One of them explained it to me this way: the quality of employers, coworkers, and the overall software engineering work you'll do in Canada just doesn't compare to the US. Even if pay/finances were exactly the same, going to the US would still be the better career choice, because that's what everyone with talent and ambition does. The people who stay behind aren't people you want to work with, if you can help it.
This sounds like a generalization in need of evidence. Ultimately, the co-op program at UoW has a long history that includes ranking/matching data for co-op employers and students. It would be interesting to see the trends over time. My intuition is that the top ranked students accept jobs from their co-op employers after graduation but that may have changed.
From my experience, the only place the last statement hasn't been true is Montreal.
There are a lot of engineers over there that could move but won't ever. That's partly why everyone is setting AI shops over there.
I and three other CS/Eng seniors were going through full time job interviews on campus in Canada. We interviewed with the big Canadian software firm at the time and with a large US software company.
Three of us got offers from the Canadian company, four of us got offers from the US company. All of us ended up going to the USA.
Edit: I found the answer in the attached document [1]. About half the class immigrated to Canada. The stats for non-immigrant Canadian might be more interesting.
1) International vs Domestic students (6.2% vs 93.8%)
2) Did you immigrate to Canada? (47.56% yes)
You used the answer for 2).
I think the answer for 1) answers your question better than the answer for 2), which doesn't answer when/why they immigrated to Canada.
Plus you're looking at the profile for the 2020 Software Engineering class. Computer science is a different program in the Math faculty. The two programs may have different international student composition.
Tuition is one of the reasons there are so few international students. International students in UWaterloo SWEng pay almost 4x as much as domestic students (C$61.3K vs C$17.1K) - see https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition.
International CS students pay C$45.5K vs C$9.3K for domestic CS students.
As a result, I think "non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job" is a smaller set of people than you'd think, simply because they're held back by the (Byzantine) immigration system in the US.
Another related factor is that if you go to an American university for undergraduate CS rather than a Canadian one, you get the opportunity to use OPT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training), which gives you up to 36 months to roll for an H-1B visa. Add onto that the fact that there are so many good American CS universities to choose compared to Canadian ones, I'd expect most international students to study in the US versus at Waterloo if their goal was to work in California.
I mean just looking at the aerospace sector and the CSeries saga, Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.
Canadian politicians even pitched Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. I mean I'm all for it, my comp being stock-based I'm pocketing the difference.
Is that something the Canadian public... approves of?
[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
If you try to recommend people pay more to get better engineers and stop them all going to the US so they can build bigger and stronger companies here you just get dead eyes back - they can't comprehend why you'd give an engineer money.
At some point you need to look after yourself and go elsewhere.
If the government fight hard, then lose, the opposing party will blame them for that and most likely make them win the next election. If they just do a marketing campaign telling they did the best possible, winning the next election is more probable.
And Trudeau has nothing to do with that, conservative or liberal, it will be the same strategy.
In order to make Canada more competitive, I think it should be addressed on the provincial level. We definitely need more startup to change the culture and have a place to keep the best talents. High risk funds, change in laws (so anybody can freely invest), etc.
How do you compete against the VC-powered economic system in the US? VCs allow startups with often pie-in-the-sky visions and shaky business models to recruit the best of the best from across the world. The recruits know that they may be looking for a new job in a couple of years if the cash dries up. For them, it's OK because there will be another startup flush with cash. For the VCs, as long as 1 out of 10 of those bets go public, the ROI still works out.
This is simply not something that exists at a comparable level outside of the US, outside Silicon Valley even.
The crazy thing is Canada has so many advantages that should make paying higher salaries easier. University is cheaper, so people don't have as much (or any) student debt. Healthcare is cheaper for companies to provide - since they generally only have to offer supplemental coverage. And so on.
We are even starting to have them manage doctors!!
The business climate might just be better in the US.
But the salary is still higher in America. So you can go to America without the student debt, and still get the higher salary. And why not? (You could think of this as arbitrage between two ways of structuring society economically.)
But maybe the thing to do is to go back to Canada when you have kids, so that their university won't load them down with student debt.
1) You will likely pay more in taxes in California than Canada.
2) It's easier to itemize self-employment tax expenses in Canada, so you can easily pay half the taxes of the US. (I paid 12% of total income the last year I worked in Toronto.)
3) Everybody I know in Canada is happy with health care, and infinitely happier than Americans who've received false bills.
4) Startups have a big advantage in Canada because of the state health care, and unrelated lower salary expectations.
However, salaries are lower in Canada because companies pay less (like Europe or anywhere outside the US), but that's not related to taxes or health care.
The biggest stress down here is the healthcare and the immigration status, if you are at a stable enough company these aren't an issue, I'm lucky I only had 1 startup fail and cause me months of stress as I tried to fix those issues.
I can't imagine raising kids in the US. The healthcare, oof. Even having kids, maternal mortality is 4X higher in the US than it is in Canada - among the worst in the OECD, and rising, while the rest of the OECD is falling. [1] Healthcare is just about the worst in the OECD along every major metric, even though it's by far the most expensive. [2]
The capital was just insurrected, is currently a military encampment, the school shootings/drills, the school metal detectors, the homeless, the riots, the lack of community. The general lack of progressivism. My street was looted a few months ago. Every business was walled off in plywood before the election. I mean, America doesn't really have a "left," just a center-right and a far-right, which really doesn't align with my personal politics. I'm not sure how I'd explain any of that to my kids.
I plan to go back in the next year or two - likely to BC, and I'll try to shore up the startup ecosystem there, investing, advising, and raising awareness of principals and practices.
After all, I graduated with no student debt. It's time to give back.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-du...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2017-Ke...
My impression is you deal with that via generous amounts of apathy and snuggly retreating into your technology/wealth bubble as you can see on HN.
[1] https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Trauma_Team_International
and the pay is much, much better.
I am still working remotely, but for a multinational with offices in Canada. I manage to keep my US-like compensation by pointing out that with remote work there is very little frontiers and that the market is now global. This was pre-covid.
I imagine this new reality will drive pay down in the US and up in Canada.
I understand this is not great for Canada but as an American I cannot complain.
Sometimes Waterloo kids take friendly jabs at the other school in the city, Wilfried Laurier. But the image of the two schools couldn't be more different. WLU is the party school that grades on a curve. Waterloo is much harsher academically, and the jokes and memes are usually focused on CS/Math kids having no friends, playing DoTA and waiting for their summer placements in SV.
I would be curious to see the number of students with immigrants parents; maybe they tried to go to the US but couldn't due to stricter policies. Now the kid can.
I believe in part it's because doing so would force us to publicly confront the uncomfortable truth that when it comes to ambition, creativity, and grit, Canadian companies don't employ the A-team. There are exceptions, but they mostly get the B/C players. Some broad generalizations are below, but I've worked in the tech industry for 20 years across multiple US/Canadian cities and in my experience they hold up.
Broadly speaking, you can split Canadian tech worker employers into a few categories:
1) Big, noncompetitive, unambitious, staid large companies making decent money via rent extraction in the Canadian market. Often times "by Canadians, for Canadians". They're minimally innovative and have largely incremental growth prospects, but because they have pricing power over their customers they subsist by turning the screws on customers and tweaking to control costs. They don't grow productivity or produce consumer/market surplus. With a few exceptions, they don't compete abroad (either they do and they're bit players, or they don't but we know they'd get creamed).
2) Small/medium sized Canadian companies. There are some genuinely interesting ones here but honestly, most don't even theoretically have a shot at hitting really big. There are a ton of small/medium sized niches with increasing venture funding, and that's great. But they are just never going to be large or profitable enough to compete with deep-pocketed US employers for the best talent. They'll end up successfully extracting rents from a niche or become the branch office of a US company. If you listen to the Canadian business/tech press we're on the cusp of a major breakout here, but we've been undeservedly pumping this narrative for almost as long as Torontonians have been the only ones in the world pumping the city as "world-class". Is 2021 the year Hootsuite will finally become a unicorn? (spoiler: no).
3) Shopify. They're special (relative to the rest of Canada) because they're a high-growth business in a huge, scalable, global market. Unlike #1 their industry isn't protected, so they actually need to compete on merit and generally do. They're recently profitable, but not that profitable.
4) Canadian satellite offices of US tech companies (some highly profitable, some highly ambitious, and some just there for skilled labour on the cheap). They mostly skim the cream off the top of the local labour markets, paying much better than #1, #2, and usually #3. They also bring skilled talent in from abroad, particularly those with trouble clearing US immigration.
The entrepreneurial A-team generally leaves to start businesses in the US. Canada is too small for them and the environment frankly seems to clip their wings.
The non-entrepreneurial A-team will move to the US to 2-3x their salary and 10x their personal growth (since they're now surrounding themselves with the A-team), which they can do because US immigration is a non-issue for most Canadians in tech thanks to NAFTA. Or they'll stay in Canada and work for either #4 or Shopify, since those are the best jobs. This is really hard to overstate. Anecdotally, from tech people in my social/professional network, with 1 exception the best people are either in the US or work for US companies from Canada.
The B-team works for #2 (who only pays enough to attract the B-team, so it's self-fulfilling) and can still do well for themselves, but it's a very different world. Slower-moving, less excitement, less growth.
The C-team works for #1. They're the ones who work on billing systems at Bell, keep the lights on at BMO, maintain inventory management systems for Metro, or are perhaps involved with government contracting at IBM/Accenture.
#1 are highly politically influential oligopolies. #2 captures a lot of mindshare and (in)direct subsidy ("X is the next Shopify!"). Neither want Canadian tech workers to become more expensive, and they all resent having to compete with #4.
You see this once you look for it. Toronto's Amazon HQ2 bid was run by Ed Clark, former CEO of TD. Part of his pitch was that Toronto software engineers were 30% cheaper than in other markets (if you’re a software engineer who can work for Amazon, 30% is a significant underestimate). Not because of health care. Because of wages. All the while, local tech employers complained about how difficult it would be for them to compete against Amazon for talent. This got a fair bit of press and no one with voice in Canadian public life is willing to fight back. An industry and culture that complains about the presence of competition is not an industry which will stimulate the growth of competitive businesses.
So US companies continue to quietly be the first choice for Canada’s best. Everyone else makes do with what’s left behind.
I'm personally convinced that the only reason that engineer TCs in the United States are so high in comparison to everywhere else is because wage fixing is no longer an issue, thanks to legal action in California in the late 2000s/2010. It's kind of crazy to think how recently it happened. Just in the last ~10 years.
Top-band compensation for ICs went up significantly year-over-year, and it hasn't stopped rising yet. It's also dragged pay for engineers in the rest of the industry upwards. Startups and non-FAANG companies can't directly compete with top band TCs, but they're forced to at least try with higher salaries.
So software engineers tend to work in supporting roles / costs center departments in other industries (finance, manufacturing, logistics) or do non-scalable work such as contracting or small/medium-enterprise front-end/back-end dev.
I replied elsewhere in the thread but this is simply not true based on what I have seen first hand at companies like Google. They have a presence in Canada / UK, but pay at a much lower rate than SV for the same job/level/performance. So profitability or a lack of revenue seems just an excuse.
On the next job switch you can now use that higher salary and get another set of competing offers. Since it's not an option in Canada there's not a lot of upward pressure on compensation.
In my limited experience the top tier employers are very strict with their regional market assessment. When I started to negotiate above that range with a FANG Canada they converted my offer to SF Bay Area. The difference has everything to do with market assessments and nothing to do with cost of living.
This is more true the more specialized you get. What is the pay for hockey coaches in Hawaii versus Toronto?
Toronto: $160 CAD ($125.34 USD) for 45 minutes, which is $2.78 USD/minute https://www.evergreen.ca/whats-on/event/private-learn-to-ska...
Toronto: $9-$15 CAD ($7.05-$11.74 USD) per 15 minutes, which is $0.47-$0.78 USD/minute https://www.uppercanadaskating.com/pages/Programs/privateles....
Hawaii: $25 USD for 20 minutes, which is $1.25 USD/minute https://www.icepalacehawaii.com/private-lessons
Hawaii: Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn't able to find a second site in my 10 minute timebox.
Not trying to snark, was just interested in looking up some skating lessons.
Most Canadian employers are not VC-funded, the pay they can offer has to be in line with general rules of finance: spend less than you make.
Compare that to something like Uber where the company makes 9-figure losses, and yet can afford to pay high six-figure salaries. Someone has to make up the difference, and as is often the case with tech companies, it'll be venture capital firms.
On a personal note: I did QA, test automation, and current am technically Sales Engineering (though I'm finding I dislike it quite a lot). My last raise brought my salary to $52,000 Canadian a year at year 9 of my career. That's about $34,000 USD or so. I'm guessing that's not exactly stellar pay in the US.
Personally I'd seriously consider heading State side too if I could. As is I haven't the foggiest idea if I am qualified, how to find out, or what companies would even consider someone like me.
I recall some clickbait articles about how websites to immigrate to Canada were flooded during election night, and commentators speculating that US academia and tech sector were doomed by the incoming administration.
It would be interesting to see if these predictions held true. Was there a notable change during the last 4 years?
Some people in my year (2016) couldn't leave Canada due to visa issues. Most who left are still in the States. 2018s had a higher % US-bound, and so did the 2020s.
Canada is paying (I presume, not an expert in how Canadian universities are funded) to educate these people, but then they immediately take all their wealth creation out of the country.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be able to do that if they want, but it has long term impacts on the country's wealth, but also its ability to more generally develop, to keep educating itself, and to perform jobs that can't be done by another a company in another country, like some parts of government, defence, healthcare, etc.
It's also just a bad indicator. Why do they need to move? Why can't they get what they want here? If the first thing 84% of your graduates do is get the hell out of your country as fast as they can then you should probably stop and think about what's going wrong that makes them want to do that?
Canada isn't exactly falling apart because Waterloo grads are leaving to work on Doordash's algorithm.
