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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable.

The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience.

Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiring threads, it still is lower than market averages)

With that said, I got a chance to talk to some of the developers, and the work-life balance seemed reasonable (although not as good as, say, working at CGI)

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May I ask where you chose to go instead? I don't see much which is exciting in Toronto (bad money, uninteresting tech).

There's a growing number of startups in Toronto, mostly in the Fintech space. Amazon's office here has around 500 devs now too, doing various interesting things (I spent 5 years there).

Apart from the madness that is housing prices, dev wages vs cost of living aren't too bad here. Hopefully that housing bubble pops, and then Toronto will really be attractive to developers.

One can hope :). TBH, absent Amazon Toronto paying unexpectedly well and having great work (or a Toronto real estate collapse), it sounds almost like going to work for Google in Waterloo and somehow making that work sounds like the least bad option in the GTA.

I stayed at the company I was at (Klick Health) for a few more years, but moved to a different department doing more interesting things. Truthfully, I left because even after two very large raises, the salary was still not competitive w/ similar recruiter-advertised positions.

After that, I went to work remotely for a company in Boulder, CO, called Human Design.

Money-wise, the better opportunities I heard about in TO were mostly from a recruiting agency called JobSprings (usually in the 120k range, usually in the queen west area). It's exceedingly rare to find anything above 150k. Tech wise, yes, it's predominantly Angular 1 jobs.

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