Alternatively, if wages were competitive in Canada (even considering cost of living and health care) there would be no reason to move. Personally, I'd much rather be in Canada to be near my family but I'd be making 1/2 the wage and have less talent to learn and grow from.

Yes there still would be: weather. There's literally no place in Canada that doesn't have a generally unpleasant outdoor experience for at least half the year. I say that as a proud Canadian. It's honestly the main thing holding my family from moving back. My wife is from Vancouver and hates snow. I'm from Calgary and can't take rain (I did 3 winters straight in Vancouver promising myself to never do another until I finally got out). We've been looking for somewhere in Canada and we can't find a solution.

It may sound small but it has a major impact on our happiness, energy levels, and overall well-being.

Toronto has none of Vancouver's rain and almost none of Calgary's snow. I wear running shoes for all save maybe 3 or 4 weeks of winter. -15 is considered a deep freeze and happens about 3 times per winter. What are you waiting for?

After many years of visiting Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal yearly, for more than a week at a time..

Toronto is not perfect, it has some of the worst weather in Canada. Summers are too hot (due to humidity), and the winter is cold and windy (due to humidity).

It’s not much different than most places in Canada but the lakes add a bite to the -15 to make it feel like the rest of the country (save Vancouver). The rain is brutal in Vancouver, but can keep you busy like cold does in the rest of Canada. Canada’s winter months are synonymous with precipitation, and you might be surprised to find where the most sunshine is.

Most of my friends from Toronto rarely or meaningfully ever leave Toronto to have an informed opinion of all 4 seasons nationally.

Commuting time takes away years of waking living time in GTA and GVRC unless you live downtown, except many startups are leaving downtown for affordability and keeping their people happy. All of this can be balanced away if you get other things that are worth it, including market size relative to Canada.

There are a few entrepreneurial pockets like Waterloo, and even Kelowna that are worth paying attention to. I don’t live in any cities listed here but travel often instead.

My wife is a UofT grad, so spent 4 years in Toronto. That's where her snow feelings come from – she still tells stories of marching to class in -20C and snow. It may not be Calgary, but it's not California either. Maybe we're wimps, but such is the situation we find ourselves in!

Maybe we'll be back some day. Toronto is the most likely.

On topic for the parent – we're both Googlers but right now Google has no tech employees in Toronto proper (it's all sales and marketing). Waterloo is the only product/eng office and that's a tough commute. I'm not sure if that is changing with this announcement.

That isn't true. Downtown Toronto has multiple Google engineers. I know one in brain and one in cloud. One has been in TO for ~2.5 years, the other for 1 year. As far as I know the only way to get into the office is by special permission. One of them only got their role because they said they were quitting due to the waterloo commute.

Fwiw I'm a Canadian that just signed a Google offer to work out of downtown SF because I hate the winter too. I think people care more or less about the weather based on their hobbies / interests.

It absolutely is true in actual practice; unless you're some unicorn ML researcher all our engineering talent is in Waterloo (or Montreal). If it was possible to work in Toronto I wouldn't have had to have sold my house and moved my family years back.

We do have a rather comfortable bus which runs from Toronto, if you don't mind the 2 hour (each way) commute.

(The company I worked for was bought by Google back in 2011. We had people in NY and Toronto; all our Toronto people were told we had to move to Waterloo and that was that. Most of us have stayed @ Google but for some the practice of having to rip up their entire lives in Toronto to move wasn't ideal and they left.)

The number of engineers at Google Toronto is so small that they're the exception that proves the rule, though. For all intents and purposes beyond some very special cases (and the Hinton stuff) you can treat the site as having no engineering.

> The number of engineers at Google Toronto is so small that they're the exception that proves the rule, though.

Exceptions don't prove the rule.

The point of this idiom is that they end up not being exceptions at all.

That is not what I understand it to mean -- rather, the opposite. That is, finding an engineer at the Toronto office is so improbable that it is remarkable, hence you are reminded that it is normally an engineer free zone.

There are some idioms that do mean it is unexceptional. You might be familiar with the Pratchettism "Million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten."

Huh? Toronto's weather is all over the map. One second its -17C, next it's flooding, in the summer 35C+ happens on the regular. Toronto has crazy weather.

The parent post just complained about winter, not summer...

" There's literally no place in Canada that doesn't have a generally unpleasant outdoor experience for at least half the year."

Much of BC. The rain is not that bad.

Also, winter is not that bad at all, it's really the long thaw that bites.

And if you live near hills and the countryside, it's fun.

Weather is a barrier to people coming to Canada, but it's generally not a reason people leave.

I still don't understand the pay rhetoric in Canada. I live in Bangalore, and I make more or less the same pay as in Toronto for nearly 1/5th the cost of living.

Why are salaries so low in Canada ? Now at least owing to the US immigration fiasco, more labour should move in and salaries should technically rise - but I don't see that happening. Not sure why.

Competitive salaries on par with California or even NYC will have a dramatic impact on the influx of immigrants.

Unfortunately top talent that wants a higher salary over all else emigrates to the US. Those of us that remain are in a lower bargaining position. And there's a steady stream of immigrants.

Also the quality of the work here is mostly miserable. There's not a lot of interesting stuff.

Things are better if you can find something outside of Toronto where the cost of living is ridiculous. One advantage of the Google Waterloo office...

> I live in Bangalore, and I make more or less the same pay as in Toronto for nearly 1/5th the cost of living.

You sound like an outlier mate.

Half is pretty generous, for mid/seniour developers it starts at a quarter and gets worse.

I was looking to move because I like colder weather/climate change related reasons and I had one recruiter tell me "You can't possibly ever make that much, that's CEO pay!".

Several Bay Area companies are opening/expanding offices up here, especially in the last year. I've joined one of them and I suggest you start looking around. At least in Toronto.

Come work at Google Waterloo.

Definitely less talent.

I don't think keeping people in your country by making it harder to leave is a good strategy.

IMHO when education is subsidized by public funds (which it is here), those funds should have to be repaid if you're leaving the country within a certain number of years or before you've paid some amount in income tax.

That would improve the talent situation here.

In New Zealand, the government funds tertiary education with a zero-interest loan. If you move/work overseas, it becomes a regular loan with 4% interest.

It gives some pressure to stay in NZ, but in reality, talented engineers can get over double their salary abroad.

That would also create more incentives to simply do one's education south of the border, rather than risk being shackled by government efforts to halt one's movement.

Have fun paying 4-5 times more for the same education then...

People are eyeing the salaries they can get with that education. I can see plenty of people willing to swallow that cost in exchange for not having the government tying an anchor around their legs.

People who are talented will still be poached and head down south. Restricting mobility won't stop anything.

I moved to the US from Canada on a TN. I would've liked to stay where I was but the local job market wasn't great at the time. At the time I viewed it as temporary. Now I have no plans to go back. I'm making twice the base salary and I'm in an area with a significantly lower cost of living.

The TN wasn't responsible for my leaving and it isn't the reason I'm staying away.

You actually just proved the opposite: your TN was the thing that got you a job paying 2x as much, gave you your foot in the door and exposure, and some time to establish longer-term plans.

Without the TN it's likely you may not have been hired because it's not worth the effort for most companies: T1 is easy, then once you're in they can process it more.

FYI this is not an argument for or against TN.

I needed to relocate or switch to a different industry. The option to relocate to the US was partly due to the TN. However, there would have been other options I could have looked at both domestically and abroad. There are plenty of countries with relatively easy immigration for people in the tech field.

You might not have meant it like that, but to me it sounds like a great argument in favor of TN (I'm from neither Canada nor US, for what it's worth).

From a classically liberal perspective, it would seem like an argument for TN.

i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'.

But from almost any other perspective it's not.

TN visas are mostly 'one way' - to America. It's an opportunity to suck out the best talent (the fruit of public education) for no cost.

Without real reciprocity, there's no benefit to Canadians who wouldn't use the opportunity.

Shockingly, neither government really keeps that much data on TN. Our incompetent governments have really little insight into what works and what does not. A TN is a 'stamp on your passport' that you get at the airport, it should be more centralized.

An easy solution to the asymmetry would simply be to make it '1 for 1', i.e. one American goes to Canada for every reverse.

I don't believe these are 'national/communitarian' vs. 'liberal' arguments, there's many situations we can have our cate and eat it.

TN visas have reciprocity. Americans in those fields can also go and work freely in Canada. However, when you factor in the difference in compensation it makes sense that more Canadians move to the US than vice versa. Big tech companies opening offices in Canada may shift that balance. I know I'd rather live and work in Vancouver than San Francisco if I was being paid the same amount for both.

Yes, definitely there is legal reciprocity, but in reality, the talent flows in one direction.

True reciprocity would be more or less an equal exchange of talent. I think this might be beneficial.

There might be some opportunities for the Canadian government to effectively market itself in the USA.

One of the reasons for the imbalance is that the Canadian dollar has traditionally been weak compared to USD. Since a large portion of the Canadian economy is based on exporting natural resources this is an overall good thing for Canada to have. Balancing all of the competing interests in a national economy is hard.

From talking with people I know who are still in Canada it sounds like the FAANG companies expanding there presence is starting to fix the wage disparity for tech workers. Without the wage gap there is less incentive to leave. I'd rather just let this continue than rely on some knee jerk government intervention that is likely to have unintended side effects.

I don't want to get into long discussion here, but I want to nitpick about this:

> i.e. you see the world in terms of 'how does this law help me now'.

Classically liberal perspective would be "how does this law help individuals now", not me specifically.

I understand what you're saying, but I believe that the nature of the liberal argument ultimately boils down to some kind of personal self-actualization.

The popularisation of almost any liberal policy usually takes the form appealing to the choice/freedom/egoism of the individual. Sometimes in a crude way.

I should have used the third person impersonal 'one sees' not 'you see' as I didn't mean 'you' of course.

Are you proposing tech version of Iron Curtain? I think the best solution for Canada is to try something that attracts the people rather then have them seeking greener pastures. Otherwise they'd leave TN-1 or not.

I think companies like Shopify are destination companies to work for in Canada. Ottawa is not a destination town for most, but people seem to be willing to move there just to work for Shopify.

Locking people in is never going to solve anything.