If pay and money is the only thing you care about then yeah. But for the rest of us, none of the places are "the worst place to work in tech" as long as you're in the northern hemisphere. Take a look at what the pay is in Chile if it's so scary to you.

Nope, cost of living is what matters and at least at the time major Canadian metros were as if not more expensive than SF/NYC and got you a 1/4th of the pay. I am sure that’s attractive to some but sounds pretty miserable. Chile I imagine has pretty good cost of living economics. Anecdotally most of my friends in Latin and South America live upper middle class on software salaries.

"major Canadian metros were as if not more expensive than SF/NYC"

That just isn't true. You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver:

> Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver

> Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Too many strange datapoints in that comparison. I never paid that much for utilities in CA but who knows. It’s anecdotal but at the time which this link does not cover it was simple math of taking a 2x paycut (not counting RSUs) to have roughly similar expenses.

I don’t know if current SF prices are reflecting the boom in AI. Another anecdote I look at the areas I used to run in under a decade ago and they are all around 60% higher. Really hard to do exact apples for apples between geographies so at the time I just went off basic necessities and it was skewed heavily in favor of SF.

There are several websites aggregating rent data that put SF rent at around 2x that of Vancouver, which is itself the most expensive city in Canada. I agree that many people would be worse off financially moving to Canada due to the lower salaries. But the claim that cost of living is the same is categorically false.

Yet you keep missing the point. “Was”. I am not saying prices today or equal. I am simply saying when I did the math pre Covid the cost of living was very similar all things considered. Like I already said the link you provided looks like a bunch of bad data so truly hard to tell. Categorically false are strong words without any data!

There is a lot of data available online that you can find very easily. Zillow for example, regarding rent:

SF average rent: $4,795USD [1]

Vancouver average rent: $2840USD [2]

[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/san-fran...

[2] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/vancouve...

I would say categorically false is accurate and an anecdote from 7 years ago isn't adding anything productive to the conversation.

EDIT: Sorry, I just saw that you said "all things considered". I think we agree that when you factor in salary, it is financially worse to live in Canada. I just noticed a lot of completely inaccurate statements about the rent being the same which I was trying to correct. Apologies if you got caught in the crossfire.

> Anecdotally most of my friends in Latin and South America live upper middle class on software salaries

And your North American friends do not? Please.

The commonality is that software engineers all across the globe live pretty great, compared to their local peers. But of course, compare them to inflated NYC/SV salaries and everything looks like peanuts.

Sure. My point was historically Canada was pretty bad from a QOL perspective. Low salary and high cost of living. Not sure what you are trying to argue but have at it!

Trying to help you understand that Canada does not have "low salary" just because it's lower than NYC/SV, since apparently your software engineer buddies live an upper middle class life on software salaries, how "low" can it be then, especially if the cost of living is so high? Something doesn't make sense here.

Sorry I don’t understand why you need to be rude. Historically when I have looked, salaries were drastically lower while having materially similar costs of living. That may have changed though as I have not looked at it in the past years post covid and you have not provided any evidence that says otherwise other than simply being a jerk. Good luck!

> And your North American friends do not? Please.

It's not even close. Both my current and previous company have substantial percentage of engineering in Mexico so I have good visibility into this. Even middle-tier software engineer salary band in Mexico allows for a very comfortable high class life. Whereas the same level engineer in Silicon Valley is crushed by rental costs without not too much left over, and if they also have kids expenses they are barely scraping by.

Pay and money are why people work, so yeah they're pretty important.

Money is just a tool to get what you actually want, the goal itself shouldn't be "more money", unless you want to miserable, because that hole you feel never gets filled by shoveling more money down it.

More money generally equals more freedom, even if you don't know what you want specifically, but you're ultimately talking about a bigger, unrelated issue.

> pay and money is the only thing you care about then yeah

Yes, pay and money matter. It's why people go to US rather than Canada.

If you can only afford rent on a Canadian salary as a tech worker without much profit, why come here?

Canada has bad weather, expensive large cities and an overworked health care sector.

At least Europe has better weather and social services.

> At least Europe has better weather and social services.

Europe is not a country, these vary wildly across members of the EU/UK/Europe more broadly.

As an Irish person, I'd love if the weather and social services were better here.

I've been working in Canada for US companies for decades, and pay-wise, it's gotten a lot better, though there's still a big difference. Never been tempted to move though.

Good to hear. I just remember looking at big tech postings at the time with salaries around 60k but then looking at rents that were more expensive then SF and thinking no way.

Canada was bad for tech specifically because of H1B.

Now that H1B pathway is being blocked, Canada can build an alternative tech center and ecosystem. They can do it, Canada has very strong CS programs and is a birthplace of AI and deep learning

It's still bad. I got a 40%+ pay cut after being transferred from the Bay Area to Vancouver. It seems local companies pay even less than US big techs. And just search and see how Vancouver is regarded as one of the least affordable cities.

Though I don't worry too much about the pay -- it's still a decent amount. It just sometimes makes me feel unfair when I'm doing the exact same job as my US colleagues.

You'd take a 40% pay cut, or more, going 20 miles east of the Bay Area.