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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Canada needs to focus on retaining the tech capacity that it has.

https://financialpost.com/news/economy/virtual-brain-drain-p...

I hate to bang on about it, but as a Canadian who has worked in the U.S. and who is now in the U.K., I've tried hard to land a good position in Canada. Very few opportunities seem to exist, and the ones that do pay a pittance. In my experience, it is not 30% higher in the U.S. as the link indicates, but more like 100-200%. A couple of years ago, I was offered a highly technical position with a salary below what I had been paid 15 years prior. It was not really even going to cover the basic cost of living for my family.

All I can say is, if you own a company in Canada, you need to work on interesting problems and pay well. Then, you will have your pick of top quality talent. If you are having trouble getting staff, you probably need to about double your salaries.

(might not add much) But this has been my experience as well. People like to point out that CAD has better social support than US - fine, a paycut may balance out there. But that's nowwhere near the differential I get here in the UK _plus_ the social support here has been far superior to CAD.

I interview with CAD companies from time to time and make a point of stating salary/equity requirements on par with the leading global market. Once they match, I'll be back.

Lower pay, higher taxes, exorbitant rents, less choice, less excellence - what's there not to like?

Seconded. Unless someone has family or is stuck up here for some reason, it's not worth it.

Nobody is serious about being competitive, it's all about trying to keep trudging along with whatever people are stuck here. All the talk about investing in tech and so on is just hot air.

I've been told C$120-150k is the salary top end quite a few times. Base salaries don't seem to go much higher. Meanwhile I'm trying to find alternatives to contracting for the US

USA-ian in Canada. Same experience here.

120k is about as high as I've seen, unless you're an oil exec or a hockey player.

By comparison my middle-of-the-road IT guy salary was 140k USD (like 180k CAD), and the high-end coder pay has no comparison (save for those exec or hockey types).

Meanwhile as a Canadian you probably speak N. American English, and have a strongly similar cultural background to the US -- easy to integrate -- have access to good, cheap University education, and have access to the NAFTA TN visa, which gets you across the border quickly. Is it really a surprise?

For anecdata sake: Recently been interviewing in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, 6yoe fullstack dev. Highest I saw was 120k, lowest 85k.

The worst part is how little stock companies are willing to give out. I had one company offer 6k over 4 years, which really puzzled me. Had another company try to sell me on how amazing their 30k/4 years package was (on a lower salary).

Even that level is extremely rare and generally only offered by the US-based giants.

Yeah Canadian salaries are a joke compared to their American counterparts. Their tech companies need to offer much more competitive salaries if they want a remote chance of preventing further brain drain of their talent to the US.

Why are salaries so low in Canada? The difference for most technical and engineering jobs is huge.

It would make sense if the cost of living were lower but it isn’t. Rents and home prices are very high. Tech jobs in lower cost of living places in the US like Kentucky or Michigan often pay much higher than Canadian tech jobs.

They're low in Europe too. The first thing I can think of is that American tech companies are generally much bigger than their Canadian and European counterparts, and therefore have much larger resources financially to pay competitive salaries.

On top of that, the American tech industry has a huge number of both existing companies and new startups entering the picture due to the entrepreneurial culture and VC funding infrastructure.

As a result, the job market in the US is more competitive for talent, whereas Canadian applicants have fewer companies to choose from if they don't want to leave the country, and therefore less leverage for salary.

* Canada only has 38 million people; California alone has 40 mil. It's a large country in terms of space, but not in terms of people. That limits how many domestic customers you can get, and internationally you're fighting with US / EU / Asian firms that can marshal a lot of resources.

* Hard emphasis and lobbying by oil and resource extraction groups to continue the focus on resource extraction -- aka "the resource curse" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

* Higher taxes. Why pay you 150k when the gum'mnt (fed + provincial) is just gonna take 57%? Might as well just pay you 90k and then throw bennies or a company car. Also means that the money that the consumer would spend is now going to government use.

Yet cost of living in the major cities is so high!

LOL I interviewed for Delvinia, and their offer was tremendously under market. Good riddance.

No wonder Asking Canadians surveys were such a pain when I did them.

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