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Google's expansion plans show why Canada's tech boom is here to stay
- lucidone 7y agoThe cheap labour pool as a consequence of the weak Canadian dollar certainly helps, alongside having identical time zones and nearly identical culture to the United States. Lots of Canadian consultancies butter their bread with USD.
- wenc 7y agoThe pool of technical talent is also pretty great. If you're in a non-primary market in the U.S. (non NYC/SF/Boston), my experience has been that you can hire comparable or better talent in Canadian cities for less the local U.S. median salary, especially in talent-starved markets within the U.S. It's an open secret that many Americans are somehow unaware of.
- jonathankoren 7y agoAlso with easier immigration, Canada’s talent pool will only get better. Already the US is losing people to Canada due to overly restrictive immigration laws. I’ve even heard immigration offices offering to help with Canadian immigration on the radio in the SF Bay https://www.csmonitor.com/EqualEd/2019/0304/Go-north-young-grad.-How-Canada-is-winning-over-international-students https://www.csmonitor.com/EqualEd/2019/0304/Go-north-young-g... https://movnorth.com/ https://movnorth.com/
- GhostVII 7y agoI think Canada is losing far more people to the US than the other way around, at least at the higher end of the market. Canadian salaries just aren't competitive at that level.
- wbl 7y agoWhy not?
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- thinkloop 7y agoThe US is the NBA, the stars definitely do go there. A pretty good life strategy is to work in the states from 30-45 while you're young and healthy, then come back to Canada for peace and safety to raise your family. I've seen a few people do that. I'm not sure it ends up being that bad for Canada. On the one hand they lose stars during their productive years, on the other hand they come back during their spending years with more money/knowledge/sophistication than they would have had.
- mav3rick 7y agoMost of these people don't create jobs when they move back. So yes, it is bad for Canada.
- blululu 7y agoCreate a business != create jobs. A large infusion of outside capital will boost a local economy. They will own homes and buy things from local merchants which will create jobs.
- mav3rick 7y agoThat is still lesser than the impact of entrepreneurs abroad. Ask the Canadian govt what they would prefer and it won't be suburban families. Canada will always be 2nd in technology.
- zozbot234 7y agoYes, Canada's bet on skilled immigration is really smart of them, and it's a neat way of side-stepping the usual social tensions that we hear about wrt. "anti-immigrant" sentiment from socially marginalized or low-income natives.
- ericmay 7y agoWhy does Canada always get a pass on this but the US doesn’t? (This being points-based skilled immigration)
- mynegation 7y agoCanada also runs separate refugee immigration program. Also: the advantage of not having too many illegal immigrants coming through the border and having to make decisions when they and their children put roots in the country.
- addicted 7y agoThe US has so much land and so much economic capacity to add people (most of those people are already in the economic system so the US will have more trouble removing them than legalizing them) that the current illegal immigrants are not an issue at all. The US obviously needs to get better control of the borders (which it has for the past decade) but the only sensible, economically effective and not to mention humane way to deal with people already here is to provide them with legal status so they don’t remain an unprotected and therefore cheaper competitor for jobs.
- chx 7y agoIt's because of things like https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/refugees/help-outside-canada/private-sponsorship-program/groups-five.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... So while there certainly is a skilled worker immigration path, if you are accepted by the board as a refugee, you will be met with help and kindness. And even while waiting, we do not separate kids from you and put them in cages. And we accept the most refugees in the world: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696974 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48696974
- mattkrause 7y agoThe immigration process itself has gotten appreciably worse though. A few years ago, it took me fifteen minutes to renew a Work Permit at the border. Last year, it was an intentionally unpleasant all-day affair. The online system is horrifically backlogged, far beyond the 100 or so days it says on the website.
- thinkingkong 7y agoFor way too long Canada has had this weird artificial market capture problem. The easier it is for us to break down those fake barriers, the better it is for everyone. Salaries are about to go up way more for the average employee. Simultaneously, any companies that were making money on labor price arbitrage are about to have a real tough time; Good riddance.
- thinkloop 7y agoWhich barriers?
- ttul 7y agoIf you get into a senior role at one of the big tech firms, pay matches the valley. For lesser roles, Canada is cheaper, but the gap is closing rapidly as talent runs dry.
- buzzkillington 7y agoSenior roles in SF/NY pay >600k in total comp. I was flat out told there are no such jobs in Canada two years back. Has that changed?
- halflings 7y agoWhat do you mean by "senior roles"? Something like a "Senior Software Engineer"? (or more like a Senior Staff SWE / director) Can guarantee Senior Software Engineers don't make >600K in SF.
- fulafel 7y agoHow would currency factor into the situation?
- sandworm101 7y ago>> nearly identical culture to the United States. Lol. Maybe a similar culture to some parts of California or Washington, and that is a stretch, but Vancouver is very very different than "the United States". Live in both for a while and all the little difference (the guns, health care, government, police, civil-military relations, the environment, land use, education etc) add up to markedly different approaches to life.
- tathougies 7y agoHave you been to Alberta? Vancouver is not representative of canada.
- kyriee 7y agoMaybe its Alberta that's not representative of Canada ;)
- sandworm101 7y agoYes. I have lived/worked in Alberta many years, and am scheduled to go back soon. But i didnt say Canada /= the united states. I said Vancouver /= the United states.
- earth_walker 7y agoIt seems you're insinuating that Alberta is somehow more (U.S.) 'American' than the rest of Canada. I have lived in Alberta for over ten years, and though culturally distinct from the rest of Canada (as is every other province I've spent time in) Alberta's brand of rugged individualist / conservatism is still very Canadian. And though we may look very different to the urbanites of GVRD (Vancouver and surrounding) and the GTA (Toronto and surrounding), you'll find many more similarities between us and those living in rural Canada with resource-based economies, like the people living in B.C.'s forestry-dependent areas, the northern prairies or NorthWest Ontario. The difference for us is that we have very vocal, oil-industry-controlled politicians and a population that is immediately suspicious of any time an easterner tries to tell us what to do. Sometimes the easiest way to see our distinctiveness is by contrast - immediately evident when crossing over to even the closest border states. I love Montana and its people, but boy do you know you're not in Canada anymore - roadways lined with advertisements; cops everywhere you look; huge rich/poor divides; razor wire, visible drug problems and ghettos in even the smallest cities; and a love of all things military. All that to say, there's far more to being Albertan than oil, guns and god, and those three things don't make us a 'murican.
- mgh2 7y agoIt is always cheap labor. Same with Taiwan. Doesn’t say much about the country itself.
- tanilama 7y agoOr Bay Area cost is out-of-reach even for Google
- chrisseaton 7y agoCheap? These Canadian cities? The cost of living is insane and tech hiring competition is already intense. It’s not going to be cheap to hire anyone there.
- jessriedel 7y agoSoftware engineer salaries are significantly lower than in the US. > The median Canadian “Software Engineer” salary is CA$72,000. The median US salary is US$91,000.... The cost of living in Vancouver is about 4.8% higher than Austin. While the median Software Engineer salary in Austin is 40% higher than Vancouver when accounting for the exchange rate. https://medium.com/@sprice/more-canadian-software-engineers-should-work-remotely-c69f52c746d4 https://medium.com/@sprice/more-canadian-software-engineers-...
- ajayyy 7y agoDepends on the city. But yes, that's why so many people leave
- smnrchrds 7y agoAs an aside, I passionately hate that graph. It implies that Canadian tech salaries are abnormally low. I wish it was either showing just the US, or included more countries than just US and Canada. Had they included London, Sydney, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc. in the graph, it would have showed that Canadian salaries are in line with and towards the higher end of world salaries except US, and that US salaries are a huge outlier in the world stage.
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- adventured 7y agoI often see people framing the US & Canada primarily as a competition in tech. The exact opposite is largely the case. The US benefits enormously from having a wealthy, vibrant Canada, including in its tech sector. We're permanent allies, liberal democracies and share a very large border as well as $600 billion in goods trade. The ability for technology, labor, products, services and capital to freely flow back and forth between the two of us makes us both far better off. Canada prospering in tech, rather than taking away from the US, brings more to the US-CA economic zone, including any talented persons they import that the US doesn't. There is more than enough tech riches to go around, the US doesn't need to own everything and shouldn't try to. If anything the US should be directly helping Canada to boom in tech. Enlarge the regional blackhole, suck up all the world's talent. They're our largest export market, the richer they get, the more people they have, the more US exports they are likely to buy (and vice versa). Canada's tech talent will occasionally also go south and start companies in the US. Canadian investors can fund US start-ups from their successes. US investors can back Canadian start-ups and public companies. The more the merrier.
- ajayyy 7y agoMost people in this field are leaving to the US. It's surprising how many. See https://s3.amazonaws.com/chartprod/Lb7EHT9ksyZyjHqo5/thumbnail.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/chartprod/Lb7EHT9ksyZyjHqo5/thumbna.... I am in a Canadian software engineering program right now, and it is a goal of many people here. Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/article-canada-facing-brain-drain-as-young-tech-talent-leaves-for-silicon/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/article-...
- blazespin 7y agoThe best thing that could ever happen to Canada would get rid of that god awful TN-Visa. TN - Talent Nuke. Completely sucks us dry of people moving to the US.
- ma2rten 7y agoI don't think keeping people in your country by making it harder to leave is a good strategy.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoIMHO when education is subsidized by public funds (which it is here), those funds should have to be repaid if you're leaving the country within a certain number of years or before you've paid some amount in income tax. That would improve the talent situation here.
- shdh 7y agoPeople who are talented will still be poached and head down south. Restricting mobility won't stop anything.
- noarchy 7y agoThat would also create more incentives to simply do one's education south of the border, rather than risk being shackled by government efforts to halt one's movement.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoHave fun paying 4-5 times more for the same education then...
- noarchy 7y agoPeople are eyeing the salaries they can get with that education. I can see plenty of people willing to swallow that cost in exchange for not having the government tying an anchor around their legs.
- abtinf 7y agoPart of the reason for this is that the Trump administration has made it very hard for Canadians working for tech companies to visit the US on business. I have friends who used to frequently and freely travel between the two countries for meetings, and now they all have corporate policies forbidding it. As is always the case with protectionist policies, the country imposing them experiences a net loss.
- smnrchrds 7y agoThis is the first time I am hearing about this. Could you please expand on what the policy change is?
- WalterBright 7y ago> As is always the case with protectionist policies, the country imposing them experiences a net loss. Both sides lose equal amounts. It's just that the larger economy notices it less.
- yellowait44 7y agoFirst time I hear about this too and I know lots of people who travel for work and never had problems. Care to elaborate?
- parasubvert 7y agoThis is, as far as I can tell, completely false. Things haven’t changed in any particular way on TN status, L status, or B-2 status.
- cunac 7y agoI would say this is totally false. I am working for Canadian office of US company and travel to the US on average once a month for meetings. Doing that for 10+ years and if anything I noticed I get fewer questions at the US border lately.
- bitL 7y agoMicrosoft and Amazon used to park people that didn't get H1B in Vancouver. Wasn't that the same as what Google is doing now?
- mav3rick 7y agoNo Google has proper engineering in Toronto / Waterloo.
- amscanne 7y agoNot really Toronto (sales and business primarily) but there’s engineering in Montreal also.
- mabbo 7y agoAmazon has over 3500 development staff in Canada, between Vancouver and Toronto. Some major orgs and AWS features are based in these offices. There may be a few people here for visa reasons (I know one or two), but that's now a very small portion.
- juskrey 7y agoAllowing to park people and outsourcing is not a tech boom. Different mindset, different understanding, different risks, limited upside at the end. A country on salary.
- gyulai 7y ago...we've been having these kinds of headlines from local media outlets pretty much everywhere where FAANG have created/expanded presences. -- But it seems to me that these companies are extremely centralized and only decentralize to the extent that it is unavoidable (e.g. distributed data centers for reasons of latency) or that it captures special opportunities (e.g. Apple expanding in Munich right now, but doing only hardware and chip design work in what seems to me like a play to pick up talent from competitors like Infineon) Also: I'd quite like to see what the distribution of carreer-levels is, when comparing Silicon Valley to non-Silicon Valley locations for these companies. I'd be willing to bet that non-Silicon Valley locations have predominantly more junior people, and that certain promotions are harder to get and will come with the necessity to move to the valley.
- qeqeqeqe 7y agoHow is opening 5000 new jobs in Canada a sign that Google is "extremely centralized"? In regards to your Munich example, what exactly is the issue with that? If there's a large amount of talent in some area why wouldn't you want to try and compete for it? Anyway, I have a good feeling that office will grow soon, there's plenty of non-hardware and chip design talent in that area :) You do have to start somewhere though. I will also make an educated guess that Google isn't hiring just junior people, and even if they were, they would grow into more senior roles anyway.
- unicornmama 7y agoThere’s no transparency on what the roles will be. Engineering? Accounting? Datacenter operations? Fly fishing?
- jpz 7y agoI would imagine a lot of this is de-risking the issues surrounding the nativism in US politics. Canada is a good nearshore location. I presume visas for foreigners are considerably less problematic. I'm in Sydney and we see Amazon do a lot of recruitment sessions here.
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- memory_vandal 7y agoExpand expand expand, in small incremental replacements that actually offer no net gain over time...
- torgian 7y agoIt seems to me they’re doing it partially because it’s cheaper in Canada ( compared to the US dollar ) as far as salaries, etc go. Pretty soon, rent is going to be too high for someone making 100k Canadian ( if it isn’t already )
- loufe 7y agoThe dollar is likely a factor, as you mention. But from their list of cities only Toronto has a crisis of home affordability. Montreal is still within sane levels and Waterloo is not too much worse.
- arboghast 7y agoFrom Toronto but live in Montreal. Rents in Montreal are going up but still no where near Toronto level. Cost of living is lower too on many levels. Of course it depends on the area but generally it's reasonable. You can live pretty comfortably on a 75k salary and lots of people in the tech sector make more than this, infosec paying even 6 figures in some places. I recently turned down an offer from Google for a job in Sunnyvale because even though I might have been paid twice as much, I knew the cost of living was much higher and quality of life probably not as good.
- lawnchair_larry 7y agoYou probably want to keep quiet about that.
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- rapind 7y agoI live in the Waterloo region and affordability is questionable. Not terrible for most tech workers, but definitely not great for the "working class". All of Canada is in a serious housing bubble, but definitely worse in Toronto and Vancouver.
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- jariel 7y agoAs a Candian, it seems to me so very pathetically and predictably Canadian to literally herald the surrender of your own industries to foreign takeover. Canada is (often) to tech what Mexico is to cars. Mexican 'assembly' of cars is fine and good, but they don't exactly move up the value chain from there. Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2/3 the wages, unfortunately, this doesn't map to a successful entrepreneurial climate. Now, that's a hard thing to contemplate, as 'nobody' can really compete with SV at their own game, but it's disingenuous in the least to farm out labor and compare that activity with those doing much of the higher-level work, and most importantly: controlling the profits. Maybe the Mexico analogy goes a little bit too far, as there are tech startups and a few decent companies in Toronto, by and large, but they have serious trouble scaling into anything. To be fair, it's not like most US cities are any better. In fact, aside from the weather and lack of charm, Toronto is a 'better all-around city' than most American cities. But there's a serious lack of exceptionalism, and far too many of Toronto's best move on to the US, London, or elsewhere. This kind of 'pathetic nationalism' is why loathe the CBC. It's as though they are utterly unaware of the extent to which they extoll mediocrity. Canadians are well educated, get along pretty well, and the 'average person' in Canada in many ways lives better than the average American, at very least there's a lot less calamity, fraud, there's full healthcare which isn't great but it's mostly good. But - on the issue of talent and exceptionalism, it's a disaster. We are near the bottom of the OECD it talent and R&D expenditures. Canada sends China 'raw materials' and they send us back finished goods: this is the opposite of 'first world/developing world' trading norm. We should not be hailing mediocrity as a victory. It's nice to have jobs, but there is no Valley of the North.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago"Canada produces a lot of decent tech people, who will work for 2/3 the wages," Actually Canada products a lot of decent tech people, most of which go south the US. The ones that stay, or the ones that immigrate here, mostly work for 2/3rd (or less) of the wages. But yes, Canadian economy is mostly "rip and ship"; and that seems to apply to talent education as well.
- graeme 7y agoThis seems shortsighted. Auto assembly workers don’t start car companies. But tech company workers do start companies. If people immigrate to canada instead of the us to work in tech, I would expect there to be more companies founded here eventually. Further, fewer caandians will go to the us if hiring rises. I can only imagine it will have upwards pressure on wages too, which will eventually help create a pool of people with some capital for angel investing.
- joiawjdoia89 7y agoFor any Canadian citizens wanting to work in USA: https://chanian.com/2010/08/01/tutorial-moving-from-canada-to-america-as-a-software-developer/ https://chanian.com/2010/08/01/tutorial-moving-from-canada-t...
- Sytten 7y agoTech salaries in Canada are very low and I really hope this will raise the bar for everybody. Most of the talent (outside of Quebec) migrates south of the border at some point, because it makes no financial sense to stay. Innovation outside of Toronto is low/inexistent and it is hard to get funding. I am always amazed when founders make the national news here when they raise 1-2M$ CAD. At the same time, you have CEOs complaining that the video game industry is poaching dev unfairly (because the salaries are subsidized) instead of raising their own salaries... It really is a sad state. It might be due to the fact that we have a culture of small/medium businesses that are very slow to adopt new technologies and a mentally of what we called in french "born for small bread". At the same time, since nobody is really making a lot of money you also have a more equal society leading to a better quality of life IMO (less crime, more generosity, etc). As a new grad myself, I am in this situation where I get offers of >120k USD if I move to SV with a growth potential (both in technical and financial terms) far better than what I can get here. In Quebec (where I live), I saw most of my peers stay around and accept salaries ranging from 65k CAD to 80k CAD (50k-61k USD). From what I know, an average senior can expect 120-130k CAD in Montreal. The only way to make more is by being a consultant, which is why you see a lot of them around here (for better or worse). I would feel a bit guilty to move to the US right now considering I got basically a free education and I do want to contribute back to society.
- jjohansson 7y agoIn 2019, PDFTron, a Vancouver-based tech company, received a USD $71 million investment from Silversmith Capital Partners (a Tier 1 growth equity firm). Vancouver’s tech scene is exploding, with a number of top tier tech companies being based here (like Clio) and majors setting up dev offices (Shopify, Amazon, Microsoft).
- Sytten 7y agoThat's really good news and we need more of it for sure. But looking at objective total $ invested (and growth), it does not paint the same picture. Those examples are still exceptions rather than the new norm, we just don't have that many (would-be) unicorns/fast-growing companies. Even if we did, I am still unsure the salaries would go up and most companies don't give equity... I am rather pessimistic about this tech boom narrative that the medias try to sell us. What I see is some large firms taking advantage of a low CAD while most tech companies are still at low/zero growth and offer very mediocre salaries. Maybe it's only in Quebec though.
- svrma 7y agoI'm curious about the salaries and potential for career growth for software engineers with 5,10,15 years of experience in Canada. Levels.fyi is handy for the US salaries but not so much for Canada. Fwiw, I am a foreign grad student currently happy with the lifestyle in Canada. But I'm wondering whether I've made the right career move moving to Canada. edit: include career growth
- raydev 7y agoAs an American who's committed to staying in Canada until my kids leave the house, and who's experienced the Canadian hiring market for the last 10 years, I'm both excited and concerned. Excited, because now that I've joined one of these SV companies recently expanding their presence Canada, my yearly TC is now an integer multiple of what I was making at a local small company. But I'm also concerned, because the majority of Canadian companies absolutely cannot compete. At all. My fear is all the biggest talent will get sucked into US-based companies. Super hypocritical of me, I know. Canada needs so many more Shopifys.
- quantified 7y agoGoogle’s expansion means that Google is succeeding, not the scene around them. Their hiring more people doesn’t increase the number of tech-related companies at all. Maybe the number of banh mi shops will grow. It just means that Google likes the lower cost of running some operations up there. The scene around might grow and might not. Wannabe Googlers might come on spec and work for a different employer if Google doesn’t work out. Xooglers will be emerge eventually, but if they’re not making googly money, it’s hard to see them staying to work in tech.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoAlso a USA-ian in Canada, under similar circumstances. Currently remote for a US firm, doing well by local standards. I desperately wish there were more competitive local options, esp. in places that are NOT Toronto or Vancouver. In the US you can go to Austin, Denver, Seattle, the Washington DC area, NYC, SF, even Raleigh-Durham for tech jobs... but in Canada it's just YYZ and YVN.
- geodel 7y agoThe most interesting takeaway for me is that never talk about 'super evilness' of FANG etc when discussion is about salaries. Instead berate companies which have no worldwide ad money pouring in for not matching the otherwise evil companies.