Just as a rebuttal, I don't have student debt and get plenty of vacation time, and my employer has pretty amazing health insurance. Not everyone is lucky this way but I personally would never move to Canada for a tech job and don't know anybody who has done so, while I have definitely met many Canadians who have moved here.

The Canadian and US labor markets are pretty interconnected so in my opinion these companies are going to have to start raising salaries if they really want to get talent. I feel like I read something on HN every week bemoaning the Canadian tech industry, when most of the problems have a pretty simple solution: pay more. Of course, that's easy to say but not necessarily easy to do financially.

No argument here that the jobs are more lucrative, on paper, South of the border. Just trying to point out that there are lots of aspects to consider when you're looking at compensation. Being young, healthy, and single in the US can net you a lot, but I suspect that other bills would quickly eat up the difference if you aren't all 3 of those things.

As a Canadian who moved south for work and is rapidly approaching or in middle age, this is my position on the healthcare here: If you have good insurance, it is AMAZING! I understand that others have it worse, but all major software dev employers that I've looked at had really really great HI. In Canada OTOH, the service is much worse for non-emergency things, but everyone gets to have it. From an ethical standpoint, of course I support some kind of 'everyone gets sensible healthcare'. But I pay less out of pocket here than I would in Canada for my family of 5. Financially, moving back to Canada would be a disaster.

If the employer doesn’t pay health, then salaries should be much higher than the US. Salaries in the US are exclusives of health benefits. So an SV company paying $140k is paying that in addition to health benefits. A Canadian company is paying $60k AND they don’t have the additional expensive of health. Then on top of that low salary, the employee has to pay taxes which obstensiby funds their health care.

Perhaps it’s worker protection that makes salaries lower in Canada? If it’s harder to fire people, that cost gets spread across all salaries to reflect the risk of having an employee you can’t easily fire.

Canadaians make far less than Americans even after accounting for the “benefits.”

I once saw a company looking to hire a senior rails developer at $25 CAD per hour. Insanity. I think it was even for a Vancouver company.