Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S.

Re:Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S. by ajju on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:19PM (#726367)

Actually Canada actively recruits US immigrants. Send an email about H-1B visas using Gmail and soon you'll see an ad on the top saying something like "Stuck in an H1B visa? Canada will give you an expedited residency if you are a qualified immigrant". And it's goes to a Canadian govt. website with a form asking for your phone number. THEY contact YOU!

If I could bear the cold I'd skoot over to Toronto in the blink of an eye.

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Re:Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S. by potatolicious on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:24PM (#726390)

To be fair, get ready for a rude income shock. I am one of the (few?) Canadians who recently came to the US to work. Why? Honestly, because I got an offer that was double what any Canadian company was willing to offer me.

Software in Canada is second class - salaries are nowhere near the US levels, and much of the work is "scrap" from Americans.

Everywhere I look in Canada I see satellite offices to large American software companies. Invariably these offices do the boring, mundane code that nobody wants to pay $150K to a Californian to do. That's what I mean when I say "scrap" - monkey work, not real dev. It's hard to find a Canadian shop that writes real, meaningful code.

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Re:Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S. by ajju on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:30PM (#726406)

Good point. I want to work for my own startup though so access to a large number of customers is more important to me. I don't yet know how this compares (the ease of finding new customers in Canada as well as traveling to the US as a Canadian resident to meet customers) but I am looking into it.

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Re:Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S. by potatolicious on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:52PM (#726436)

Customer-wise stay in the US I say :) Canada doesn't really have a consumer culture to the tune of the USA, and because of lower income and higher taxes, you need to sell harder to get our money.

For tech companies focusing on mobile apps this is especially troublesome. Telecommunications in Canada is expensive as hell, and come with a ludicrous number of strings attached. Want to do a high-bandwidth site like Hulu? Forget it, your customers get hit with overage fees from their ISP like the plague. Want to do a mobile app? Sky high costs for data plans means your customer base is severely limited, and even the ones that do have it are apprehensive about going over their paltry (500MB to 2GB!) monthly limits.

I wouldn't consider doing a Canadian startup that sells to Canadians. I would, however, consider a Canadian startup that sells to Americans :)

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Re:Skilled Immigrants on Why They're Leaving the U.S. by ajju on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @12:25AM (#727419)

Thanks. That's useful input! :)

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