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.

Not sure if this is the norm for everyone.

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.

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 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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

Have you calculated what salary you'd have to earn to afford an equivalent configuration of {house, cars, debt, schools, commute, sanity} in the BA?

That may be where the lack of understanding comes from.

I really do get tired of this "but the cost of living!" argument being tossed out. People get it. It's not complicated.

https://www.ssa.gov/international/Agreement_Pamphlets/canada...

The spot with the best balance seems to be Seattle. High salaries and housing relatively affordable when compared to Vancouver or SF.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A good reminder that nobody brags about being paid 100k in tech,

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

It is certainly DOABLE, and within reach to get a job at google and stay there for 3 years. But thats the population we are talking about here.

  Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple)

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.

You shouldn't go to the bay area because you will never be able to afford a 2 million dollar house on 300k a year.

Stay in Vancouver and just buy a 1 million dollar house on 90k instead.

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.