It's become cliche for companies to complain about a talent shortage while wage statistics don't rise in response. I've heard restaurant owners complain about not being able to attract and retain quality wait staff while they pay the tipped minimum wage (less than $3 per hour).

This attitude has to change.

If a company can make significantly more money by hiring someone, then they should be aggressively increasing wages to signal to the market that they are serious. It's basically refusing to participate in the free market, or a complete lack of understanding of how markets work.

Business managers frequently act like they understand economics better than economists yet this attitude should telegraph a level of cluelessness that makes them unfit to manage a hiring process.

Everyone wants to pay less and get more talent. If you can't afford to pay more then compete on other aspects---allow remote work, more flex-time, and so on. Try something different in your interviews. Offer apprenticeships.

Sometimes it's not even a pure talent shortage that force increasing wages. In San Francisco the housing shortage and lack of support for new construction wipes out a lot of gains that come with higher salaries.

> In San Francisco the housing shortage and lack of support for new construction wipes out a lot of gains that come with higher salaries.

You can even see that problem get worse as people leave. Fantastic dev I worked with moved from Seattle back to India. She said that yes, she made more money in Seattle, but cost of living was so low in Bangalore that she effectively made a lot more money there. Coupled with her family being closer, it made perfect sense.

If you don't care about buying 'big ticket' items e.g. iPhones, MacBooks, VR, etc, - this is true. But these items don't change in price depending on where you are, and are likely much harder to buy as a result.

Would you rather own a house and a Xiaomi phone or never be able to afford a house and own an iPhone?

iPhones are cool, but houses are cooler.

Some of us have no desire to actually own a house, as far as a home goes. I'm no opposed to buying a house for investment, but have no real urge to live in my own house.

unless the difference between your rent spend and a hypothetical mortgage is well invested, you're very likely worse off renting. after all, your rent is paying someone else's investment mortgage!

Rental life is a simpler life. It means someone else is responsible for fixing your sink when it leaks. The biggest financial risk renters take is not getting their deposit back due to necessary repairs when they vacate at the end of their lease terms.

And, from an investment point of view, maintenance may not be worth it if you believe that housing prices are too high and that a correction will be coming in the short to medium term. Why spend your own money on repairs if your house's value is going to tank in a few years anyway?

and houses in seattle are a lot 'cooler' than houses in bangalore

Not if they actually build houses with A/C in Bangalore.

(mostly joking)

Does it matter if the house in seattle is cooler if you're never going to be able to buy it?

You can retire comfortably in many places in India on 1 year of a developer's salary in the US.

The problem is companies like this are constantly rewarded by young drop-outs and fresh grads who have faced adversity entering the job market and will take any job. These people are living with their parents and have never been truly employed. They will take these jobs and work their butts off, validating these same managerial processes.

You don't give them enough credit. This process works for them sometimes. And sometimes is evidently enough.

I think this arguably reinforces my point if a company has a process that works yet they complain about a talent shortage.

Part of this complaining can be an attempt to influence/distort government policy, justify a flawed or exploitative hiring process, or managing who to blame when they miss a quota.

I definitely agree that what you said is part of reality for some companies, which is why I think it's important to aggressively point out that there are solutions when the "skill shortage" is brought up.

Additionally, if underpaying younger talent is prevalent, then all the more reason a company should offer competitive salaries to recent graduates when faced with a shortage. They'd start booking some easy wins.

It would seem at least a little disingenuous for a company to hire new grads who will take any job and then turn around to complain about skills shortage. I'm not saying that grads don't ever have skills, but if the company tends to hire desperate noobs then they aren't (or are just barely) shopping for the skills they say they need.

People complain about their costs going up, just like most people complain about their rent / housing costs going up.

It's frustrating. A huge number of top grads move to the US when they graduate for 30-50% higher pay, before exchange rate. Even Amazon will offer you 50% more to move to the US vs. Toronto.

How is this Amazon's fault? Maybe if Canadian companies weren't such tightwads they would have a better success rate in hiring top talent.

And I say this as a Canadian.

confused how you read any of these comments as bashing amazon and excusing canadian companies

I didn't read it as you bashing Amazon. I read as Amazon is "stealing" all the talent by offering better wages, etc...

I don't think you can make an apples to apples comparison of salaries between Canada in the US.

Why not?

The one reason that occurs to me is the different expectations for social safety nets, which most people I think ignore when they are youthful and/or healthful. In Canada, losing one's job (sometimes following a bad health diagnosis) will not likely condemn the person to bankruptcy and worse. It was stunning to me how different Canadian society is compared to the US when one digs just below the surface. In some sense, the analogy that occurs to me is riding a motorbike (US) to riding a Camry (Canada) - the former is thrilling, full of freedom, and 'bad', until you get in an accident.

I agree that Canadian employers can totally up their hiring game by upping the miserly salaries but they could emphasize the social differences between Canada and the US to attract risk-averse/future-focused candidates.

It's about the personal calculus. It's easy to move to the US for work, if crap really hits the fan they can move back. The actual likelihood of that happening is minor, and if your young then it's rational to live in the USA for a 10-30 years and save up the huge compensation difference. If you stay long enough to reach 65, then you'll have medicare, and you can pocket the lower cost of living difference too.

Also employers pay for your medical insurance with pretty good plans, if you have a medical issue your paying at most ~$5k and $3k/yr for family medical insurance.

So universal healthcare isn't a good enough reason to not move to the USA. Also the US might get universal healthcare in that time span.

You are kind of proving my point: for Canadians to come to the US for more money as you state makes a lot of sense. You get to keep your Canadian citizenship and if things go badly, you move back. Also, re. 'employers pay for your medical insurance', the trouble is how long said employer will keep you around if some unforeseen illness comes about. COBRA, for which the premiums are very high, is good for another 18 months, assuming you have enough money saved up to pay for it along with the medical expenses brought about by the adversity.

I think my motorbike vs. Camry analogy is reasonable. Vast numbers of people ride motorbikes every day and live for decades without encountering a problem .Others can end up having their lives turned upside down as a result of some accident. A social safety net is not designed for everyone to bounce on but to catch the most unfortunate in society and help them cope as best as possible at their time of extreme adversity. My point is that the US, especially with the impending destruction of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid defunding, is about to lose its very short-lived and already weak safety net. If you can go back to Canada when adversity strikes, you are in good shape. Most people don't have that option.

You can use a relatively small amount of your salary to buy income protection or disability insurance in the US, and pocket the difference.

I am aware that most companies will automatically buy a certain amount of disability insurance for employees with option to buy more, often as a pre-tax deduction. These cover, afaik, something like $1 million in expenses for the specific circumstance of disability. However, I think the overall sub-thread was discussing healthcare. It is not clear to me that a long-term debilitating disease, such as (heaven forbid) cancer, would be covered adequately by such plans. Certainly, even healthcare prior to the Affordable Care Act could deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions or if there ever was any lapse of coverage; for such circumstances, assuming the disability insurance applied, the money would get spent pretty quickly. Real disability expenses are often much more expensive than anticipated - the referenced link [1] shows the expenses for Texas governor Gregg Abbott, who was disabled by a falling tree trunk while jogging at age 27; he managed to negotiate a pretty good settlement with the homeowner and you can see that his disability, for which he was too young or unprepared to have purchased disability insurance, had cost $6 million as of 2013.

My intent was to outline the fact that the US safety net is weak and there are plenty of corner cases that one could fall into from which recovery will be tough. Reduction in Medicaid will only worsen this. If you have coverage that you feel covers you in a majority of worst case scenarios, then you are in good shape but hopefully you are up to date on your read of the coverages. The Canadian safety net, in my opinion, saves one a little bit from this planning.

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-politics/2013/08/02/gr...

In Canada, you pay for that healthcare via taxes, so pre-tax salary shouldn't be different. If you're on a high salary, you can get income protection and healthchare insurance.

Though I'll note that the US puts a higher percent of GDP into public healthcare expenditure than Canada (yes, Americans pay more taxes for healthcare than Canadians, despite not having much public healthcare), so I guess the US is just bad at doing healthcare efficiently. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PUBL.ZS

I agree, Canadian employers are really not paying good wages for the same skills as the US. The reason for that, AFAIK, is Canada's skills-based immigration policy. In the original article, notice that the CEO effectively brought over teams of people permanently to the country fairly easily (it seems like) so perhaps that causes wage depression?

I was answering the parent post on why salaries are not directly comparable in the US and Canada with one opinion, re. the healthcare safety net. It is entirely possible that having a sane immigration policy rather than the indentured sickness that is the H1B also leads to a healthier supply of talent and thus lowers wages. I am sure there are other factors.

Living on the border, from what I have observed salaries are roughly 30% lower in Ontario compared to the US, across the board.

I was wondering this too, and would love to hear the parent's reasoning.

One difference I can think of is that Canada has Universal Healthcare. Maybe the compensation system differs because Canadian companies can pay <Salary> and US Companies have to pay <Salary + benefits>?

(I mostly see people here on HN throwing salary numbers around, not total compensation. Also, I wonder if having the government handle benefits would make it easier to pay more (since companies don't have to pay benefits) or less (since companies just pay the government to do the benefits). )

If that was the case, Canadian employers should have the upper hand in competitive salaries, because they don't have to cover healthcare, and corporate taxes are also cheaper. This happened in the auto sector, where Canadian plants have enjoyed a few decades of favoured status compared to American plants due to lower employment costs. That's now changed since the UAW has caved in so much to the automakers and workers in the U.S. South will work for peanuts, on top of state government offering massive subsidies to attract new plants.

What happens is simply that many Canadians like Canada and don't want to move south, and the Canadian economy is poorer than the American one (in particular, there is way less VC investment per capita), so companies have less money to fight over developers, and many developers (like myself) are content with this market.

Health insurance amakes an apples-to-apples comparison difficult.

Sure, but even if you count $1K a month for health insurance, it's still hardly competitive. Even at $2K they're only starting to get close. And from what I see, $120K CAD is basically the absolute top you're going to get as a very experienced dev.

I think that depends on the specific skillset they are looking for. In the systems software industry $120K CAD total compensation is about half of what a Senior Staff makes based on what I've seen.

Generally speaking, people need to start being more proactive asking for raises and switching to higher paying jobs if we want compensation in the GTA job market to improve.

This is part of the problem. Canadians are generally more complacent and have a lower tolerance for conflict compared to Americans from what I've seen. (I'm Canadian)

I can't speak for other regions, but for Vancouver $120k CAD is about the upper end of the middle. Most truly senior developers in the $150k-$180k range.

I'm just going off of what senior folks have told me in the Toronto area, for banking, or at big employers like AMD. $150-180k makes it far more reasonable, and if I had seen hints that offers would be close to that, I would have moved back to Ontario years ago.

This is very different from what I understood about Vancouver tech jobs. Do you have concrete examples of positions/companies that pay this?

Senior positions at EA, MS, and Amazon all pay at that level in Vancouver. That's what I was making as a TD at EA 7 years ago -- wow I can't believe it's been that long. Pretty much everyone in my peer group has a base salary in that range.

The problem in Vancouver is that it often feels like any PHP jockey with 3 years of industry experience is called "senior". This doesn't happen in other market's I've experienced. It happens here because the Vancouver talent pool is very shallow. We have a very wide base of low skilled juniors and intermediates with a very narrow point of experienced senior engineers. There are far more juniors than there is demand for juniors so that pushes down salaries. Conversely, there is a lot more demand for seniors, real seniors, than there is supply in the local market and that pushes up salaries.

It means Canadian salaries ought to be much higher since they aren’t paying health insurance for employees. It makes zero sense: US employers pay salary + health insurance. Canadian employees pay salary.

So it’s backwards. Canadian salaries should be a lot higher to reflect that they have a lower total employee cost.

But they also have the Skilled Worker immigration program that takes in people with specific skills and fast tracks them to a Canadian permanent residency (with higher priority given to people with job offers in hand.) Thus, they are able to attract talent from the rest of the world. I think that might help keep things low too, perhaps? Probably balanced a little bit by all of the Canadians who leave for the US searching for higher salaries?

Seriously? These are people just working on one piece of software. On what planet does someone who is maybe doing unit tests, or working only on one part of a code base, deserve or even demand such a high pay?

If your firm makes less money because it can't get enough developers to reach full capacity, then it makes sense to spend extra money on salaries to make even more money from customers.

Assuming that this calculation applies to your firm, are you going to leave profit to others when you could instead have a win/win situation for everyone (business, employees, customers) instead?

Markets aren't made by how much something costs. They are made by the perceived value of things.

In the same vein, people aren't paid based on the content of the work -- they are paid based on market rates. Doing mundane work like fulfilling unit test contracts doesn't sound that valuable until there is no one in your geographic area that can or will take that job {in that place, at that time, with the legal ability to work, etc}.