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It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that

It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  Canadian here, and this checks out. I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it. I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians). So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
    - ska 4y ago
      > And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package. Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think. Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        CRA will screw you if you incorporate and only have one client. My employer is using Deel, paying me as sole proprietor, and that's fine. Deel can also act as an EOR and I could be "full time", and that could offer benefits. But it feels like a bit of a veneer overtop over what feels like contracting anyways, and it would mean less $$ in my pocket. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially now that pharmaceuticals in Ontario are free for kids whose parents don't have a plan. Also, it seems that telling my dentist and physiotherapist that I don't have a plan seems to make them behave more responsibly, on the whole. If I end up at some point landing more clients and I end up being more consultant than single-client contractor, then I will incorporate.
        ska 4y ago
        As I understand it, it's not really about the 1 client, so much as about demonstrating you aren't really an employee-employer relationship masquerading as something else. It sounds like that's what you actually are, so in that case you shouldn't be incorporating. If you change contracts often enough it might make more sense. FWIW an EOR/POE is more about the convenience for the employer, not you - they don't have to establish a local business presence, register a bunch of tax accounts, etc. You can end up technically employed by the EOR with access to a decent benefits plan etc., and paid directly by payroll. At least that's how it works in some jurisdictions, as you note. It's different all over, but can make a huge difference in somewhere with crappy medical coverage, or other benefits you want to keep consistent.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    As a Canadian PR I've always thought this would be a good option except that the Canadian government seems determined to make it difficult. When the most practical option is to form a corporate entity with a single employee, and BTW you may have to pay GST + PST on labor depending on if other Canadians use the service, it begins to look really unappetizing. I get that employees as contractor relationships are rife for abuse, but, like so is exempting tech employees from overtime protection (BC and Ontario). It really just shouldn't be this hard to do work for a company that isn't in Canada.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      CRA now frowns heavily on "personal service corporations." There is no tax advantage (in fact there's disadvantages) to incorporating unless you have more than one client. So it ends up being sole proprietorship only, which has far less tax advantages. I mean, as a tax payer and citizen who paid exorbitant personal income taxes for years as an employee of a FAANG, I think this is probably equitable. But as a contractor, now... damn I'd like to be able to take advantage of corporate tax rates like I could 13 years ago when I did this last.
      - dghlsakjg 4y ago
        I’m not even talking about tax advantages, just the amount of regulatory overhead and paperwork and general BS just needed to sell your services
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    > I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive. It's extremely easy to be self employed in Canada with a foreign corporation. You just start getting your money wired through Wise or whatever service and declare it on your income taxes. As you work for a foreign corporation, no need to charge sales tax. That's it, no separate entity or incorporation needed. You can still expense your tools expenses, part of your housing, etc. Sure if you want to incorporate, it becomes more complicated. But you wouldn't be incorporated either if you had a salaried job for a tech company locally.
    - seabrookmx 4y ago
      I'm aware.. as I said I currently contract. But "extremely easy" is relative. It's still more hassle than being a salaried employee. If you make a non-trivial amount of money you'll need to pay your income taxes in installments and set it aside yourself (no deductions after all). You need to pay 100% of your CPP contributions. You're likely getting paid in non Canadian currency so need to get set up with a good forex provider or get ripped off by your bank (I use xe, but there's a few out there). Also your point about not needing to charge sales tax depends on what country your employer is in. In my case it's true I don't need to charge because we have a tax treaty with the USA; for other nations this may not be the case. If no tax treaty is present, you need a GST registration #, charge your employer said GST, hold it yourself and then pay it out just like your income tax. Also the extended health can't be overstated. If you have dental issues, bad eyesight, are on prescription drugs etc. it can make a real difference. Generally I'd recommend contracting to people but I just want to be realistic.. it has it's downsides.
- golergka 4y ago
  Why not hire completely international then?
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    Timezones and IP and labor laws mostly. Having a team completely unavailable during the USA working day is a real pain for collaboration and it's hard to sue people in other countries that "borrow" your source code to make their own version. Also, knowing exactly how to pay (say) a German developer and how taxes work and what the labor laws are is always an issue. Aside: The very best contractors I ever hired were Ukranian. So many absolutely fantastic talents at around $30 an hour. Then Russia invaded (the first time) and annexed Sevastopol and the USA made it illegal to pay them any more.
    - wrzuteczka 4y ago
      Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      > the USA made it illegal to pay them any more. only ones who stayed in Crimea
    - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
      +1 I've only had incredible experiences with Ukrainian devs and designers- I hesitate to say best because I've worked with amazing people all over (I was at two gig economy companies that did custom software dev with freelancers) but Ukraine as a destination often stood out for high quality, low prices, and not needing a ton of supervision/detailed instruction. Shameless plug- a buddy runs a dev shop out there, they have great devs and exceptional designers (and also are doing a fund for Ukrainians impacted by the war). If you're looking for help in that region, they're great people to chat with: https://beetroot.co/ https://beetroot.co/
    - GFischer 4y ago
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  It's what we ended up doing (indirectly through an acquisition). But it didn't end-up costing less in the long run. I'd say about a third of employees ended up coming to the Bay anyways during the first year. Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talented engineer to get one). Therefore, comp has to be priced appropriately. The later can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    I'd say there's three segments TBH. The "SV caliber" developers you identify [honestly, that's kind of offensive, but whatever] who can and do actively consider relocation to the US. The same caliber of developers, but have no interest in ever living in the US, for personal or obligation reasons. The permanent resident non-Canadian citizen category you allude to. Google Waterloo for example is mostly full of the second category. Plenty of high caliber talent who are there and not in Mountain View because that's where they chose to be. Because any of them could relocate / transfer to MTV any time they liked, but prefer not to. In my last few years there, there were dozens of people who I met who had transferred (back) into Canada from SV/Bay Area because they simply couldn't stand living there anymore because of cost of living, politics, family, home sickness, etc. There are other companies that set up shop in Canada merely to siphon the first. They offer an "ok" experience for people who choose to stay, but push hard to get talent to relocate. I get the impression there's lots of this happening in Vancouver in particular. The prominence of the last (recent immigrant / PR) category is really something that has held back the Canadian tech scene in general TBH. It's a product of international recruitment by the Canadian immigration system. There are shops full of people essentially fresh off the boat from the PRC or Eastern Europe. Many of these are highly qualified -- but in the context of our industry as a whole -- underpaid/mistreated. Others are not as competent. And it's all mixed up, and it has messed up the local tech market, compensation ranges, and quality of work produced. Of course all of this is in flux and changing because of the rise of remote work.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Canadian here. Canadians are clearly the best developers out there and yes, unfortunately, you can slide quite a bit down the payscale to afford us. I'm surprised cross boarder hiring hasn't become even more popular with the pandemic and forced work-from-homeness. Canadians mostly speak English (even most Quebecois do!) and are in a compatible timezone with the majority of the developers either in St. Lawrence valley or Vancouver and thus being either EST or PST. Also, while the holidays differ I think the total number of stats is pretty close to the same.
  - uf00lme 4y ago
    I raise you an Australia. Smaller market and different time zone but cheaper and in my experience they make some exceptional workers/engineers.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      I am quite uncertain about the cheaper portion - but the timezones hurt quite a bit and the costs for in-person visits are extremely high. Australia and New Zealand are awesome places (and I'm highly jealous of New Zealand in particular) but a 13+ hr flight to get to the west coast is extremely fatiguing so meetups are highly unlikely - compare that to flying someone down from YVR to SFO and it's a huge price and time difference and SEA and YVR are close enough that the train/bus is usually a very reasonable option.
      - uf00lme 4y ago
        But who doesn't love a trip out to Oz to 'meet the team'! Same thing with lots of US companies in Ireland (whilst mostly for tax reasons initially, Ireland now is stacked with talent) - trip to Ireland to 'meet the team', pre-covid ain't no one going to say no to those off-sites. It is going to be an interesting decade, the rise of working from home and ai creeping into every profession will make for some radical changes. Engineering managers can only hold their accountants overlords back for so long. I do hope SFO stops being the centre of the tech world as it is very inefficient, but that's probably 30-40 years away at the earliest unless all out war is triggered.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Not that simple for startups/small businesses. Dealing with labor law is no joke. I've been unable to hire FTE Canadians due to the legal burden that was going to come with setting up those operations. Larger corps can take advantage while small businesses sometimes can't deal with the paperwork overhead.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.
  - belval 4y ago
    As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      There's a rather simple answer for why you weren't getting paid more.
      - belval 4y ago
        Are you suggesting that I was bad at my job? If so that seems irrelevant as I'd be bad at it on both sides of the border.
ransom1538 4y ago
You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.
- tfehring 4y ago
  There are well over 100k US-based software engineers at the five FAANG companies alone, plus a long tail of other companies that compete with them for talent and offer similar (and in some cases higher) compensation. All of those companies can go over $250k in total comp for the equivalent of Google L4, i.e., one promotion above entry-level.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  Yes it absolutely does lol
- dixie_land 4y ago
  Google level (L3/4/5 etc) * 100k is a very realistic expectation for TC. At L7 or above double that number too. Source: recent offers and friends who recently got offers
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
    - haliskerbas 4y ago
      In a bull market it’s pretty easy to clear the 3xx/4xx in a single year in those levels at competitive companies. I know many folks who have done so.
      - EddySchauHai 4y ago
kragen 4y ago
Anyone can learn to read and write, but Stephen King and J.K. Rowling still make bank.
wickedsickeune 4y ago
I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.
- jshen 4y ago
  There are not more than enough decent developers.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
  - est31 4y ago
    I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
    - 4y ago
jahnu 4y ago
It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.
- washbrain 4y ago
  100k - accounting for pay, benefits, office space, training, hiring, computing equipment, support services (hr, etc)? In the States, those things can exceed the salary cost of the engineer.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
  - guiriduro 4y ago
    > Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports. Should be outsourcing at the programme or project level, not hiring employees to add to US teams, then.
    - justinlloyd 4y ago
      Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
robertlagrant 4y ago
> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer. While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.
jshen 4y ago
The thing people miss, demand for software is infinite, so demand for software developers will increase to match any increase in supply.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Demand for pretty much anything is infinite, if you assume a price of 0. So in reality we almost always end up with a non zero price where supply equals demand.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Agreed. That's why I wrote "pretty much". My go to example is oxygen. There is more than enough of it for everyone, so there is no possibility/need to charge money for it.
      - mym1990 4y ago
        Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service. Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
  - jshen 4y ago
    I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints. My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really. Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year. But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.
pharmakom 4y ago
I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.
philipov 4y ago
Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to write a decent essay. Not everyone can become a professional author.
rileyphone 4y ago
Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.
randomdata 4y ago
Anyone can learn to code. However, few want to and even fewer want to pursue it as a career.
jorblumesea 4y ago
Google's definition of "decent developer" is probably top 5-10% of the industry. At least historically, this has been the case. No one actually believes "anyone can code" when you're at faang level of talent.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.

seabrookmx 4y ago
Canadian here, and this checks out. I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it. I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians). So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
  - ska 4y ago
    > And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package. Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think. Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      CRA will screw you if you incorporate and only have one client. My employer is using Deel, paying me as sole proprietor, and that's fine. Deel can also act as an EOR and I could be "full time", and that could offer benefits. But it feels like a bit of a veneer overtop over what feels like contracting anyways, and it would mean less $$ in my pocket. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially now that pharmaceuticals in Ontario are free for kids whose parents don't have a plan. Also, it seems that telling my dentist and physiotherapist that I don't have a plan seems to make them behave more responsibly, on the whole. If I end up at some point landing more clients and I end up being more consultant than single-client contractor, then I will incorporate.
      - ska 4y ago
        As I understand it, it's not really about the 1 client, so much as about demonstrating you aren't really an employee-employer relationship masquerading as something else. It sounds like that's what you actually are, so in that case you shouldn't be incorporating. If you change contracts often enough it might make more sense. FWIW an EOR/POE is more about the convenience for the employer, not you - they don't have to establish a local business presence, register a bunch of tax accounts, etc. You can end up technically employed by the EOR with access to a decent benefits plan etc., and paid directly by payroll. At least that's how it works in some jurisdictions, as you note. It's different all over, but can make a huge difference in somewhere with crappy medical coverage, or other benefits you want to keep consistent.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  As a Canadian PR I've always thought this would be a good option except that the Canadian government seems determined to make it difficult. When the most practical option is to form a corporate entity with a single employee, and BTW you may have to pay GST + PST on labor depending on if other Canadians use the service, it begins to look really unappetizing. I get that employees as contractor relationships are rife for abuse, but, like so is exempting tech employees from overtime protection (BC and Ontario). It really just shouldn't be this hard to do work for a company that isn't in Canada.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    CRA now frowns heavily on "personal service corporations." There is no tax advantage (in fact there's disadvantages) to incorporating unless you have more than one client. So it ends up being sole proprietorship only, which has far less tax advantages. I mean, as a tax payer and citizen who paid exorbitant personal income taxes for years as an employee of a FAANG, I think this is probably equitable. But as a contractor, now... damn I'd like to be able to take advantage of corporate tax rates like I could 13 years ago when I did this last.
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      I’m not even talking about tax advantages, just the amount of regulatory overhead and paperwork and general BS just needed to sell your services
- jeromegv 4y ago
  > I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive. It's extremely easy to be self employed in Canada with a foreign corporation. You just start getting your money wired through Wise or whatever service and declare it on your income taxes. As you work for a foreign corporation, no need to charge sales tax. That's it, no separate entity or incorporation needed. You can still expense your tools expenses, part of your housing, etc. Sure if you want to incorporate, it becomes more complicated. But you wouldn't be incorporated either if you had a salaried job for a tech company locally.
  - seabrookmx 4y ago
    I'm aware.. as I said I currently contract. But "extremely easy" is relative. It's still more hassle than being a salaried employee. If you make a non-trivial amount of money you'll need to pay your income taxes in installments and set it aside yourself (no deductions after all). You need to pay 100% of your CPP contributions. You're likely getting paid in non Canadian currency so need to get set up with a good forex provider or get ripped off by your bank (I use xe, but there's a few out there). Also your point about not needing to charge sales tax depends on what country your employer is in. In my case it's true I don't need to charge because we have a tax treaty with the USA; for other nations this may not be the case. If no tax treaty is present, you need a GST registration #, charge your employer said GST, hold it yourself and then pay it out just like your income tax. Also the extended health can't be overstated. If you have dental issues, bad eyesight, are on prescription drugs etc. it can make a real difference. Generally I'd recommend contracting to people but I just want to be realistic.. it has it's downsides.
golergka 4y ago
Why not hire completely international then?
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  Timezones and IP and labor laws mostly. Having a team completely unavailable during the USA working day is a real pain for collaboration and it's hard to sue people in other countries that "borrow" your source code to make their own version. Also, knowing exactly how to pay (say) a German developer and how taxes work and what the labor laws are is always an issue. Aside: The very best contractors I ever hired were Ukranian. So many absolutely fantastic talents at around $30 an hour. Then Russia invaded (the first time) and annexed Sevastopol and the USA made it illegal to pay them any more.
  - wrzuteczka 4y ago
    Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    > the USA made it illegal to pay them any more. only ones who stayed in Crimea
  - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    +1 I've only had incredible experiences with Ukrainian devs and designers- I hesitate to say best because I've worked with amazing people all over (I was at two gig economy companies that did custom software dev with freelancers) but Ukraine as a destination often stood out for high quality, low prices, and not needing a ton of supervision/detailed instruction. Shameless plug- a buddy runs a dev shop out there, they have great devs and exceptional designers (and also are doing a fund for Ukrainians impacted by the war). If you're looking for help in that region, they're great people to chat with: https://beetroot.co/ https://beetroot.co/
  - GFischer 4y ago
908B64B197 4y ago
It's what we ended up doing (indirectly through an acquisition). But it didn't end-up costing less in the long run. I'd say about a third of employees ended up coming to the Bay anyways during the first year. Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talented engineer to get one). Therefore, comp has to be priced appropriately. The later can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I'd say there's three segments TBH. The "SV caliber" developers you identify [honestly, that's kind of offensive, but whatever] who can and do actively consider relocation to the US. The same caliber of developers, but have no interest in ever living in the US, for personal or obligation reasons. The permanent resident non-Canadian citizen category you allude to. Google Waterloo for example is mostly full of the second category. Plenty of high caliber talent who are there and not in Mountain View because that's where they chose to be. Because any of them could relocate / transfer to MTV any time they liked, but prefer not to. In my last few years there, there were dozens of people who I met who had transferred (back) into Canada from SV/Bay Area because they simply couldn't stand living there anymore because of cost of living, politics, family, home sickness, etc. There are other companies that set up shop in Canada merely to siphon the first. They offer an "ok" experience for people who choose to stay, but push hard to get talent to relocate. I get the impression there's lots of this happening in Vancouver in particular. The prominence of the last (recent immigrant / PR) category is really something that has held back the Canadian tech scene in general TBH. It's a product of international recruitment by the Canadian immigration system. There are shops full of people essentially fresh off the boat from the PRC or Eastern Europe. Many of these are highly qualified -- but in the context of our industry as a whole -- underpaid/mistreated. Others are not as competent. And it's all mixed up, and it has messed up the local tech market, compensation ranges, and quality of work produced. Of course all of this is in flux and changing because of the rise of remote work.
munk-a 4y ago
Canadian here. Canadians are clearly the best developers out there and yes, unfortunately, you can slide quite a bit down the payscale to afford us. I'm surprised cross boarder hiring hasn't become even more popular with the pandemic and forced work-from-homeness. Canadians mostly speak English (even most Quebecois do!) and are in a compatible timezone with the majority of the developers either in St. Lawrence valley or Vancouver and thus being either EST or PST. Also, while the holidays differ I think the total number of stats is pretty close to the same.
- uf00lme 4y ago
  I raise you an Australia. Smaller market and different time zone but cheaper and in my experience they make some exceptional workers/engineers.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    I am quite uncertain about the cheaper portion - but the timezones hurt quite a bit and the costs for in-person visits are extremely high. Australia and New Zealand are awesome places (and I'm highly jealous of New Zealand in particular) but a 13+ hr flight to get to the west coast is extremely fatiguing so meetups are highly unlikely - compare that to flying someone down from YVR to SFO and it's a huge price and time difference and SEA and YVR are close enough that the train/bus is usually a very reasonable option.
    - uf00lme 4y ago
      But who doesn't love a trip out to Oz to 'meet the team'! Same thing with lots of US companies in Ireland (whilst mostly for tax reasons initially, Ireland now is stacked with talent) - trip to Ireland to 'meet the team', pre-covid ain't no one going to say no to those off-sites. It is going to be an interesting decade, the rise of working from home and ai creeping into every profession will make for some radical changes. Engineering managers can only hold their accountants overlords back for so long. I do hope SFO stops being the centre of the tech world as it is very inefficient, but that's probably 30-40 years away at the earliest unless all out war is triggered.
icelancer 4y ago
Not that simple for startups/small businesses. Dealing with labor law is no joke. I've been unable to hire FTE Canadians due to the legal burden that was going to come with setting up those operations. Larger corps can take advantage while small businesses sometimes can't deal with the paperwork overhead.
thrown_22 4y ago
Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.
- belval 4y ago
  As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    There's a rather simple answer for why you weren't getting paid more.
    - belval 4y ago
      Are you suggesting that I was bad at my job? If so that seems irrelevant as I'd be bad at it on both sides of the border.

ransom1538 4y ago

You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.

tfehring 4y ago
There are well over 100k US-based software engineers at the five FAANG companies alone, plus a long tail of other companies that compete with them for talent and offer similar (and in some cases higher) compensation. All of those companies can go over $250k in total comp for the equivalent of Google L4, i.e., one promotion above entry-level.
wittycardio 4y ago
Yes it absolutely does lol
dixie_land 4y ago
Google level (L3/4/5 etc) * 100k is a very realistic expectation for TC. At L7 or above double that number too. Source: recent offers and friends who recently got offers
- happyopossum 4y ago
  Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
  - haliskerbas 4y ago
    In a bull market it’s pretty easy to clear the 3xx/4xx in a single year in those levels at competitive companies. I know many folks who have done so.
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago

kragen 4y ago

Anyone can learn to read and write, but Stephen King and J.K. Rowling still make bank.

wickedsickeune 4y ago

I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.

jshen 4y ago
There are not more than enough decent developers.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
- est31 4y ago
  I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
  - 4y ago

jahnu 4y ago

It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.

washbrain 4y ago
100k - accounting for pay, benefits, office space, training, hiring, computing equipment, support services (hr, etc)? In the States, those things can exceed the salary cost of the engineer.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
- guiriduro 4y ago
  > Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports. Should be outsourcing at the programme or project level, not hiring employees to add to US teams, then.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

robertlagrant 4y ago

> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer. While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.

jshen 4y ago

The thing people miss, demand for software is infinite, so demand for software developers will increase to match any increase in supply.

BurningFrog 4y ago
Demand for pretty much anything is infinite, if you assume a price of 0. So in reality we almost always end up with a non zero price where supply equals demand.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Agreed. That's why I wrote "pretty much". My go to example is oxygen. There is more than enough of it for everyone, so there is no possibility/need to charge money for it.
    - mym1990 4y ago
      Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service. Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
- jshen 4y ago
  I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints. My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really. Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year. But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.

pharmakom 4y ago

I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.

philipov 4y ago

Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to write a decent essay. Not everyone can become a professional author.

rileyphone 4y ago

Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.

randomdata 4y ago

Anyone can learn to code. However, few want to and even fewer want to pursue it as a career.

jorblumesea 4y ago

Google's definition of "decent developer" is probably top 5-10% of the industry. At least historically, this has been the case. No one actually believes "anyone can code" when you're at faang level of talent.