And I'm not trying to be argumentative, but your take on TN visas is extremely simplified. For instance software developers aren't actually allowed to have a TN visa, and instead you have to say that you're a "system analyst". Only they've actually started strictly demanding proof that you're an analyst and not a programmer, etc. Add that any single border crossing can lead to a revocation of your TN visa.
No thanks.
EDIT: Before more people reply with general comments, I am specifically talking about the salary claims for "ML Specialist" and embedded developers. Those numbers -- and I happen to have a good amount of reason to know this -- are ludicrously low. But yes, if you're a web developer, a generalist, etc, pay will be terrible in much of Canada, just as it's terrible in much of the US.
Then put stock in a the words of a guy who has actually looked for employment in Canada, and after the election of Trump is very incentivized to take a positive view on moving to Canada: as far as I can tell from the salaries posted, I'd take about a 50% pay cut, and I wouldn't be able to afford a house (at least not in Vancouver). Drop me in, say, Kamloops for $65K/year and maybe I'd do it. But there are few, if any, software jobs in Kamloops, or Kelowna, or much anywhere else outside Vancouver.
The biggest problem there is you have to be OK living in a place like Waterloo, which is great if you like suburbs and want lots of space, not so great of you're into city living.
(seriously, their headquarters are there)
The Okanagan is actually a great area to live in as far as tech goes in Canada.
What are the big tech names around there these days?
Would might net worth be slightly higher if I had stayed in the US? Yes, because I spent around $30k to get established (that was also a personal choice, I needed a break after a rough startup go between '98-2005.
I, too, like BC, but SW Ontario has more jobs.
Software engineer (Canada): $51,000 (C$70,000)
Software engineer (US): $80,825
The gap here is smaller ($30k vs. $50k) but still significant. And I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm more inclined to believe two surveys than a random person's claim.
[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa... [2] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
So yeah, a lower dollar is somewhat bad for employees who see some of their costs go up (in CAD) due to the exchange rate, as well as those who are planning to spend their earnings in other countries. It's also bad for companies that need to import goods. Of course it's good for companies that export goods, especially those with costs (like employee salaries!) paid in CAD. If the dollar stays low (in a relative sense) for long enough, these things tend to be pulled back into equilibrium, but they never move as fast as currencies can fluctuate.
I haven't researched the historical averages and correlated them with exchange rates, but I have been employing software developers in Canada for around 8 years now and so have kept current on market rates. In my experience, currency fluctuations, even on the order of 25-30%, have very little impact on market salaries.
Healthcare, stability and democracy (sans land/house prices) make up a lot for this.
Healthcare: We're talking about tech jobs. The healthcare coverage you will get from any tech company paying 6 figures is going to be essentially zero cost full coverage.
Stability: I have no idea what you are even talking about here, but it would be pretty hard to refer to the US as unstable from the perspective of someone working in a tech job. I suspect you pay too much attention to click-bait news and not enough talking to people that live here?
Democracy: again, what is this even referring to? The fact that the US is a republic? That's a pretty weak argument when comparing to a monarchy.
This is not always the case, especially for small startups. I know engineers who make 6 figures in small startups and pay $1K a month for Health insurance for family of 2 young people.
>> Stability.
I think what OP refers to is stability of financial markets. Canada does not have major financial crisis every decade or so, that wipes out half of your 401K and real estate value.
>> Democracy: again, what is this even referring to? The fact that the US is a republic? That's a pretty weak argument when comparing to a monarchy.
Canada is not monarchy, it is "Federal parliamentary representative democracy under a constitutional monarchy", so essentially Canada has parliamentary form of government. Also per my understanding they do not have electoral college. US has wired and extremely complex election system. In last elections Democratic candidate received 3M more votes, yet she lost election and Republicans control both House and Senate. Similarly Al Gore lost elections to Bush.
That's not been my experience. Microsoft used to offer a 100% plan, but that was unusual, and they dropped it a few years back. (Don't remember exactly when; I'd already left.) Google did not have a 100% plan, and no startup I've worked for has done better - in fact the startup I'm working for right now has no health plan at all.
All in all I don't really think it's a useful point of comparison when considering compensation between the two countries.
US politics are pretty terrible.
If any relevant number of people left you would know someone anecdotally at a minimum or be impacted in your tech company.
So, point is, you might not see a sudden movement but it might still be there.
a) Engineering is covered by TN visas, but you have to have an actual engineering degree. Claim you're a software engineer and they have every right to deny the CS grad.
b) Programming is not covered. This is simple fact of NAFTA. It's a process where applicants are told to be super careful with the wording (sort of like saying you're "going to meetings" when crossing the border for work related things), and at most the actual allowance is for a software analyst that does a small amount of programming.
In the Trump era antagonism towards NAFTA, anyone who buys this notion that it's all automatic is fooling themselves. And once you have a TN visa, that is zero guarantee -- any single border guard can reject it, at any time.
Not true at all. BSc in Computer Science is perfectly fine for Software Engineering jobs.
Look up NAFTA Appendix 1603.D.1
> b) Programming is not covered. This is simple fact of NAFTA. It's a process where applicants are told to be super careful with the wording (sort of like saying you're "going to meetings" when crossing the border for work related things), and at most the actual allowance is for a software analyst that does a small amount of programming.
That's true. But seriously is there anyone hiring "computer programmer" these days?
>>And once you have a TN visa, that is zero guarantee -- any single border guard can reject it, at any time.
True. Remember to carry all your paperwork with you whenever you cross the boarder.
Small correction. "Software engineer" has been a valid TN category since the early (?) 90s.
At the end of the day, those 'low' salaries are only low relatively. They are more than enough for most people and only a reason to move south if your main driver is money. Otherwise they're good enough.
The average Canadian house costs $585k now[0]. That's over 10x these average Canadian tech salaries. Housing prices contributed to our decision to move from Toronto to Seattle 10 years ago. I imagine that they are even more of a motivator nowadays.
[0] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/house-price-data-...
The thing about Canada is that Nafta makes it easy to move south, while in the U.K. going to the USA is not as simple.
I just had an interview fall through because I'm a Brit and it would be difficult to get me over to SF due to the visa system. Maybe I should look for a dev job in Canada? :P
I've been making more than double the median wage in my city for the last 20 years or so.
All the anecdotes still seem to point to software engineers making more than double in the US. I would love to return to Canada some day, but I'm not likely to do so until the numbers I see people post online start beginning with at least a 2 or 3.
And you have 20 years experience? If you are good, you could be making 4x this in the Bay Area. Or more,
In the larger cities, salaries have really gone up in the last few years.
This is false. I say this as someone with a TN visa, which I use to visit my employer a few times a year.
The TN application process is onerous and takes weeks to confirm. The actual visa is indeed granted at the port of entry but can be denied - simply having the completed application doesn't guarantee anything. And you have to go through the complete application process every time you re-apply. There is no renewal application.
The best way to get it done is to work for BigCorp, Inc. whose team of lawyers will handle it for you. If you work for a smaller company or are a contractor/consultant, you'll have to hire a lawyer for a few grand. I know because I've been there too.
When I moved from Canada to the Bay Area, I accepted my job offer on a Friday evening, organized to get original transcripts from my university on Tuesday morning, FedEx'd them overnight to the law firm and they arrived on Wednesday. I received my TN-1 package (a thick, completely opaque set of forms, documents, letters and all sorts of other legal shenanigans) on Friday evening. I then bought my ticket to leave Canada the following Friday. All together it was 2 weeks from acceptance to arrival in the US.
Not every experience is the same, and no doubt it would have been far harder had my company not pipelined my immigration through a very prominent and large law firm.
That being said, the fact that I can be denied entry in the US at any time scares me. It scares my company. It's no secret it's expensive to hire, and even more expensive to hire new talent to replace talent that cannot enter the country. I say this as a young, educated professional with no criminal history or ties. I shouldn't have to worry about this.
takes weeks to confirm
For example, I used to live in Fukuoka, a mid-sized Japanese city, and now live in Tokyo. A nice 2BDR in Fukuoka downtown would cost (say) U$600 per month. My salary in Tokyo is about double of what I could earn in Fukuoka, but an equivalent place in Tokyo would cost me way over $1200. So I don't live in downtown, and I choose to live in a smaller place. But it's not like everything costs twice as much as in Fukuoka. Food is a bit more expensive, not twice as much. A smartphone costs pretty much the same wherever you are in Japan. Traveling abroad also costs the same (or less in Tokyo, since you usually need one fewer leg). More importantly, if I keep my savings rate the same (savings/income), I can save much more money in absolute terms; I don't have to retire in Tokyo, so it is definitely worth the save more.
Beyond that, there's also the issue of schooling. That tends to be a nightmare for people in the Bay Area, due to the districting policies. Many Bay Area parents opt for private schooling, further adding to the expense.
How about, you know, basic empathy? (Unless you have some reason to believe that DCFS has unreasonably high standards here?)
No. I was never advocating for raising children in cramped conditions. Remember, the person I was arguing with lumped family into "other stuff".
I live in Waterloo. I've seen more than one person on HN argue that you should leave as soon as you get your degree here. I don't want to do that. I think Waterloo has some wonderful neighbourhoods for raising children, complete with top notch public schools within walking distance. The real estate prices here are not nearly as bad as Toronto, let alone SF. Even if you could make 3 times as much working in the Bay Area as you could here; I would assert that it's easier to buy a 3BR house here, have 2 kids, get them both into university and keep them healthy the entire time than it would be in SF.
If you used to live in a nice 1BR condo, you could definitely move to SF and spend an extra $20k/year in housing and still come out way ahead.
If you used to live in 3br house with a backyard and garage, you definitely won't be able to maintain that in SF.
In order to hire relatively talented people, the salaries were (even in 2007) no where near what you are describing.
When I resigned in 2014 the lowest paid developer on a 30 person team might have been making around $80k. Typically salaries were between $88 and $110.
While there are a large number of Canadians that have gone to the US to work, I regularly encounter Americans in tech that have come here. Sure, it's anecdotal.
My taxes are only slightly more than I paid in Wisconsin, and likely on par with California. And for that I always have some level of basic healthcare, even if I lose my job. Plus, the government tries harder for its citizens here.
Software Developer $80,947 Software Engineer $96,600
500px https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salary/500px-Salaries-E600778.htm Software Engineer $93,333
The averages are pulled down by lots of mediocre companies. Startups and big places like Google and IBM have salaries that are nowhere close to your numbers. Couple this with taxes here being much much lower than say the bay area, and you are doing really well living here.
The average Torontonian (in any field) earns ~$50-70k and costs here are quite high still, even if they trail San Francisco by ~30%.
To wit: on that average salary you certainly won't starve, but pick one: save money, buy a car, have a child (and that might be a stretch).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
I'm a Canadian software engineer living in Canada, but I'd never consider working for a Canadian or US company here and earning Canadian dollars - it just makes no sense. I work remote only (these days only part-time.) It isn't such a great deal as it used to be for me now that I have to pay Canadian taxes, but it was bloody fantastic when I used to live in Panama and legally paid no tax of any kind other than 7% sales tax.
as well as higher taxes and rapidly rising real-estate prices in both Vancouver and Toronto
But high earners pay lower taxes in California because the higher brackets are lower and they can purchase a home (interest portion of mortgage is tax deductible).
I'm Canadian though, so I don't have to deal with the long-armed-fingers-in-my-pockets embrace of Uncle Sam. Every other country in the world is sensible enough to only tax residents.
To be non-resident you have to spend at least half the year outside the country and have no residential ties to Canada like property, dependents, bank accounts, health insurance, etc.
See: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/nnrsdnts/ndvdls/nnrs-eng.html
Not so the USA, which has a claim on all money earned by Americans world-wide. There's a ~U$100k earnings exemption (so many people aren't paying much tax back to the USA), but high-earning USA expats are in a different tax-world from their overseas colleagues.
Not for Mexicans, as I found out the hard way. I tried doing this to come to Canada, but since Mexicans at the time needed an entry visa, I had to leave the country for a month and apply for a work visa in NYC. It was pretty frustrating for me because I read and re-read all the documents I had to read, and everything seemed to say I could just walk into Canada with my NAFTA-relevant job offer.
On the other hand, the Canadian border guard at Toronto was very nice to me, said I had to figure out my visa status and let me in anyway on a 1-month temporary visa, to give me time to go to NYC and fix my visa status.
There are people in the Valley who specialize in tracking every twist and turn of what visa policies are like this year.
Also, I'm assuming those numbers are converted to USD. Even if they look lower, you have to consider what kind of lifestyle the salary buys you where you are earning it.
In my experience, the real reason people leave isn't so much salary, as lack of opportunities.
Of course, Trump has said before he's not a huge fan of NAFTA either, so...
https://alis.alberta.ca/occinfo/occupations/computer-program...
The developers I know that are worth their chops have all taken remote US contracts. I'm looking to do the same because local companies just can't compete with the work available nor wage.
Additionally, sales tax is high relative to the US. IIRC GST in Toronto was around 15% when I was there last summer.
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/employ...
Of course, in practice, no sane company is going to abuse this to the extreme. People do get stat holidays, overtime isn't usually used, etc.
Machine learning specialist: US 108k, Canada 53k (49%)
Embedded applications/devices developer: US 100k, Canada 53k (53%)
Systems administrator: US 90k, Canda 49k (55%)
Doubling your salary by moving south across the border is a very tempting option, especially considering that NAFTA makes it extremely easy to do so. No need to wait for an H1-B, just show up at the border with job offer & credentials in hand, assuming you've graduated college. TN visas are instant and infinitely renewable.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017#work-salaries...