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

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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also not do anything risky at all and not worry about losing your housing. It's very comfortable to let life carry you around when you know that nothing bad can happen to you. Pessimism aside, there's not much education about the whole concept of being an entrepreneur. Most people wouldn't even know where to start. Everyone is being pushed to either college or a trade school right after high school. Not once…

What is different in Canada that prevents you from losing housing? What happens if you can't pay rent?

Once you get into the social housing program, your housing cost is 25% of your income. If your income is 0, you receive a monthly check instead and the social housing is deducted from it. Varies by province.

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

#702
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that a chart like that doesn't even hint at how much of that "real estate" activity is a direct result of the needs of "conservative" industries. It certainly stands to reason that something like resource extraction is not just land-intensive but is intensive in changes to land ownership/tenancy. I'm pretty confident that someone who, according to that chart, is in the "real estate" industry who works sel…

I'm pretty confident that residential real-estate activity (people selling houses to each other) in major urban centres (eg: YVR, GTA) eclipses that of mining towns.

That may well be true, but it's just not detailed in those charts.

A very brief search resulted in this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/607742/gdp-of-manitoba-c...

If that's accurate, it suggests that Manitoba, which, though known as more agricultural and manufacturing rather than mining, has the same pattern of "real estate" accounting for individual income. Of course, the significant majority of the population is in Winnipeg, but I don't think that qualifies it as a major, on the same scale as Vancouver or Toronto.

Again, I think that even real estate "industry" workers in Winnipeg know their money really comes from manufacturing, just as the ones in Edmonton know their money really comes from oil.

Maybe in the major cities you mention it's not so obvious, but "real estate" still fails to eclipse the sum of all the industries that actually produce something (manufacturing, resource extraction, construction).

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

#703
post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Qc too, in Québec city. May I ask what language do you guys use ? Thanks.

My job right out of school was mostly C++. Nowadays it's a mix of C++ and web stuff.

ok ok thanks, I'm learning c++ , and later I want to get into BI. :)

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

#704
post #169
post #149

I'm surprised at the lack of answers that suggest a positive opinion about working in Canada. I personally love the health care and other social benefits, the winters, the multi-cultural city (Toronto), the people, and the lack of gun ownership, among many other things. SV strikes me as a monoculture. I don't want to live at my workplace. The opportunities are fewer but there's also higher demand. My workplace has be…

Competitive to what? Toronto salaries or SV salaries?

From the posts on here, both

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

#705
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no further interest in taking this conversation forward. I immigrated to Canada on Express Entry in which I got points based on my skills and that too within 3 months. I feel for my colleagues in Quebec whose applications are on hold in Quebec with no explanation from MIDI for the past one year. If you start asking cites for all these from official source which is MIDI, I can't give you because MIDI don't have…

I would appreciate the previous poster replying, as I believe his points will prove enlightening to this thread.

If you meant me, I'll give a high-level reply now since the thread has mostly died down but you were still interested. If you want me to dig into the nitty-gritty nuances I was disagreeing with, and provide cites, I still can, but that feels less useful than it would have been on Friday or Saturday.

First, I actually agree with the other poster that the processing times for Quebec are too long and too slow. I didn't get any special priority as a US citizen, despite what he may have thought - it took me almost the same 32 months he found to get Quebec's approval and around the same 15 months for Canada's. This should get fixed.

However, the same was true for the federal system until 2015's switch to Express Entry. It was heavily slow and heavily backlogged. Quebec's similar switch is happening... this year. Quebec's block on most new regular skilled worker applications is to allow that. I say "most" since several types of applications are still allowed, especially from students and workers currently here temporarily.

Once that switch happens, I hope the Quebec and federal governments can work together to minimize processing time. The federal government will have to dedicate more resources if they want to reduce the 15 month part of the process - that's purely in their hands and not up to Quebec. They do the same admissibility checks much faster for federal Express Entry applicants.

Quebec's system generally lags behind the federal one. Right now, that's bad due to the slow processing times. It was however good during the time when Harper was restricting access to the older federal skilled worker system, since Quebec's was then more open. I think overall it's good to have these two different systems with different politicians making changes on different time scales, since it provides more ways into the country.

The main other important point: Quebec's system is only first-come-first-serve to decide whose applications to consider and when. The actual decision, once they've decided to consider you, is already points-based with the types of merit systems desired by the other poster. The Publications Quebec website has their legally binding regulations with the full points system, and the Immigration Quebec website has (in French) their internal administrative procedures guide which is far from a black box. Similarly, the federal government's Express Entry system is only used to decide who can apply when - a different system is used to make the actual decision on the merits, and their skilled worker program has a very similar points system to Quebec's (with different weightings).

The slowness of the current system, while it's very worth fixing, doesn't have quite the same impact as it does in the US because the options while waiting are better. Quebec graduates have the same access to post-graduate open work permits as other graduates in Canada, as do their spouses. As one pursues the permanent residence paperwork, there are ways to get work permits, temporary stay permits, and so forth without the same kind of crappy restrictions and lotteries that the US imposes on H-1B applicants and their families. The bureaucracy gets looser once you get Quebec's approval but is overall much more manageable.

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

#706
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alumni Affairs conducts surveys of their members all the time. The researchers could have approached them, had alumni affairs send out a survey to particular students and received a much better representation of the student population.

You said why not 'get a contact list', not 'ask them to contact people for you'.

That's called "splitting hairs".

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

#707
post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident that residential real-estate activity (people selling houses to each other) in major urban centres (eg: YVR, GTA) eclipses that of mining towns.

That may well be true, but it's just not detailed in those charts. A very brief search resulted in this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/607742/gdp-of-manitoba-c... If that's accurate, it suggests that Manitoba, which, though known as more agricultural and manufacturing rather than mining, has the same pattern of "real estate" accounting for individual income. Of course, the significant majority of the population…

AMA about Manitoba: I was born there.

If resisdential RE tanks in Canada, a real possibility with rising interests rate and extreme debt levels, the economy goes down with it.

Mining / Oil & Gas isn’t going to save it.

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

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> able to fetch over $500,00 USD By far this not the case. Most will be around 1/3rd that (according to the salary reports i've read) .

As someone who works/hires in the field, the salary reports are all wrong. I have not seen a single one yet that was close to accurate. In software a 90th percentile engineer can easily make 2-3x what a 50th percentile engineer makes. (And it can get even crazier as you move higher up the tail.) This is not true in virtually any other industry, which seems to cause problems for the salary reports.

Ok, thats all good. But is HN giving advice for the 90ths percentile or the 50th?

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

#709
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's VTA. Not really used by professionals.

But why isn’t it used by professionals? It seemed clean enough, punctual and conveniently located as well as being reasonably priced. Is there an alternative (besides owning a car) that I’m missing for travelling around the conurbation of Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose et al.

There isn't an issue with VTA itself (aside from maybe the expectation that it companies would move their offices to locations accessed by VTA rather than vice versa).

The South Bay is just really suburban and car-friendly, and the VTA was a failure as a result because most people in the South Bay are happy travelling by car don't need to use the VTA. In contrast, Caltrain is used to travel to SF, which isn't car friendly, so a lot more professionals use it.

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

#710
post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Canadian (Vancouver / Victoria), spend a lot of time in SF. This has also been my experience but I'm wondering if its just a big city thing in CAD.

I’m a New Yorker, grew up there and now living in SF. Brooklyn was cool, but it didn’t “get” the kind of experimental intellectualism that’s needed in a tech startup scene. Not ripping on my old hometown. They have the intellectualism but haven’t applied it to tech. If I were to go back to New York, I wouldn’t go into tech, I’d go into finance because that’s where the nerds would be. If I may, when I visited Vancouve…

Which coffee shops in Manhattan?
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