to be in the same category of things as the sorts of things Trump's doing. I'd say compared with Tories, the Republicans really are in a class of their own.

> It doesn't seem to be in the same category of things as the sorts of things Trump's doing. Indeed. While we have similar laws regarding denaturalization, Trump did not make them. But you're probably right about the rest; I doubt a Tory PM would demonstrate the same level of sloppy, slapdash, incompetent jackassery we're seeing from the new occupant of the Oval Office. Tangentially: I get there's a lot of fear going…

It could be that we've been reading different things (Twitter and Facebook aren't good for this sort of things IMO), but my impression is that people had justified suspicions, and that these weren't just Hitler comparisons (which really should be called out, they're too far out). Authoritarianism can mean a range of things, none of them good, and so so long as people base their arguments on things that Trump and his team said or things that they did, people should be on solid enough ground.

As an example, you say "he's an utter noob", and, sure, that is one of the possibilities. But it's not the only possibility, so one would be wrong to say that it's obvious, for example, that he's an utter noob. He might be, or he might not be. How do you know? And those other possibilities have to be considered too, to be fair. It'd be wrong to dismiss them straight up as clickbait without examining the merits.

(I'm not sure if you meant noob or boob, it looked like a typo to me, but as luck would have it, my reply works both ways.)

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#53

What I probably will never get is why - of all places - Silicon Valley is so obsessed with exclusively hiring locally. You'd think that companies that are so eager to disrupt whole industries would be more susceptive to adapting more modern and efficient ways of organising work.

It's mostly because of the VC Ponzi scheme. US investors invest in US incorporated companies because it is easier to sell them and to get other later stage institutional investors interested.

There's two ways how companies can quickly exit nowadays:

1. Acquihire - and the companies buying normally want colocated teams. Acquihires are predominantly happening because the 10x-ers can leverage their capacities by incorporating and effectively bringing forward their entire future earnings to the present through an acquisition. The companies like it because the can lock-in 10x-ers for 4-10 years, which usually only stay for 6-24 months in one company and jump ship very easily, taking company knowledge with them. They generally have to be incorporated and operating in the US as it is difficult to enforce such contracts internationally. This is also the fastest way for seed investors to get big multiples back without having to wade through all the subsequent rounds. As a seed investor you also don't need to pick a winning product or biz model, rather just a very smart team. The best of these brain-investors have contacts in all the big corps to advertize their investments to them well ahead of time.

2. IP is most often useless without the people and knowhow who can use and implement it. That generally means the people who developed it. Most loss of IP value doesn't come from simply Chinese copying, or even patent wars, rather the people developing and using the IP getting hired away to the competition. By having them all in the US or even State such as California, and keeping them on a 4-10 year contract, you firewall that IP from the competition.

Combine the above two with the much larger and more liquid unified financial market of the US, and you can bid your equity up due to demand pressure. The same company, with the same tech, and same users, and same development team, can be 5-20x less valuable in terms of equity if located in the EU. This is also why there are so few large exits in Europe as compared to the US.

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't seem to be in the same category of things as the sorts of things Trump's doing. Indeed. While we have similar laws regarding denaturalization, Trump did not make them. But you're probably right about the rest; I doubt a Tory PM would demonstrate the same level of sloppy, slapdash, incompetent jackassery we're seeing from the new occupant of the Oval Office. Tangentially: I get there's a lot of fear going…

It could be that we've been reading different things (Twitter and Facebook aren't good for this sort of things IMO), but my impression is that people had justified suspicions, and that these weren't just Hitler comparisons (which really should be called out, they're too far out). Authoritarianism can mean a range of things, none of them good, and so so long as people base their arguments on things that Trump and his…

Not saying I'm certain, just that it seems the parsimonious conclusion right now.

(I did mean "boob" - see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/boob .)

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#55
post #16

I'm so sick of the "moving to Canada" talk. You get to come if we say so, not because it's your backup plan. I like living where I am now, and I don't want to leave to go back to Canada and earn drastically less with the same (optimistically) expenses. While working on less interesting stuff.

Let's be honest, Canada (like any other country in the world) is always happy when a wealthy company comes to invest and open an office, especially if it's to recruit qualified workers. The equation is pretty simple: 1. It will bring jobs to Canadians (the offices won't be made only of expats, for many reasons) 2. Employees will spend their salary in Canada, and pay taxes in Canada 3. Knowledge: interns/employees go…

I'm not talking about Facebook opening an office in Vancouver, I'm talking about "I'm moving to Canada if Trump wins".

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x-3x is excessive, and is changing. Anecdotally, the Amazon/Microsofts of the world pay "only" 30% less in Vancouver than they do in Seattle. I haven't confirmed but supposedly Salesforce no longer discounts. And despite what the local fear-mongering suggests, these companies aren't just using Vancouver as an H1B parking lot - they are establishing real centers of excellence and hiring plenty of local talent. All th…

I think 2x-3x is not excessive at all. The exchange rate is ~1.30 CAD to 1 USD. I work at UBC and most software developers graduating here are in the $60k range. Taxes are worse for Americans as you have to pay both US and CAD taxes if you make over $100k.

Due to the tax treaty between Canada and the US you'll get tax credits in the US for Canadian taxes paid that would offset the US taxes in most cases.

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the downsides of Mexico are the insecurity, the pollution and the endemic corruption of authorities. Not speaking english is a fake problem. You can learn spanish in 6 months if you live in the country, it's not a very hard language and Mexican are very social people.

As a Canadian, I'd move to Mexico if I was paid the same as I'm making now. Of course no company would be happy to have that happen ;-) Plus, I'm already used to going to Mexico in winter for a week on a beach, and Mexican food is delicious.

If you get a remote working gig, you can work from anywhere. I regularly get contracted by americans and still work from my bedroom in France.

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#58
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that some VC money follows them to Canada, which has always been what you guys lacked in comparison to SV. So this will be good for native (??) Canadians too.

Will it? I gather not all are fond of what such money has done for San Francisco and the Bay Area in general.

Is this about the rising cost of housing? My understanding is that it has more to do with nimbyism and proposition 13 than just engineering wages pricing out locals. That said, I don't know about the situation in Canada, so maybe someone can shed some light.

Re: Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

#59
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people don't want to live somewhere where the cartels rule and disappearings ending in brutal murder are a thing.

If google can have offices in mdf, so can others --stay out of the illegal drugs business and you'll be fine. This protest business is strange. We have many Indians here fretting and denouncing the temp refugee ban, but I'd bet most don't care about how the Indian government treats refugees back home (some in UN camps), many not recognized. etc., so it's all political selfishness which is why maybe Americans can be s…

>stay out of the illegal drugs business and you'll be fine.

It's not that simple. Imagine if you have a relationships with the daughter of someone in the drug trade (or one of your children do) - and have a bad breakup. Imagine if someone in a cartel decides to take a liking to your daughter - it happens all the time in certain areas. It can happen in America or anywhere - you or someone in your family can get in an abusive relationship - but in Mexico, cartel members are used to getting what they want and acting very violently when they don't.

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