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Comment by rgoldade | Hacker News Reader

Canada has some decent ranking schools (UofT,Waterloo,UBC,SFU,etc.) and many Canadians don't want to move to the US (plus the Canadian dollar is worth less lately).

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Yes, but even if Canada has a really big pool of talented developers for its size, the base problem is Canada's population size. According this ranking (http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/universit...) Canada has 4 universities ranking in the TOP 100 for CS. The EU has 30. China has 5, and it's much cheaper.

Those rankings are a joke. Seriously, UBC ahead of Waterloo?

If I look here[1] the 'much cheaper' seems not to be that much. And ofcourse on the comparison part here [2]. I am currently around close to Shanghai but I live in Europe and the prices are quite comparable to north EU/US if I would want the same living standard. In the south (GR/ES/PT) and east of the EU it is cheaper than here and I find it's also cheaper there than in Beijing if I compare living standard again.

[1] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp [2] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp

Well, the cost of living does not matter to the company; the issue for them are the salaries. According this[1], the average salary for a software developer in Shanghai is 150k RMB. That's like 30.5k Canadian dollars. The average salary for a software developer in Vancouver is more than double of that[2].

Changing the topic... I'm not so sure if Southern Europe is cheaper than Shanghai. The two main cities of Spain rank higher in cost of living than Shanghai, according your link. I guess that defining the "cost of living" is a really complicated problem.

[1]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/shanghai-software-enginee... [2]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/vancouver-software-develo...

Yeah I think it is also who you ask. And Glassdoor is also a bit wonky; all companies I speak to here are crying they have to offer 350k-800k RMB otherwise devs (seniors) just go elsewhere. And that's Vancouver salaries.

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