Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
1–10 of 177 posts
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#2Canada was already doing this for the games industry, though not at 80%. It worked. Look at all the studios in Montreal. Perhaps it could work again for the startup culture. It's cold enough up there in the winter that going outside is horrible, so why not stay inside and code!
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#3It'll be interesting to see how well this works. Silicon Valley did not pop into existence from nowhere.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#4Canada was already doing this for the games industry, though not at 80%. It worked. Look at all the studios in Montreal. Perhaps it could work again for the startup culture. It's cold enough up there in the winter that going outside is horrible, so why not stay inside and code!
The article is really light on details, but I'm pretty sure it's not describing anything new. It's just SR&ED (lovingly called shred colloquially) and related provincial programs, which have been around for a long time (in their modern form since at least 1994). In fact, it's probably fair to say that almost every tech employee (and many non-tech employees) in Canada has been under an SR&ED grant whether they knew it or not.
There's actually quite a bit of overhead in reporting on how your work qualifies as research, and it's gotten more strict in recent years. Apparently there have been cases in the past of things like restaurants claiming their chefs were doing research and such.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#5Canada was already doing this for the games industry, though not at 80%. It worked. Look at all the studios in Montreal. Perhaps it could work again for the startup culture. It's cold enough up there in the winter that going outside is horrible, so why not stay inside and code!
Actually it's the province of Quebec and it is a tax credit for video game studios. The incentive was put in place around 1998-1999 and it is said to have been paying itself since 2005 or so from the influx of high paying job in the industry.
And winter isn't that bad, we only get -30C for a week or two in January!
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#6The kill or be killed attitude they mention in this article is interesting because I almost immediately noticed the difference when moving from Canada to California. It's a different animal, that's for sure.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#7One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York.
But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not melted. Is that scallion?
How can this article be trusted when their choice of stock photo is so wrong I question if they've ever even had the dish?
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#8So... what's the catch? Sounds too good to be true. Can anyone think why they would do that?
Can I just move there and get the benefit?
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#9One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…
I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York.
Another 2x? 3x? 4x? Why make us guess? It's valuable info that helps inform people's decisions for the future.
Thank you for the datapoints.
Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries
#10One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…
It's especially worth noting that this is true even though these tax credits already exist. The benefit has largely gone to the companies that use them, not so much to their employees.
Of course, it can be argued that there would be fewer jobs for them without it, so that is not to say that there has been no benefit -- it's just kind of hard to quantify. But it has not helped make salaries in Canada more competitive.