81–90 of 96 posts
I am still working remotely, but for a multinational with offices in Canada. I manage to keep my US-like compensation by pointing out that with remote work there is very little frontiers and that the market is now global. This was pre-covid.
I imagine this new reality will drive pay down in the US and up in Canada.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the taxes/rent/COL. I know three Canadian SWEs whose parents could have easily bought them a nice house or condo in any major Canadian city, if they had wanted to stay. One of them explained it to me this way: the quality of employers, coworkers, and the overall software engineering work you'll do in Canada just doesn't compare to the US. Even if pay/finances were exactly the same, going to the US would…
I was with you up until the end. There are numerous reasons why people “stay behind” beyond them not being “people you want to work with”, so don’t just lump everyone in that bucket of “they’re not good enough”.
As someone who graduated from Computer Science at Waterloo, this is common for anyone with the ability to do so. Pay is not competitive in Canada, and contrary to the common refrain here, taxes/rent/general CoL does NOT make up for this, not even close.
How many of the CS students are non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job, or perhaps even move to California for weather? Edit: I found the answer in the attached document [1]. About half the class immigrated to Canada. The stats for non-immigrant Canadian might be more interesting. [1] https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf
1) International vs Domestic students (6.2% vs 93.8%)
2) Did you immigrate to Canada? (47.56% yes)
You used the answer for 2).
I think the answer for 1) answers your question better than the answer for 2), which doesn't answer when/why they immigrated to Canada.
Plus you're looking at the profile for the 2020 Software Engineering class. Computer science is a different program in the Math faculty. The two programs may have different international student composition.
Tuition is one of the reasons there are so few international students. International students in UWaterloo SWEng pay almost 4x as much as domestic students (C$61.3K vs C$17.1K) - see https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition.
International CS students pay C$45.5K vs C$9.3K for domestic CS students.
As someone who graduated from Computer Science at Waterloo, this is common for anyone with the ability to do so. Pay is not competitive in Canada, and contrary to the common refrain here, taxes/rent/general CoL does NOT make up for this, not even close.
Why doesn't Canada simply... Compete? I mean just looking at the aerospace sector and the CSeries saga, Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for…
How do you compete against the VC-powered economic system in the US? VCs allow startups with often pie-in-the-sky visions and shaky business models to recruit the best of the best from across the world. The recruits know that they may be looking for a new job in a couple of years if the cash dries up. For them, it's OK because there will be another startup flush with cash. For the VCs, as long as 1 out of 10 of those bets go public, the ROI still works out.
This is simply not something that exists at a comparable level outside of the US, outside Silicon Valley even.
Could it be that a lot of these young, bright folks would just rather live in the US, and getting a valuable degree enabled them to do what they've wanted to do for some time?
Sometimes Waterloo kids take friendly jabs at the other school in the city, Wilfried Laurier. But the image of the two schools couldn't be more different. WLU is the party school that grades on a curve. Waterloo is much harsher academically, and the jokes and memes are usually focused on CS/Math kids having no friends, playing DoTA and waiting for their summer placements in SV.
Why is this notable? Canada and the US are friendly neighbors and quite similar (from the perspective of the privileged types of people getting these jobs) and the US is bigger so you’d expect there to be more jobs there.
Do you know the concept of 'brain drain'? Canada is paying (I presume, not an expert in how Canadian universities are funded) to educate these people, but then they immediately take all their wealth creation out of the country. Nobody's saying they shouldn't be able to do that if they want, but it has long term impacts on the country's wealth, but also its ability to more generally develop, to keep educating itself,…
Canada isn't exactly falling apart because Waterloo grads are leaving to work on Doordash's algorithm.
Why are SWEs paid so much less in Canada vs US?
Most Canadian employers are not VC-funded, the pay they can offer has to be in line with general rules of finance: spend less than you make.
Compare that to something like Uber where the company makes 9-figure losses, and yet can afford to pay high six-figure salaries. Someone has to make up the difference, and as is often the case with tech companies, it'll be venture capital firms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should let the border guards know ;) the last time I got a TN my immigration attorney told me "honestly, you're lucky you're white, so you shouldn't have any problems."
Race doesn't have anything to do with it.
As someone who graduated from Computer Science at Waterloo, this is common for anyone with the ability to do so. Pay is not competitive in Canada, and contrary to the common refrain here, taxes/rent/general CoL does NOT make up for this, not even close.
How many of the CS students are non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job, or perhaps even move to California for weather? Edit: I found the answer in the attached document [1]. About half the class immigrated to Canada. The stats for non-immigrant Canadian might be more interesting. [1] https://uw-se-2020-class-profile.github.io/profile.pdf
As a result, I think "non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job" is a smaller set of people than you'd think, simply because they're held back by the (Byzantine) immigration system in the US.
Another related factor is that if you go to an American university for undergraduate CS rather than a Canadian one, you get the opportunity to use OPT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training), which gives you up to 36 months to roll for an H-1B visa. Add onto that the fact that there are so many good American CS universities to choose compared to Canadian ones, I'd expect most international students to study in the US versus at Waterloo if their goal was to work in California.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why doesn't Canada simply... Compete? I mean just looking at the aerospace sector and the CSeries saga, Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for…
Speaking only w/ regard to tech salary differences: How do you compete against the VC-powered economic system in the US? VCs allow startups with often pie-in-the-sky visions and shaky business models to recruit the best of the best from across the world. The recruits know that they may be looking for a new job in a couple of years if the cash dries up. For them, it's OK because there will be another startup flush wit…