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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

#61
post #59
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This happens in India too (replace drug lord with politician, someone influential) that hasn't stopped companies having offices there. And BTW, contrary to what seems common knowledge, there are a lot of expats in India (probably not as many as in the US).

Maybe Mexico is radically different, I don't know. But this seems far fetched to me.

Source: I'm an Indian living in the US

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

#62
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…

I totally agree. I bet my bottom dollar that nobody gave a damn about refugees while they were in India and arguably don't care about them right now. Now that Trump administration is clamping down on H1B workers, all of a sudden many of them magically care about them. Pure selfishness...

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

#63

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.

As someone who has worked in Dallas, Austin and now Silicon Valley I can answer this question with some perdonal anecdotes.

Silicon valley is miles ahead and will remain miles ahead of these other upcoming "silicon whatevers". The environment is just different here; people are willing to put their lives into building something (it's arguable if that's healthy disposition), people are smarter (and also smart asses) and there is general "itch" to do something entrepreneurial. To scratch this "itch" there are people willing to put money and everything on the line which I haven't seen in Texas. There is a reason why most major technological developments come out from Silicon Valley and not elsewhere. Hell, if I were a hiring manager, I wouldn't hire myself for a position here if I were working in Texas :P (I'm exaggerating here, the point is that I never had the drive and neither do most of the people there)

P.S: Please don't inundate with negatives of silicon valley, we all know about it. What's unarguable is the technological output of Silicon Valley.

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

#64
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It seems like you have no clue what's going on and what this article is about. It's not about Trump winning, it's about Trump having started to do its shit and forcing companies to find a way to make their employees work since the US doesn't accept them anymore.

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

#65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This happens in India too (replace drug lord with politician, someone influential) that hasn't stopped companies having offices there. And BTW, contrary to what seems common knowledge, there are a lot of expats in India (probably not as many as in the US). Maybe Mexico is radically different, I don't know. But this seems far fetched to me. Source: I'm an Indian living in the US

>This happens in India too

This can happen anywhere. One or two isolated incidents cannot be used to infer a trend. I can bet you it happens a lot less (like 10x) here than in Mexico even though India's population is 10x of Mexico (so effectively the situation in India is 100x better than Mexico).

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

#66

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.

As someone who has worked in Dallas, Austin and now Silicon Valley I can answer this question with some perdonal anecdotes. Silicon valley is miles ahead and will remain miles ahead of these other upcoming "silicon whatevers". The environment is just different here; people are willing to put their lives into building something (it's arguable if that's healthy disposition), people are smarter (and also smart asses) an…

I'm not sure you can say that most major technological developments come out of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the most obviously world-changing ones do but the majority of technological development still happens outside of Silicon Valley. Even if you just look at the software industry, where Silicon Valley clearly is leading, the majority of software is still developed outside of Silicon Valley. When considering other industries and disciplines this becomes even more obvious.

Regarding the entrepreneurial itch the same thing has been said about the US in general in the past. People elsewhere are just as smart and can be just as entrepreneurially-minded it's often just that the environment doesn't easily accommodate this drive (e.g. lack of adequate infrastructure or conditions not as amenable to entrepreneurship).

However, with the world becoming ever more connected and networked there is no good reason (other than VCs with ulterior motives as mentioned in the other comments) why people from different parts of the world shouldn't collaborate on new projects and ideas. In fact, this stubborn insistence on location might exactly be what's holding further innovation and entrepreneurship back because it excludes a huge number of people from taking part.

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in Dallas, Austin and now Silicon Valley I can answer this question with some perdonal anecdotes. Silicon valley is miles ahead and will remain miles ahead of these other upcoming "silicon whatevers". The environment is just different here; people are willing to put their lives into building something (it's arguable if that's healthy disposition), people are smarter (and also smart asses) an…

I'm not sure you can say that most major technological developments come out of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the most obviously world-changing ones do but the majority of technological development still happens outside of Silicon Valley. Even if you just look at the software industry, where Silicon Valley clearly is leading, the majority of software is still developed outside of Silicon Valley. When considering other indu…

That's true. I didn't mean measure it by lines of code but more by impact and forward thinking.

Despite the connectedness and networking in the other parts of the world, I'm yet to see anything world changing come out from elsewhere. It seems everyone outside the US is just reshashing what's being done in the US (social media, networks, taxi apps, what have you in emerging markets). And my argument is that it is the environment of Silicon Valley that facilitates this enterpreneurship and is hard to replicate elsewhere (yet).

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't pay more in Toronto. You don't even pay more in tax let alone healthcare and housing. Vancouver is really the only place it could reasonably be argued that you pay more while earning less, and it's one of the warmest areas in Canada, with awesome giant mountains, and a beautiful coastline. Live in Halifax[1], earn $80k a year as a decent, but unremarkable, software developer and buy a house downtown or on t…

> Live in Halifax Yeah but that Atlantic Canada winter. Brrrh. Nope! > Or Ottawa, or Montreal, or Quebec City, or Kingston, or Waterloo These all experience winter. Although skiing does make up for some of that, and in Ottawa you've got the Rideau canal.

Yeah, Ottawa is great. It's so cold for so long that the Rideau canal freezes and hundreds of people can skate on it at a time (in fact there's a whole festival that occurs on the frozen canal!)

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

#69

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…

The weather, unfortunately, is terrible. But this is also a problem with Seattle, another major tech hub.

Late reply, but I'll argue you on the weather. Vancouver gets tons of cold rain, yes, but that is manageable. Just a few degrees colder and we'd get snow, which is infinitely harder to deal with on a infrastructural level.

Being so close to the freezing point has its perks: Vancouver's mountains get some of the best snow and longest seasons. I've skied in Whistler in late May and gone to the beach. Those days are amazing.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its crazy on a practical level because those tech companies aren't going to lose their cheap source of exploitable Labor..they'll figure a way around it. it's crazy because the country is going to be losing out on so much tax money from these countries Outsourcing and moving their operations overseas or to Canada.

> those tech companies aren't going to lose their cheap source of exploitable Labor..they'll figure a way around it That's pretty much what we're looking at right here, don't you think?

It seems unavoidable. Am I wrong?
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