Born in Hong Kong, raised in Vancouver and graduated from UBC, now working in Seattle and regularly commute to SF (once a month) and almost twice a month to Vancouver. I've been observing this for quite a while and try to put my finger on where the problem is for Vancouver. Have been trying to talk to people up and down the coast who are similar as well to understand more.

It's a complex comparison because:

- SF has crazy amount of capital flowing around, people are earning crazy $, but there's also high cost of living and tax rate

- Seattle is not as crazy as SF, but still has plenty of high paying engineers. Cost of living is quickly rising. Locally, it's starting to become a problem in some areas like Capitol Hill, like SF's Mission area. However, WA don't have personal income tax. So while on paper we don't make more than we do in SF. The general consensus from those that made the move north from SF says they end up keeping more.

- Vancouver doesn't have crazy tech capital. But it's got a really nice environment. Has public health care whereas in the States we have to account for health care cost. Generally American tech jobs provide health care with co-pay/deductible options but it's still thousands out of pocket before the 100% insurance coverage kicks in.

The Canadian brain drain thing has always happened since early 2000. I think the biggest problem with Vancouver is that there isn't enough venture capital flowing in. In many places where there doesn't exist an already established tech scene, like Detroit, the government has a lot of subsidies for companies to move there. However, there doesn't seem to be enough or any for companies that want to move to Vancouver. In fact, many of our subsidies are starting to expire, and that's why many gaming and SFX studios are shutting down. Without the much needed capitals, start-ups have harder time competing with Seattle and SF which offer comparable/better climate and surrounding with much better pay. Often time when I hear a Vancouver company pitch it's by saying how nice and active the city is. Sure, the city is nice but is it worth the difference in pay? To me, at least not at this point. Not at least with the money I am making I can afford to come back whenever, or fly down to SF for a few days. Especially not with the pay I am making after tax in BC, and have to pay for housing and transportation.

Fair description. I would say the quality of life will easily be higher in Vancouver depending on what you value, despite the slightly lower wages. Healthcare is much more affordable than the States, the public transportation blows Seattle out of the water. Housing is much more affordable than SF and on par with Seattle. Skiing, biking, and outdoors in Van is closer and cheaper.

Easily as diverse as Seattle, just different. Startup community is more vibrant than Seattle, more personal than SF -- but if you want a cushy job at a large tech firm, Vancouver is not the one.

The Vancouver up-and-coming is where it's at. Tons of my friends and colleagues are moving from all over the world to take advantage on the rise up.

Invoke, Highline.vc, WavefrontAC, Spring.is, Launch Academy, are accelerators powering startup names you all are familiar with. Not to mention the Canadian government basically throwing money at tech through grants, tax rebates, and mentorship programs because they recognize it will carry the economy no matter what happens with natural resources. Not sure what subsidies you think are expiring.

I get offers from SF regularly but it's not worth it. My friends there tend to get overworked and leave after burnout. Vancouver is a place to set down roots -- Canadians know how to enjoy the weekend and each other's company outside of work events.

Background: Living in Seattle for a decade, founded a startup in Vancouver last year, have many friends and past work in SF.

i stand to be corrected on the subsidies part! Did some more research this morning. It seems that the reports are generally focused more on how other cities are providing more subsidies than Vancouver, rather than Vancouver stopped providing subsidies.

Definitely agree Vancouver is awesome to live in. To be perfectly honest, I'd love to move back to Vancouver. It's a very nice city, nice enough that I'd want to visit twice a month! I have to be honest, for the right job and at the right time in my life, I wouldn't mind taking a slight pay cut to enjoy the life style here. I'd love to still enjoy a place of my own though. :(

Funny last weekend I was in SF Mission and a friend recently bought a new condo there. $600K, and small just like the Vancouver ones. However our sentiment is that SF can support that kind of market because the price is mostly backed by the crazy tech money. Unlike Vancouver where the housing price don't seem to be backed by any economic boom.

At the end of the day, I guess money still talks. Especially if one tried to raise a family or do anything significant in life like owning a home.

I definitely think Vancouver has great transportation... As long as you live close to a Skytrain station. Many new developments in Vancouver outside of DT seem to emphasize on walking distance to the Skytrain. Some are even built on top of or next to the Skytrain stations, like the ones around the Cambie Canada Line! Otherwise, I don't think Vancouver's bus system is any particularly better or worse. Also, with some of our light link rails and street car projects coming online in the next 24 months, the situation will definitely improve in Seattle. There is already planning into extending the LLR to the Eastside to Redmond/Bellevue areas.

Vancouver's transportation is really good. Just the other day this article came out comparing all the cities in the west and Vancouver came out on top in terms of percentage of commuters who take transit. 20% vs SF's 15%. http://www.biv.com/article/2015/3/who-takes-transit-work-met...

Thanks for the article, read through it. True that Vancouver may have higher public transit ridership, but what they neglect to mention is that different cities may have solved the public transit problem in a different way.

First off, many major tech companies SF (and to some extent in Seattle) offer private buses. Automatically, these people are no longer counted by the study. In a city like SF where there is a huge Google/Facebook/Adobe/Company XYZ population, they all offer buses or shuttles from urban areas to Palo Alto, Cupertino, and even within other places in SF. Nonetheless, almost 100% of the people I talk to that lives in SF either doesn't own a car or owns a car but almost never drives it because their companies offer alternative transportations. They also don't ride the BART or Muni or CalTrain much because of Uber/Lyft.

Secondly, places like NYC, SF and Seattle have a big ride sharing culture. Obvious Uber and Lyft are prevalent around the city with their staches' and U's. Recent stats in NYC indicates that there are now more Uber drivers than taxi drivers. These ride sharing economy definitely takes the ridership out of public transit. In fact, on my recent trip to SF I decided to take Uber to my door instead of the normal BART because they cost similar except I don't have to get off at a BART station and transfer somehow. Compare that to Vancouver, where Uber and Lyft are outlawed, with the city even going to extra step to make sure they don't even get a start over existing taxi services, it's definitely going to push more people to public transit.

Also, I don't think this article or study is even non-partisan at all because of the upcoming city-wide transit referendum. Honestly, I am taking this with a grain of salt.

What's wrong with the bus system in Vancouver? It's extensive and the buses are nice and run on schedule. And you can hop on the Skytrain after a bus ride without having to pay an additional fare.

> I think the biggest problem with Vancouver is that there isn't enough venture capital flowing in.

To be honest the same can be said for London. Despite an abundance of capital available, investors this side of the Atlantic are far more conservative than in the US.

I don't know what it is in the US that makes investors take a punt on risky ventures, in the UK they just don't. If you're not making revenue in 12 months then they don't want to know.

IMHO low interest rate can drive a lot of people to making insane decision up and down the financial food chain. It's essentially "free" money, except the principle has to be paid back.

Much of this has been the seed of the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Funny how crisis in one industry turned out to be a boon for another.

Hear hear!

Here's my comment to back up dennispi post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245915

As per my post (the TL;DR summary here...): Intermediate Engineer 90k or more, Senior 110k or more. Better health insurance/coverage. For example: child-birth cost almost nothing (VIP room costs $100 ish for 2-3 days after corp. insurance cover the rest, regular room is covered by basic health insurance I think).

>Finally, commutes range from 5-30 minutes (and that's going to cover people who walk, bike and take transit).

I'd like put that in bold (as stated in my comment as well). This is different compare to the States where Highway is the One True Way :). (I used to live in LA before settling down in Vancouver).

So, the salary is still half SF, and 2 hrs away w/ TN Seattle pays %90 SF. And cheaper housing.

LA is highway culture, SF the city is transit culture.

I've been away from SF for a couple years now but I have a hard time believing that the average programmer is being paid ~200k. The salaries the GP listed seem about 80% of SF salaries to me.

Transit culture? Is that the idiotic 'I love sitting 3 hours a day in a bus going up and down 101 from my home to my employer in the South Bay and back'?

Seriously, the public transit is only great in San Francisco if you're only comparing it to the rest of California.

There are employers inside SF itself. If you live in suburbs, you need a car, just like Vancouver. There are many people who just live & work in SF and use transit the majority of the time.

SF salary is $180k intermediate/$220k senior?

Remember the currency conversion. 1 CAD = 0.8 USD.

I was living in Vancouver until I moved to Waterloo for University, and will be graduating in a few months. It seems like everyone here is comparing Vancouver with US tech hubs like Seattle and SF, when there's a much more comparable target: Toronto.

Of course, this is anecdotal, but for every one of my 6 co-op terms in Waterloo, I always made finding a job in Vancouver one of my highest priorities, but in the end I always ended up choosing a job in Toronto over the Vancouver ones because the quality and selection of interesting places to work is just so vastly different ever single time.

Once you factor in the costs of living, it's ridiculously difficult for a young professional working in tech to justify choosing Vancouver over Toronto (and trust me, I tried, Vancouver is still by far my ideal city to live in), let alone SF/Seattle where the salary disparity comes into the equation.

A friend of mine who works for blackberry in mississauga feels otherwise about TO, he said the highest paying tech jobs are mostly in financial industry.

You're definitely right that housing price is affordable in TO but there are people who still want to go back and prefer Vancouver over TO. They don't mind to pay more for the quality of living in Vancouver.

I'm not sure about high-paying jobs (during my search, I've found the average salary to be in the same ballpark for Vancouver vs Toronto). But in terms of sheer number of interesting companies and opportunities, I've found Toronto to be superior by a large margin.

If you take a look at the AngelList jobs board (https://angel.co/salaries), you can see triple the number of postings in Toronto vs Vancouver, and more than triple of those that pay 60k+. This is by no means completely representative, but I believe it's good indication of a much more vibrant startup scene, and my job search experience so far seems to confirm this (despite being biased towards Vancouver due to personal preference).

> The downtown core is one of the few places in the world where people live and work in the same area...

> commutes range from 5-30 minutes (and that's going to cover people who walk, bike and take transit).

So, in general, it is like a classical European city, where the streets are even full of life after the end of the workday? If that’s true, than this is actually amazing.

And creates the new question: Why did it work in vancouver, but not in so many other cities on the american continent.

Vancouver is surrounded on three sides by the sea, snow-capped mountains, and the U.S. border. Copious amounts of prime real estate are also set aside for Stanley Park, UBC, and the airport. There's some sprawl toward the South (right up to the border) and East (inland), but the downtown core itself is physically incapable of getting any bigger than it was 100 years ago.

It's somewhat like downtown San Francisco, except Vancouver is even smaller. No point in downtown Vancouver is more than 1 mile from water. This helps keep everything within walking distance.

Compare this to, say, Los Angeles, where there's not much to stop the city from expanding in every direction.

obi-nine you appear to be hellbanned - by default no one can see your posts.

> due to the large number of homes which are owned by foreigners and are vacant. I'm not aware of a concrete way of measuring this.. but anecdotally, I suspect it's close to 30-40% of the downtown residential core.

There have been studies out of UBC that estimate 30%+ van can't condos in the downtown area by using anonymize do BCHydro electricity usage data. As far as I know this number has been increasing. This has gone on for so long that the city, province, and federal government (all three are implicated) are between a rock and a hard place. Canada has one of the highest levels of personal debt-to-income ratios because property prices are overvalued. Anything they do now to try to correct for affordability, and bring down property values would result in a large number of defaults for domestic owners, and big hit to the economy.

Your comment "30%+ van can't condos in the downtown area" doesn't make any grammatical sense. Are you saying that 30% are vacant, or 30% are occupied?

Anyway, here is the study I think you were talking about, which says that 42% of Vancouver condos are vacant, compared to 3-6% in other areas of Metro Vancouver:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/22/vancouver-housing-va...?

I assume "vac can't" is a mobile miscorrection for "vacant".

> Anything they do now to try to correct for affordability, and bring down property values would result in a large number of defaults for domestic owners, and big hit to the economy.

Structural changes are always painful in the short term. It's the long term total return value that counts.

Also, domestic owners in downtown vancouver would be just fine. If the place is worth over 600k (which they all are) then they are already/mostly rich enough to absorb the hit. Note that the larger the price tag of the home then the larger the hit will be, but on that end it's filled with people who really can afford that hit. The smaller the price tag of home then it's also a much smaller hit taken and the odds are then extremely high for them to regain that value back over time.

>the large number of homes which are owned by foreigners and are vacant. I'm not aware of a concrete way of measuring this.

I saw an interview on CBC about this and the person interviewed simply said "Look up." He pointed to row after row of full condominium buildings with only two or three lights on in each building.

I do the same test in my fully occupied 40 unit townhouse in Vancouver at night. At any given time, most of the lights are out.

I just wish the media didn't try to spread so much FUD just to sell views.

Why would you look if you know it's full and you live in it?

>Finally, commutes range from 5-30 minutes (and that's going to cover people who walk, bike and take transit).

Ha, ha, ha, a 30-minute commute would be luxurious. Richmond to VGH for 9:00 takes 45 minutes by car. Coming in from Surrey, Langley, or Maple Ridge I'm sure is worse, and good luck getting to UBC or downtown in less than an hour from these places.

Transit in Vancouver is a joke, and that 45-minute drive takes more than an hour by Skytrain+bus.

>Ha, ha, ha, a 30-minute commute would be luxurious.

I have to agree. My commute is 45 minutes, 65 if you follow the speed limit, and significantly better than many of my coworkers. I would really love a sub 30 commute, but not sure I want to pay an extra $300-450 a month for it. It also takes 1.5 hours by bus+skytrain+bus.

I would really love for the 5-30 minute commute to be true, but it just isn't.

So don't compare to SF, compare to Seattle.