1,438 karma · joined September 8, 2010
Chinook Therapeutics
Element AI
Repare Therapeutics
Enerkem
DalCor Pharmaceuticals
Verafin
Fusion Pharmaceuticals
Stormfiser Biogas
Hootsuite
North
Chinook Therapeutics merged with Aduro Biotech and is now headquartered in Seattle. It's publicly traded as KDNY and is worth ~831M CAD.
Hootsuite is kind of stagnant. It has been on and off being close to being worth $1B since 2014, hardly a growth story.
Verafin was purchased by NASDAQ for $2.75B. A good exit, though it took nearly 20 years to get there and now it's just another Canadian office of a US tech company.
I don't know enough about the cleantech/pharmaceutical angle, but if this list is the best we can come up with, it's far from cause for the software industry to celebrate. My feeling on articles like the one you posted is they're mostly superficial cheerleading.
From https://medium.com/@lawrencekhov/narwhals-and-unicorns-where...:
Despite investing the second most into venture capital amongst all OECD countries, Canada is producing the least amount of unicorns. Not only that, of the unicorns it produces, valuation are also the lowest amongst the group (to be fair, the sample size is tiny. Plus, Canada’s unicorns are generally really new compared to that of other countries, which may have opted to stay private for a variety of reasons). For an ecosystem that is by most metrics, really well funded and really strong, the number of narwhals and unicorns that it produces is disappointing. In terms of creating billion dollars startups, Canada is ruthlessly inefficient compared to the likes of Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.Health insurance working for a decent US tech company generally requires some out of pocket, but the amounts are really quite modest. Premiums are typically mostly paid by the employer and not considered part of your compensation. If you're single you'll probably pay nothing for insurance premiums and potentially up to a few thousand out of pocket if you're a heavy user of health care, and maybe $5k in the absolute worst case (and the out of pocket is often tax free). If you've got a family, you might pay a couple thousand per year in premiums and $10k in out of pocket maximum. These numbers are honestly chump change for people who are earning $50k-250k more, with better career prospects and more high paying employers to choose from if a particular job doesn't work out.
Rent is certainly higher in the Bay Area, though less higher now vs. a year ago, and even so, at the income levels we're talking here (especially if going to FAANG or a unicorn), there is very little chance you'll end up with less disposable income after rent and health care.
If you want to buy a property, you have your work cut out for you since real estate is insanely expensive, though. It's not too hard if you're a dual-income high earner couple but very hard otherwise and will take a number of years of savings. This is worse than the Vancouver/Toronto housing markets, but it's less worse than you think given how crazy they are now.
Of the 3 major Canadian cities, only Montreal could be considered affordable to software engineer. Vancouver/Toronto are extremely expensive vs. local pay. Unless you want to sign yourself up for a punishing daily commute or bought your house a long time ago, it's hard to describe the standard of living as "very comfortable" other than compared to lower earners in the local market.
Tellingly, when you look at the data more than 100% of Toronto's population growth comes from international migration. Which makes sense, it's a very welcoming place. But without immigration, the city would have shrunk by 50k people last year (~1.5% of population).
I would not laud the city for "making some real changes" as much as I would criticize the mayor for being a stale, retrograde leader who is clearly in the business of delivering the barest possible minimum solution only after made to look like a fool.
Wake me up when he applies any pressure whatsoever to Toronto Police over their alarming lack of traffic enforcement and takes less than a year to support like the Bloor bike lane.
Even Amazon employees do pretty well, getting 2 weeks paid time off + 1 week of "personal days" (de facto vacation days) in year 1, then that goes up to 3 weeks PTO + 1 week of personal days starting year 2 IIRC.
This is a big deal (in a good way, IMO). Companies have a very real disincentive to go public with a shareholder-rights-unfriendly listing now, since a large portion of the passive investment universe will be prohibited from ever buying.
I see this as a case where everybody wins: the default option ends up being friendly to shareholder rights, but if you really want to and are in an advantageous position you still have the option to list go public with non-voting/less-voting shares if you want to gamble.
Re: your other points.
Health care is likely on par or better in the US for engineers working at Amazon/Google/Facebook (granted, you're SOL if you lose your job, so this has value; in the USA you're entitled to buying your last job's insurance for a period of time after leaving and getting the same coverage, which is probably enough to tide you over in a hot labor market like we see now, but this may not always be the case).
Commute time varies. A software engineer in Toronto can afford to rent somewhere with a good commute, and rent is reasonable for how good of a city Toronto is (the new rent control rules seems likely to privilege current renters by having future renters subsidize artificially below market rent, so it's very possible Toronto rent will climb significantly in the future).
But even if you're paying double the rent in SF (or similar rent in Seattle), the pay still puts you ahead. If you want to buy in Toronto on a software engineer's salary somewhere with a good commute, you're already priced out unless you're looking at condos (you're on the verge of being priced out in SF too, it's Seattle which is the standout here). Hopefully that'll change with years of continued wage growth and a decline in the value of Toronto property.
That doesn't negate your very valid points re: work/life balance, inclusion, and culture (though I think the American west coast is closer to Canada than you give credit). But IMO, if you're able/willing to get one of those sorts of jobs in the US, you have more/better options than in Canada.
So then it comes down to what sort of financial/lifestyle sacrifices you're willing to make to be in Toronto and what sort of familial/cultural gains you get in the process. It's completely valid to prioritize that over money, but arguing the pay is close after factoring in cost of living is disingenuous and problematic. I hear a lot of Canadian tech employers (and, amazingly, employees) use this reasoning to justify lower salaries.
The biggest problem there is you have to be OK living in a place like Waterloo, which is great if you like suburbs and want lots of space, not so great of you're into city living.
Big tech company jobs in Seattle are extremely common, and a big tech company job in Seattle will pay you much more than $126k/year USD when you include stock/cash bonus.
Especially a few years into your career. If you're willing/able to be a dev at a big tech company, $200k-$300k/year is absolutely normal 10 years into your career (often much sooner). If you're great, $300k-$400k is completely possible.
It's extraordinarily unaffordable in the Bay Area and none of my friends there (at Google, Facebook, or elsewhere) would say it's easy, but I don't think $400k is the right number to pick even if you're conservative about affordability.
Google has been hiring extremely heavily over the last 4-5 years, and their HQ gets tons of early 20s fresh university hires. So I'd expect that $160k number (which I see as $166k?) to be skewed down a bit. Anyway, fresh early 20s university hires aren't likely to have the savings, stability of personal situation, or desire to buy property.
You're probably looking at more established engineers as buyers, and they'll have been able to save longer and advance in their careers, and $160k + the standard 20% down payment is probably on the low side for that.
Glassdoor's numbers don't change much when you bump up the experience, and I'm afraid I don't have sources other than my fairly extensive social network at large Bay Area tech companies, but I can pretty confidently say 3-6 years out of school that yearly total comp number will be $200k+ and if you're saving properly without 6 figures of debt you'll have upper 5/lower 6 figures saved to put down on a place.
$700k is still a stretch, so I think your point still stands, but I don't think you need to be a dual-income Google/Facebook/etc. software engineer household to afford it.
This isn't actually what happened in Toronto, to be clear. There was a huge housing boom (especially condos) in Toronto in the late 80s, followed by a bust. >100% gain in real housing prices between 1985-1989, then a 40% drop between 1989-1996. What you saw was a housing collapse which took until the 2000s to recover, not a flatlining.
I can imagine a cable operator centric replication model for Go, where HBO doesn't handle customer delivery at all. Instead their library would be replicated from HBO to {Comcast, Cox, TimeWarner, ...}. Each HBO Go customer ID would be assigned a "master cable operator" responsible for their delivery and managed centrally, but HBO would feed customers links to operator-local content replicas.
In the common case, customers access HBO Go from within the operator's network so transit is free and HBO is totally out of the data path (just catalog/user interaction/etc.). But the service can still easily support remote access by going over the public internet.
The benefit of that model is HBO controls the catalog and most of the user interaction, but doesn't need to build/provision/pay for a CDN which scales with # of total HBO subscribers across the entire world (and guarantee reliable connectivity from their CDN to every customer). They just need to replicate their library across a few tens of cable operators who are able to keep everything local. Plus the entire sales/marketing/billing models are completely different too.
Thinking about it from HBO's perspective it makes a million kinds of sense if you have the majority of your customers paying for you via the broadcast cable subscription model. OTOH, with HBO Now there is no cable operator in the picture so they can't make that optimization and now have to build something which looks more like Netflix.
I'm incredibly envious because I can't imagine affording that kind of real estate on a Toronto developer's salary without making some serious retirement savings/lifestyle sacrifices.
I work in tech (not Amazon) and live in Seattle, and given the reputation I don't think I'd really want to work for them in this city given the other options we have here.
But if they paid top-notch salary and had great work, I'd seriously consider it as an option when moving back to Toronto. The employment options seem quite limited and I have a hard time justifying a move home if I end up working on less interesting technology and make less than half of what I do here. I'm afraid of my only options moving home being a massive pay cut, boring work, a terrible commute, and being priced out of real estate anywhere appealing in the city. :(
RE: IBM, if I recall most/all of their engineering is in Markham, they don't treat their employees particularly well, and the pay is so-so (though maybe market rates given Toronto).