Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF • Hacker News Board

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#81

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

reustle wrote: post #59

vinceguidry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Why was this post flagged? Comments now disabled? I think you're running into the comment-cooldown feature. The reply button doesn't appear until a comment has been live for a couple of minutes. I'm not a big fan of the feature, it leads a lot of people to think they're being messed with by the moderators.

Hmm possibly. The story showed [flagged] on the left of the title, next to the upvote button. I don't think comment cooldown would trigger that?

When you see [flagged] it means that users flagged the story and that there are enough flags to predominate over the upvotes. If [flagged] goes away it means that upvotes regained the upper hand.

But please don't take HN threads even further off-topic by editing your comment to complain about this kind of thing. The way to get an answer, as the guidelines explicitly say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is to email hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#82

Post by mabbo » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

cm3 wrote: post #14

mabbo wrote: post #9

If anyone whose been let go by Joist is reading this: I'm a developer with Amazon in Toronto. There's a lot going on here- 300 developers in 4 or 5 major divisions doing all kinds of interesting stuff. The pay's good (for Toronto), we're well located (beside Union station), and of course we're hiring. My username, but at my company's name, dot-com. Happy to chat by email, but I'll link you to our jobs site: https://w…

Is it different than Amazon Seattle? I mean, is there a reasonable balance between work and life?

Like all of Amazon, depends on the team. Pretty much all engineers at Amazon have on-call rotations which is what most people talk about when they complain about work-life balance here.

On-call can be good or bad, but if you're a manager and your team's on-call is awful then soon all the developers move to other teams (it's pretty easy to transfer around in this company). Upper managers know this fact, and push their managers to improve this. My current team, I have never been paged outside of work hours since I joined 6 months ago.

In terms of working hours, when I first joined I'd let myself work crazy hours and my work-life balance was unhealthy. I soon realized that A: I didn't need to do this to get my job done and B: this was killing me. I work 9-5 now, plus delta (get in at 10, work to 6, get in at 8:30, maybe leave at 4:30). On occasion, I'll put in a crazy night or something to get a big project done but I take the hours back on another day to make up the difference.

If I was in Seattle, I'd be doing the same thing. I'd make a little bit more money and I'd have better beer available.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#83

Post by aardvarkk » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

jgw wrote: post #78

wyager wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.

Re: "owe nothing to it", I respectfully disagree. Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them. Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed. I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a s…

UW Sys Des '07 grad, still in Canada. 100% agree with you.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#84

Post by Apocryphon » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #73

DanHulton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I hear it, it all comes down to financing. Talent's easy to find, sure, but raising money anywhere in Canada vs. SF is no contest. It's still a shitty way to treat people, but I can see why companies still want to be in the valley. I just wish we could attract more investors to Toronto. There are a lot of super-psyched tech and design folk in this city.

It's not quite that simple - for example Canada has a number of advantages and good programs for early stage startups. What is true is there isn't much access to SV style VC funds, so if your model is dependent on that, you have a problem. Other sources can be pretty good though.

What all of these tech hubs need is to popularize their own style of growth that can contrast favorably with SV's '80s Wall Street-esque brand of maniac growth chasing. Once a city figures out how to do that, then the "must be in SV" meme will weaken.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#85

Post by zongitsrinzler » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

They might have access to more "top talent", but there will be 10x more companies after each of those 30 remaining employees as well who I'm sure will leave this caring company as soon as they get green cards.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#86

Post by kedean » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

jgw wrote: post #78

wyager wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.

Re: "owe nothing to it", I respectfully disagree. Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them. Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed. I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a s…

If you require students to spend X years working in Y, then it's not a subsidy anymore, it sounds a lot more like a scholarship. What you're suggesting would have to somehow be structured to let students choose not to accept the agreement, and at that point its not "for everyone" anymore.

This sort of agreement definitely does exist, though. My sister in law went to med school under one requiring her to work a number of years in rural parts of the state after residency.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#87

Post by hga » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:30 PM UTC

mhurron wrote: post #32

raverbashing wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kathan told BetaKit that the “incredible difficulty” of acquiring senior-level talent in Toronto No, it isn't But they're probably looking for "the perfect candidate" and the one that thinks and does things exactly as they expect They won't find it in SF as well

> They won't find it in SF as well The person they want already exists in SF, because their perfect candidate hits the bullet point 'exists in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.' As long as everyone continues to believe California is some sort of special, magical place, this will happen. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Everyone goes to California to work at the 'best' places, the 'best' places go to California t…

As long as everyone continues to believe California is some sort of special, magical place

It is when it comes to the enforcement of non-competes. True for the US in general, and a few minutes with Google makes it look like they're not well favored by Canadian courts, which prefer non-solicitation provisions, but non-competes still can be enforceable, and I can speak from harsh experience outside of California that they have a chilling effect without you ever stepping into a courtroom. Killed two neat pieces of/concepts of technology as well.

Non-solicitation can also get nasty, when it includes your former co-workers, and I've gotten the impression that they're also not very enforceable in California, I recall a court case where a salesman was able to take a customer list, which is considered to be a gold standard of enforceability in e.g. Virginia.

Massachusetts has finally started to realize this is crippling them, but the last time I checked wasn't able to muster the political will to make the change. Other locations that say they want to be the next Silicon Valley ... nope, they're not willing to give this up at all.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#88

Post by grandalf » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

udba wrote: post #30

As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV. There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better. If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same. Howev…

In spite of the language, cultural and historic similarities between the two nations, the US and Canada do not enjoy free economic relations across borders.

This is the fault of both nations. The frictions are imposed by elected officials that limit the freedom of people to cross the border to work, dictate how taxes are paid, etc.

This also applies to investors, as investors must deal with the regulatory regime in the company's location.

I'd say things like this reflect a big failure of both the US and Canadian governments to make the borders transparent for business. All the moving expenses, severance packages, wasted training, visa fees, etc. etc. is all a total economic loss.

The people who suffer are those on the margin who get laid off or who can't afford lawyers to do immigration paperwork, or who don't quite meet the standards that bureaucrats outlined for a work visa.

Economic freedom is just as important, just as relevant to people's lives and futures as the other freedoms we value.

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#89

Post by kevindeasis » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #71

kevindeasis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how does the process of job hunting work in the Ontario area if they get a job in SV? Does the SV company offer a visa permit or does the student apply for work permit in advance?

In almost all cases a work permit must be tied to a job offer, so it's not possible to apply for a work permit in advance. You interview, you get the offer, and the lawyers at the company apply for the visa for you. There are some exception cases where an open-ended visa is possible, but this is uncommon - but if you're famous in the industry you may qualify.

Thank you, Jerry that was very helpful!

Re: Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF

#90

Post by lordnacho » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

Why don't they just open a US office and get their "senior talent" there, if it's that easy to hire them in SV? And if it is easier, why would they cost more in SV? Maybe because there's competition?

Also, it's a bit of a cliche that you need the best people to be successful. Organisation is far more important. That other cliche that the team is more than the sum of its parts is far more true.

I moved abroad with a very small team a few years ago. It totally broke the culture. People went on intellectual holiday, and haven't recovered. We also became insanely insular, not getting any real inputs from other financial industry insiders.