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

#671

Post by kingofhdds » Sat, May 05, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #488

kingofhdds wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there are some important details missed in your story, because you either don't know them, or don't understand why they are important. My European, but non-EU, friend is a software engineer with certified knowledge of both En, and Fr, clean records, and all that stuff, decided to go to Canada for some not particularly economically rational reasons (like love of northern nature). This year it's going t…

What is the race of your friend?

White. Why do you think it could be important? I don't expect a country like Canada to racially filter qualified applicants.

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

#672

Post by soperj » Sat, May 05, 2018, 10:39 PM UTC

ralphie02 wrote: post #562

soperj wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As per the comment below, the population between Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal is about a third of the total population (about 12M). Bit pedantic but this really is a far cry from being the "vast majority" of Canada's population.

Golden Horseshoe is 9.2 million alone. So 12 million is definitely on the low side.

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

#673

Post by prmths » Sat, May 05, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #66

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…

> I've always admired Canadian culture/values

What is canadian culture? What are canadian values? I've never heard anyone mention canadian culture or values before.

> would love to live in Canada one day.

You are one of the rare individuals. Most canadians I've met want to live in the US. Especially those with money or skills to make money. Better food, weather, culture, history, life, etc.

> - Aggressively encourage/fund/facilitate startups. Unlike salaried employees, startups aren't turned off by the low-engineering-wages. Once Canada can grow 5-10 startups into major established companies with Canadian HQs, that will really boost the local engineering ecosystem and job market.

But they can't compete because of scale. Canada isn't large enough and it certainly has too little internal talent to compete with the US. California by itself can out compete canada by itself. Thrown in the other 49 states.

Even if canada retained all its "brains", it wouldn't matter. We outnumber canada 10 to 1 and outrank canada in every economic facet from resources, ports, infrastructure and foreign talent.

Foreigners with skills, from china to india to the middle east to eastern europe, all want to come to the US to study and work.

It's almost impossible for canada to compete with the US. They have nothing going for them vis a vis the US and their internal market isn't large enough to compete with the US.

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

#674

Post by digianarchist » Sat, May 05, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

akshat_h wrote: post #351

whack wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the current H1B lottery, even someone with excellent credentials will most likely be denied the visa, purely due to random chance. Also, even if you get the H1B and apply for Permanent Residency, the wait time can be obscenely long depending on where you were born. If you were born in China, you'll have to wait for 6+ years. If you were born in India, you'll have to wait for 12+ years. Ironically enough, if you…

To add to the above post. For people born in India the wait time is estimated to be more than 20+ years, since the queue is going to get longer and longer, and there are only fixed number of people who leave the queue every year. Unless you are on EB1, it is better to basically forget about getting a green card. Talking to my friends from India, the options are: 1) Do a PhD and hope to produce original, well cited re…

I guess citizens of all other countries fall under a single category? I could only find dates for the countries you mentioned. There is no delay for Canadians or say Australian citizens?

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

#675

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

#676

Post by akshat_h » Sat, May 05, 2018, 11:44 PM UTC

digianarchist wrote: post #674

akshat_h wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to the above post. For people born in India the wait time is estimated to be more than 20+ years, since the queue is going to get longer and longer, and there are only fixed number of people who leave the queue every year. Unless you are on EB1, it is better to basically forget about getting a green card. Talking to my friends from India, the options are: 1) Do a PhD and hope to produce original, well cited re…

I guess citizens of all other countries fall under a single category? I could only find dates for the countries you mentioned. There is no delay for Canadians or say Australian citizens?

There is no delay for other countries, at least for Employment based green cards.

There is some fixed number of employment based green cards that are awarded per category(EB1,2,3) with rollover between categories. The reason why there is a delay is that there is a country-wide cap on a percentage of total green cards awarded that year. So countries with higher number of people immigrating have a queue. If there were thousands of Australians immigrating, there can be a queue there too.

I am not sure about Canada though, as there maybe some other category for it.

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

#677

Post by neuromantik8086 » Sat, May 05, 2018, 11:53 PM UTC

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #666

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never lived outside of the East Coast / mid-West, but what you're saying sounds feasible. That said, I'd guess that the "who are you? What is your background?" question is more of a Boston thing than a New York thing, since New York doesn't have the Puritan / Boston Brahman caste system. I've known of a number of people who went to state schools or random unknown schools in New Jersey who've done reasonably well…

I also wonder if the weather has anything to do with the mentality. Winters in the East Coast are harsh so it forces people to be more 'realistic'. Whereas the sub tropical West Coast gives people an environment to think in more imaginitive ways. Also Juicero was headquarted in San Fran?

Juicero may have headquartered in San Fran because it was the "cool thing to do", but the founder lives in Brooklyn. I suspect that the San Fran HQ was HQ in name only.

Weather certainly does have an effect on culture. That said, the East Coast vs. West Coast, U.S. vs the World rivalry is mostly contrived, and claims that one area is more innovative than another are dubious. It's reasonable to claim that the Bay Area has more of an engineering-centric culture, but that is likely due to a) Intel and b) the presence of multiple well-funded National Labs within close proximity.

If you look at the case of Leland Stanford, for instance, you'll notice that he maintained pretty deep personal and economic ties with his hometown of Albany up until his death- a lot of his success wouldn't have been possible if he hadn't been able to rely upon his extended family in the East Coast for support.

Stanford University was actually originally supposed to be in Albany, but was the location was switched to Palo Alto- allegedly because people got greedy. Instead Albany got a children's orphanage sponsored by Stanford's wife, which didn't last past the 30s. [1]

[1] http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2010/10/01/why-stanford-isn...

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

#678

Post by acchow » Sun, May 06, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

ironjunkie wrote: post #567

acchow wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely. Born and raised in Toronto. Canadians are nice and the diversity is great. But San Francisco was a breath of fresh air I didn't even know I needed until I came here. Toronto feels so rigid in comparison. I don't want to ever leave California.

stay there for long enough and you will start to see the cons also. There is a lot of pros for moving fast and getting things done, jobwise. Weather also is amazing. Now for personal life, the older you become, the more I realize that this place (the bay area) is really not the best quality of life you can get. People all think the same way, diversity is only visual, and there is not that much diversity of thought. E…

I'm not really in the tech bubble tho. I work in tech but it's just a job. Most of my friends are not in tech and most of them have never met anyone else working in tech other than myself.

The tech industry only makes up a small percentage of the bay area population.

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

#679

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 06, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #488

kingofhdds wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there are some important details missed in your story, because you either don't know them, or don't understand why they are important. My European, but non-EU, friend is a software engineer with certified knowledge of both En, and Fr, clean records, and all that stuff, decided to go to Canada for some not particularly economically rational reasons (like love of northern nature). This year it's going t…

What is the race of your friend?

[deleted]

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

#680

Post by sumedh » Sun, May 06, 2018, 1:29 AM UTC

kingofhdds wrote: post #670

sidrajaram wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, your post is also missing some important details. The Canadian system is very transparent with its scoring. Unless you're from a natively English/French speaking country, you need test scores to validate your proficiency in English/French. Certified doesn't mean much. Also, you need degrees from accredited/verifiable institutions to really rack up points - if your friend is self-taught, it may be no g…

I'm not sure if he's self-taught (most likely not), but as for languages he did exactly exams required by Canadian immigration service. In any case, my point is that it is observably easier for a CS professional to move to California than to Canada. I don't blame anyone/anything, because frankly I have no first-hand knowledge. Probably, the system is transparent but inefficient.

> my point is that it is observably easier for a CS professional to move to California than to Canada

Pretty sure you are missing some key details, you can get a Canadian permanent residency if you the required number of points which are based on your education, language, work experience etc.

For majority of the cases if you have the points you will get the PR visa. Once you get the visa you can move to Canada and look for jobs you cannot do that with the US.