Canadian tech worker here. Base salary is 120k CAD in Calgary which is far above market rate but I am educated, experienced etc. That is 93k USD.
I am looking to move to the USA because of higher salaries, but I am not 22 years old anymore and moving a family (with 2 earners) is no easy task.
It falls on deaf ears though, 120k CAD is a good income, I can afford a house, cars, no debts etc so there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay.
I do remote work for this reason. Although I did manage to recently find a contractor position that pays competitively here in Canada, I find that very rarely. If you do remote contract work, mostly for US or Swiss companies, you can make 2-3x a top Canadian salary. Just throwing that out there as an alternative to moving to the US.
Based on my own experience of finding remote work for US companies.
I usually get lowballed on the offers because I am based in Canada.
In other words, US companies pay average salaries calculated based on my local salary rates.
In fact I just had a phone interview with a SF startup for a remote position and they were shocked to hear that I was asking for an AVG salary rate in SF instead of Canada.
Yes that happens. I explicitly exclude any US company with a presence in Canada - as that implies an HR department in Canada with Canadian salary guides. I got an offer from IBM that made me laugh. On top of that they wanted to own anything I did on my own time. Stay away from IBM.
Without really planning it or advertising myself much. I don't have a website even. So I'm not the right person to ask. All I can say is just be persistent, don't sell yourself short, and most importantly always do an excellent job that wows your client. Work harder than your peers. I've always worked 6-7 days a week (always working challenging side projects after work), and after 15 years of doing that I'm better than most of my peers - it's like making a slowly compounding investment in yourself.
I haven't enjoyed life as much as my peers perhaps, although I do have a good time and I love what I do. But I'll retire early in my fourties and spend the rest of my life working on whatever I find interesting, traveling, or whatever else catches my fancy.
Not the person you're responding to, but C++ for me. I make a normal Seattle salary while living in Toronto. Which after conversion seems to put me higher than people with 3x my experience in much better paying sectors than I'm in... It's stupid, and it sucks, I wish my company was local, I don't prefer remote. I do much prefer making literally double than I'd make locally though. :/
I hear you, I don't really like remote either. I go to local programming meetups to get some of the socializing I miss out on with colleagues. But at the difference in income, I can't justify doing it any other way.
I do full-stack but focus mostly on backend. I work in any language, platform, or framework the job requires. There aren't that many remote jobs, so being flexible on the technology side helps me get the best. I find Go to be very much in demand right now. C++ is making something of a comeback ever since C++11.
A lot of the tech industry is about burning through investors' money in search of new profitable ideas. I'm guessing there's much less investor money in Canada.
"Burning through investors money in search of profitable ideas" has nothing to do with it. There's this huge misconception on HN about the size of the venture capital market. Start-ups are a miniscule portion of the tech economy by any measure of value.
The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc. The combined market cap of FAANG is fluctuating around $3 trillion right now. That's about 2X the entire GDP of Canada...in just 5 American companies.
No large-ish tech company in Canada is near that level of profitability or size. Combine that with currency fluctuations and with the greater tax/regulatory burden of having a full-time employee in Canada, and you will never have a Canadian company that can afford to pay engineers $250K+ en masse like FAANG can.
> The reason engineers make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc
The reason engineers in the US make so much, is because four to five decades ago US tech companies combined with globalization and scaled out into the entire planet as a market. That premise has remained intact, while the global economy has gotten a lot larger and richer. That's something most other nations have failed to do at a large scale (S.Korea has Samsung but not many other companies that have gone hyper global for example).
Go all the way back to Fairchild, Intel, HP, IBM in the 1950-1980 era. Nobody has done globalized tech like the US, probably only Japan got close (and they've largely missed out on the huge margins in software).
Without the ability to tap into the rest of the planet, Netflix wouldn't be able to pay what it does. The rest of the planet is half their market now, and will be 2/3 or 3/4 of it in the near future.
Europe only has three or four major tech companies that managed to go substantially global (eg SAP, ARM, Spotify, or Booking.com which got swallowed by Priceline). ARM & Booking got taken out, Spotify will be acquired next. The same kind of problem Canada often faces with its tech companies (Shopify is very likely to end up in the belly of a US tech or retail company, especially once their valuation normalizes).
I have a hard time understanding the comparison of aggregate market cap (a valuation) to GDP (an annual output). These seem like two very different quantities, with different units. How do you intend for us to interpret that comparison? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the aggregate revenues of those companies? (I'm not an economist, so I'm not sure those two quantities are comparable either, but they seem closer at least.)
FAANG can only hire so many engineers, the positions tend to be highly competitive, they pull them from all over the world, and the drop-off in compensation at the next level is pretty significant.
Lots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same.
So they just pay what it takes to fill the spot.
Of course they are also incredibly resistant to changing this, preferring to complain about how we need to fix brain drain and/or make immigration easier.
> Lots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same.
So it seems like they're not losing devs at a fast enough pace to warrant increasing dev salaries? Or perhaps there are just enough developers for the Canadian market, to not have to increase compensation to attract better talent?
From what I've seen, American based companies with offices in Canada do seem to pay very well, but Canadian companies are unabashedly poorly compensating. I talked with a few hiring managers at some Canadian startups and what they were offering would be less than what I made right out of college. It left me wondering how talented folks can continue to work for Canadian firms?
You can replace "Canadian" with almost every other country on earth and the question stays the same.
I live in Germany, which has similar wages for software engineers as Canada. And in a 2 hours train ride I can be in Poland, where software engineers earn 1/3 their German counterparts.
Engineer/technical/science-type people tend to have this belief that wanting to reap the value they create makes them "bad people" or at the very least not a "good engineer/scientist/etc."
Apparently, only business and finance people are allowed to want money because they provide a useful service or just because they want money.
I personally believe that in a capitalistic society, it is imperative that everyone tries their best to extract as much of the value that they create. Otherwise we end up with massive inequality.
I left Toronto Canada 25 years ago. Earned more in the first 10 years than I could have earned in my entire life in Toronto, Canada. The USA is the Land of Milk and Honey.
Yeah, it's a knee-jerk response that's been trained into people to help them rationalize staying in Canada. I explain to friends/family/etc.: "I was offered 3x my salary to move to Seattle [from Vancouver]" and every goddamn time I hear "Oh, but I've heard Seattle is very expensive these days, so it probably cancels out!" Yes, Seattle is more expensive than Vancouver! About 25% more. And I make 3x as much money. I put literally 10x as much money into savings every year than I did when I lived in Vancouver.
I think people don't understand how their cost of living can be different then someone else's. Your COL calculation will be very different based on what standard of livings you want to preserve (house vs renting, downtown SF vs commute, sending kids to private school). So the COL delta is different for everyone.
Definitely be aware of the current value/cost of CPP and OAS and the difference typical medical expenditures (both the normal ones things that contribute to out-of-pocket maximums, and catastrophic care risks). Not to discourage you, the pay difference might cover it and then some. Sounds like you know what you're doing, but just in case.
Seattle's housing market is going up really quickly, though. Last time I moved, I definitely noticed higher rents and more expensive purchase prices compared to a few years ago. It's not yet at the level of Vancouver, and far from SF/NY levels, but its trajectory isn't great.
As a Canadian in Vancouver who owns a home, the sad state of Vancouver is even the suburbs are ridiculously expensive.
If I want to sell my downtown townhouse and buy a detached home or upgrade in any way I'm looking at a 1.5 hour commute easily and still not getting much. And once you're outside downtown , entertainment etc rapidly drops off.
Alternatively in the bay area, where I may soon be moving, the suburbs have a strong drop off in cost from the hotspots while still maintaining a reasonable commute and quality of life.
The issue is, Vancouver's infrastructure drops off so dramatically as you get further from downtown.
Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) median is close to 2M - that is only 5x of $400K which a lot of FANG and other engineers pull yearly (and that is the main reason for current SV home prices as, during such low mortgage rates, the market is naturally self-adjusting to 5-6x of prevalent salaries. In 2008 those houses were $700-800K+ - the 5-6x of those $120K-150K salaries back then).
i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though.
The housing prices are rising across the globe - one has to put somewhere all this money sloshing around. So, even to just stabilize the prices, one has to build faster than the money are printed - like Alice in Wonderland where you have to run fast just to stay at the same place.
Basically all that NIMBY vs. YIMBY fights is just 2 poor hobos fighting for a penny and completely distracted with that fight while a nice rich gentleman sells them both to slavery and makes away with the money and all the rest of their possessions.
> i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though.
It definitely won't be one or 2 developments; there has to be a systematic increase in the housing stock. Which is why the latest California plan (which was shot down in committee) to increase the density around mass transit by default was so amazing.
SF is NYC in the making. I know SF folks don't want to change the character of the city but something has to give; its attracting way too many people and we still need affordable housing for middle class folks.
Replacing large swaths on single story single family houses with multiparty rentals does not necessarily involve any high rise buildings. Paris and Barcelona have proven that very high density can be achieved with four to six stories or less.
are you suggesting that Paris is [more] affordable for software engineers? Quick check shows that the prices in Paris are about E10K per square meter - basically SV prices while salaries as far as i know are significantly lower there.
I have only vague idea about Barcelona - quick check shows like it may be on the scale of E5K per square meter (it was $100K per 2-3 bdrm 20 years ago, so 3x-4x today seems reasonable) So you need to have like at least $60K salary - do they have that there?
Again, i'm not against high[er] density. I'm against it being suggested as the panacea for housing affordability crisis - as far as i see it looks like it may even worsen the crisis (at least for some less fortunate people - like relatively affordable low income communities being displaced by upscale new construction like we have happening everywhere in SV).
Please just show where higher density did help to alleviate the affordability crisis. I think even the massively empty apartments in all these massively constructed ghost towers in China aren't falling in prices.
What evidence exactly are you looking for? If you compare two different cities with different housing densities, you're not only changing the housing density but (likely) also the value of the housing (since it increases availability of services and so on). It's not possible to magically adjust one variable while not touching the others.
However, if the prices in silicon valley were, say, 30% lower than they are now due to zoning which allowed more housing, would that constitute as evidence? You could still say that the "prices are high, higher density housing doesn't work!" - even if the higher density housing would've decreased prices by non-trivial amounts.
In any case, it's weird to see people objecting to basic supply and demand when it comes to housing.
The vast majority of engineers in the valley do not get FANG levels of compensation. Non-engineers earn even less. FANG employs a small fraction of all engineers, also. Using their salary as a baseline to analyze affordability introduces a strong bias towards one extreme of the tail. If one wishes to analyze affordability in general starting that bias makes the analysis not fit for purpose.
I agree.
The thing with salaries is that you have a minority that is extremely well paid at FANG companies, and love to brag about it, given a false feeling that everybody is in that range.
A good reminder that nobody brags about being paid 100k in tech,
all the Netflix engineer salaries i know about are larger than $400K. And it may give you nightmares when/if you hear what Netflix offers when it gets into an offer bidding war with a compensation-comparable company :)
To GP questions - there is a lot of info available around about FANG compensation. Wrt. other companies - several guys around have recently landed new jobs - between 250K by a junior guy with 12 years experience and 0.5M by the guy with 20+. Only one went to FANG, a junior with about 10years and he got close to 300K.
This may be true, but again these are outliers - most people here are not cranking down 400K. Netflix hires the best of the best so these people are the top 10% of engineers probably... Not the avg joe
Its not true. Most engineers are in the 150-200K range at the most. It is true that some companies like Netflix do pay much more, but Netflix goes for the best of the best. This is the not the majority of engineers. So realistically if you are talking 80% of engineers, then no, they are not making 400K (so they can easily buy a 2million dollar house in SV) they are making about a 1/3 of that.
The Sunnyvale housing market may be "ground zero" for Apple due to supply, but Apple's "Spaceship" HQ is in Cupertino. Homestead is the border, except for a small chunk just west of Wolfe.
>And ... guess what... Bank uses Base (no bonus, no RSUs) to calculate your mortgage.
you have obviously never taken a mortgage in US. What bank typically uses is 2 last W-2s. In case if you don't know what W-2 is - it includes base + bonus + FMV of the vested RSUs as of the vest date.
My insurance costs me personally about $250 per month covering a family of 6. My employer pays the rest — AND I make 2-3x a Canadian salary excluding stock.
The health argument is completely invalid when it comes to Canadian salary comparisons because the Canadian employer doesn’t have to pay health insurance costs — so they should have more money available for salaries.
Health care is not that expensive for upper middle class earners. We are a family of five and insurance costs us $11k/year in premiums and, worst case, another $16k/year in out of pocket maximum. And you’re also forgetting that stuff costs less in the US. Groceries, gas, etc. are all much cheaper down here.
But the differences in taxes reflect not covering health care. If you include that 20,000 a year spent on health care doesn't feel like a great deal anymore
I am looking to move to the USA because of higher salaries, but I am not 22 years old anymore and moving a family (with 2 earners) is no easy task.
It falls on deaf ears though, 120k CAD is a good income, I can afford a house, cars, no debts etc so there is very little understanding from others how I could not be satisfied with pay.