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Comment by cfcf14 | Hacker News Reader

Canadian living in London for about 4 years now - of course people are leaving. The pay is incredibly low in major Canadian cities like Vancouver & Toronto; I was looking at 50-60k/yr there, ~150k in the US, or about 60-70k GPB in London.

Now, London isn't exactly cheap, and my overall buying power here is probably only mildly superior to what it would be in Canada, but I get to live in a great city with all the amenities of a major European hub.

Canada is great and I love many things about it, and I do consider it my proper home, but there's not much to attract me back at this point in my life & career. It's just truly a bad place to be if you're in tech.

I've been encouraging my friends back home to go explore other options like the US or Europe, and so far 3 more people I know have left - and it doesn't take much convincing once they see what's abroad.

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As a Brit living in Vancouver I have the opposite perception, there's things I miss about the UK but all things considered I can't see myself moving back there. I know plenty of other Brits in tech jobs here who feel the same.

I guess it's partly what people value and partly a novelty effect of appreciating differences when you move overseas but I often see that Brits and other immigrants like Vancouver better than the people who grew up here (though there's an obvious selection effect there) and the same seems to be true in reverse for many Canadians who go to live in the UK.

What industries pay better in Canada? What industry is Canada a good place for? At least, better than tech. Or is it just that tech workers have so much opportunity and mobility that there's too much incentive for them to leave their domestic labor markets.

Coming from Western Canada, the oil and gas industry pays pretty well, or at least it did when I last talked to folks. The O&G industry in Canada is on-par with that in the US.

I moved from Canada to London for a few months and I did appreciate the tech culture compared to silicon valley because it's not the #1 industry so you get a lot of balance. However the drinking culture is absurd and unhealthy overall.

London isn’t as we’ll paying for engineers as SV either unless they’re in finance or contracting - how’re you finding the pay gap here vs the US?

It goes without saying that SV pays dramatically more than London, and certainly more than mainland EU (Paris, Frankfurt, etc).

My point is more that as a Canadian you can go pretty much anywhere else and be better paid (even if only a little bit relative to cost of living), and sometimes there are substantial other advantages too, such as proximity to desirable locations, cultural stuff, and so on.

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