If you are a company that NEEDS high growth to be sustainable in the long term (Uber, Google's ML products for example), then SF is your place. Capital to fund your growth flows like the Niagara. If you are a company that is serving other startups, SF is also great for that.
However, if your company is solving an interesting technical/scientific problem or is a niche industry product or if you are not affected by high/low growth or easy capital, then the "value" engineering talent in Toronto/Waterloo is perfect (see: Geoffrey Hinton's NN group at UToronto). Keep grinding, you'll win in the long run.
Joist probably should've made this call earlier on. No idea why they waited this long.
P.S: Most smart advice in Waterloo and Toronto will tell you this exact same thing.
Regardless, I don't believe these moves are rational. If you're the CEO, you're giving up close proximity to a lot of cheap talent, cheaper offices, cheaper cost of living etc. Sure, you can hire new engineers but you're gonna be paying a whole lot more money + 25% for the exchange rate to make them do so. Joist was paying engineers up to 130k CAD in Toronto[1], which ends up being around 100k USD. You're not gonna be attracting the best and brightest talent with 100k USD when Google is around the corner giving them 130k USD + 25k signing bonus and stock options. You're gonna have to pay at least 130k USD (=165k CAD) plus the signing bonuses and equity that are necessary to attract talent in SV. We're still not talking about how much more an office costs in SV, how much more of your employee's salary is going towards comically overpriced housing etc.
Let's dispense with the idea that moving to SV is some sort of rational or genius executive decision: does it really make sense to fire 2/3 of your staff, move everything to SV, and rehire 60 people in an expensive city for far higher rates?
[0] - http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/EIU_BestCities.pdf [1] - https://angel.co/joist/jobs/112984-data-warehouse-engineer?u...
It's still a shitty way to treat people, but I can see why companies still want to be in the valley. I just wish we could attract more investors to Toronto. There are a lot of super-psyched tech and design folk in this city.
On the flip side, the SF VCs don't like investing outside their local sandbox.
This is the fault of both nations. The frictions are imposed by elected officials that limit the freedom of people to cross the border to work, dictate how taxes are paid, etc.
This also applies to investors, as investors must deal with the regulatory regime in the company's location.
I'd say things like this reflect a big failure of both the US and Canadian governments to make the borders transparent for business. All the moving expenses, severance packages, wasted training, visa fees, etc. etc. is all a total economic loss.
The people who suffer are those on the margin who get laid off or who can't afford lawyers to do immigration paperwork, or who don't quite meet the standards that bureaucrats outlined for a work visa.
Economic freedom is just as important, just as relevant to people's lives and futures as the other freedoms we value.
That might have something to do with it. If none of the good people are willing to stay for reasonable rates, companies may have trouble finding people regardless. That can reduce the costs of moving to SV.
For example: if the people you'd want to hire are comparing your offer against a SV salary, you may need to pay SV salaries anyway. But you'll still lose out on people who also like the job density of SV, or the weather, or that their friends have moved.
You interview, you get the offer, and the lawyers at the company apply for the visa for you.
There are some exception cases where an open-ended visa is possible, but this is uncommon - but if you're famous in the industry you may qualify.
In other cases, the work status conversation is an important part of hiring and negotiation.
Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
Disclosure: UW Comp Eng '98 grad, still in Canada.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Even foreign students who have no intention of remaining in Canada after university are still adding value.
Why? Because when they go abroad and do good work, they maintain and improve the image of UW. There's a reason it became a world class school, and you can think of former students doing work abroad as sort of like advertising.
Besides, foreign students pay more. Their tuition is not nearly as cheap as that of domestic students.
> Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
This is the case in many countries on earth which engage in socialism.
> I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
That would suck, quite frankly. I'm a Canadian who moved abroad after university because I wanted to gain some perspective and see more of the world.
I'm not a resident of Canada currently, so you're saying I should be saddled with additional debt because I left Canada without contributing to the economy?
Why shouldn't education be a right? I had to pay for my education, as I assume you did. Yes, it was subsidized by tax payer money, but in the end I spent ~$35,000 CAD (total) on tuition for my B.Eng.
I had to work summers and internships to pay for my tuition, and housing expenses when I was in university.
Will I return to Canada? I don't know, maybe. I'm still having a blast working abroad, and I'm still in my 20s, so who knows what will happen.
What I can say though, is I'm really glad that Canada didn't charge me an additional tax for going abroad after my education. If I had any kind of significant debt, I wouldn't have been able to afford to move to Europe and look for work.
(I am not a UW grad)
Disclosure: UW Tron Eng 2010, still in Waterloo.
This sort of agreement definitely does exist, though. My sister in law went to med school under one requiring her to work a number of years in rural parts of the state after residency.
> structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt
That's called a student loan.
The US government does exactly this in the form of "scholarships" where you're essentially indentured to the government for X years after graduating.
Maybe your business should give reason for why it should exist, and why anyone should care about it first.
However, I find it particularly reprehensible when companies make the move. For them, it's counter-intuitive: they have access to a huge pool of talent, both experienced devs and the vast armies of grads from UofT, UW and others. Furthermore, they're getting this talent at dirt cheap rates, since the Canadian peso is awful at the moment and salaries are significantly lower here than those in SV and the wider US.
Their expenses go up because they have to pay in USD (instant 25% hit in purchasing power), and they get thrown into the rat race of competing for talent in SV. I really wonder what goes through the mind of some of these moronic execs when they make moves like this.