At the risk of sounding like I'm boasting, I'll share concrete figures. I earn about $285k USD (~$380k CAD) as an L4 SWE at a FANG company. My top earning friends in BC work at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Juul and earn about $60-$120k CAD.

I wonder if this is a BC-specific problem, because Amazon and Shopify appear to be paying seniors in Toronto around $150-200k CAD/year+RSUs. With Google opening an office, and Snap already here, and Yelp already here, and Square already here, and others, I think the market in Toronto has already started changing.

Even if they were making $250k CAD total compensation in Toronto, as a senior engineer at top companies in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, etc. you can make $350-$400k USD ($470-530k CAD). We're talking about earning $150-$200k more. Working just 5-10 years with savings like this would be life changing.

I wasn't arguing that at all, only that things appear to be much better for SEs in Toronto than Vancouver for some reason.

And I've said elsewhere in thread, I'd happily move my family down (I'm a US citizen) if I thought it was possible to buy health insurance that would guarantee coverage for all issues. I've heard too many stories of insurance companies refusing to pay for emergency treatments because the hospital happened to be out of network.

> My top earning friends in BC work at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Juul and earn about $60-$120k CAD

Are your top earning friends L4 or equivalent? If not the comparison is worthless.

Those looks very much like junior level salaries. 90-100K$ CAD for a junior position at one of the FANG in Canada is as low as you can go.

SAP paid that well when I worked there five years ago, and they're right down on Hamilton street.

Damn man.. I really need to just suck it up and try and get a job in the US when COVID wraps up and we can get across the border again. I don't really want to work there and be so far away from family but it just doesn't make financial sense to keep doing what I'm doing.

I make really good money for my 3 years of experience (compared to others in my city with my level of experience) but it's just such a hilariously large gap at this point that it'd be dumb for me not to at least try and get a job.

I'd visit first and see if you want to live there more than Canada. I generally quite like Vancouver, and although I don't have the visa requirements for the states, I have no interest in moving on-location there despite the financial gap. I'd focus on what your interests are outside of work and then work to accommodate that.

Amazon certainly pays around 200k cad total compensation in Vancouver now a days..

Thanks for sharing this. People don't realize, and often refuse to believe, how large this gap has gotten. (Patio11 has written about that quite a bit.) It's...crazy.

Then you're probably an outlier; that's well outside of the normal for software engineers in California based on data I can find.

FAANG engineers are the highest paid 10% of software engineers in California.

Sure, but not every software engineer in California is a FAANG engineer; and even among FAANG engineers that stated salary is rather high.

It's not particularly useful to make claims that one can earn enormous amounts by changing region without also acknowledging that such an opportunity is only available to a small minority.

Among FAANG engineers $285K is not high.

For L4, 285k is within ballpark. "Among FAANG engineers" is a big pool from L3 all the way to L5/L6.

You're right that this is achievable only by a small percentage of people at the upper end of incomes, but I am comparing the same category of companies across both regions. Microsoft in Seattle vs Microsoft in Vancouver can be a 1.5-2x difference for example.

1.5-2x is a much narrower range, and smaller limits, than the 2-4x you posted earlier.

I'm saving over $100k USD per year after rent, food, phone, entertainment, etc. at age 24. This is impossible in Canada or most other parts of the world. My situation is not unique either, I know dozens of young engineers working at mid to high compensation companies earning around the same. Contrast this with new grads and mid level engineers in Canada earning < $75k USD and it's a no brainer to work here.

That smacks of sample bias and survivorship bias.

Sure, you and your social sphere have done well; but what about the population in aggregate?

Not everyone will or can work at a FAANG, or is competent enough to rise to that compensation level within those companies.

> Contrast this with new grads and mid level engineers in Canada earning < $75k USD and it's a no brainer to work here.

You're comparing SF to the whole Canada. If you zoom in to just Vancouver and Toronto, less than 75k is definitely smaller local companies. Similar to some no-name companies in SF in general won't net you close 200k TC.

SAP new grads TC can hit $100k and this company is considered to pay the least among Salesforce (and Tableau), Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify, Splunk, etc around Vancouver.

Senior Devs (outside the list above) avg base pay in Vancouver is around 130-140k at entry (newly minted Sr. Dev) before bonuses (10-20%), RRSP matching, and stock if the company is public.

Toronto have more tech companies that pay similar avg I believe.

Definitely it's not $285k for intermediate dev (SDE2) for SF Bay but Vancouver and Toronto have established themselves as tech hotspot in Canada leaving the rest.

On the other hand, I agree with you on the point of your saving rate provided that you are young without family. With Family, I believe you have to pay extra health-insurance out of your own pocket. You might have to pay extra for education as well (or pay extra to live in better neighborhood).

Yep this is pretty similar to my experience

The best jobs? Granted I don't know what "the best jobs" are in Victoria, but that seems surprising. Are there big tech offices in Victoria?

If there aren't good jobs there then it's a different story.

There's hardly anything in Victoria. It's a Government and Retirement town.

Edit: apparently my perspective is dated; see the replies.

Tech is the city's biggest industry.

https://www.victoriachamber.ca/about-victoria.html

Was just reading this; sounds like tech started becoming a growth industry recently. Neat!

https://www.vicnews.com/business/booming-tech-sector-in-grea...

No so. Victoria has a thriving software community.

There's a significant amount of startups / medium companies / consultancies but no "heavy hitter" offices like FAMGA, which is probably a driver behind the state of salaries. There is some Amazon presence through an acquisition they made on ABE books. Though there's also lots of remote workers here too for big companies like Github / etc.

Workday. Unless they moved out of Victoria cause it's hard to recruit.