A lot of the tech industry is about burning through investors' money in search of new profitable ideas. I'm guessing there's much less investor money in Canada.

"Burning through investors money in search of profitable ideas" has nothing to do with it. There's this huge misconception on HN about the size of the venture capital market. Start-ups are a miniscule portion of the tech economy by any measure of value.

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 make so much money in the US is the public market giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc

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).

I have a hard time understanding the comparison of aggregate market cap (a valuation) to GDP (an annual output). These seem like two very different quantities, with different units. How do you intend for us to interpret that comparison? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the aggregate revenues of those companies? (I'm not an economist, so I'm not sure those two quantities are comparable either, but they seem closer at least.)

It's several hundred billion in revenue per year - i.e. about half the Canadian GDP for the FAANG companies.

FAANG can only hire so many engineers, the positions tend to be highly competitive, they pull them from all over the world, and the drop-off in compensation at the next level is pretty significant.

But they push other tech firms to make their offerings more palatable.

Can Canadian programmers good enough to be hired by FAANG be paid similar salaries in Canada?

No, that's the whole point of this discussion.

It's a rhetorical question.

they can work for FAANG in canada at a 30-40% discount (well not FN, but AAG)

They have an anchoring effect.

Lots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same.

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.

> Lots less, but the big problem is a lack of competition. We don't have the big companies sucking up devs at an insane rate, or startups doing the same.

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?

You can replace "Canadian" with almost every other country on earth and the question stays the same.

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.

I guess that Germany and Poland do have problems similar to Canada, except that their brains are harder to be drained by America due to the distance.

Also Canadians have a much easier visa to get.

This isn't due to any failure in Poland. It takes money to make a person choose Germany over Poland. Poland is really really nice.

It really depends, but if a Canadian company operates in the US market and charges US prices, that puts them at a huge advantage.

The primary source of revenue for every Canadian software company I worked for came from the US.

Engineer/technical/science-type people tend to have this belief that wanting to reap the value they create makes them "bad people" or at the very least not a "good engineer/scientist/etc."

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.