Most of the students that do leave for the US would be more than willing to stay in Canada, even if they were not paid as much. It's a familiar culture, the cost of living is cheaper, and in many ways Toronto is a better place to live than SF[0]. When they do go to the US, it's because they're getting huge sums of money mainly from SV giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and so on. While many grads are willing to stay here, even for a pay cut, the scale is tipping in SV's favor. Companies like Joist are what used to be turning the tide, they offered pretty good compensation, a decent job, and you got to stay in a sweet city.

Regardless, I don't believe these moves are rational. If you're the CEO, you're giving up close proximity to a lot of cheap talent, cheaper offices, cheaper cost of living etc. Sure, you can hire new engineers but you're gonna be paying a whole lot more money + 25% for the exchange rate to make them do so. Joist was paying engineers up to 130k CAD in Toronto[1], which ends up being around 100k USD. You're not gonna be attracting the best and brightest talent with 100k USD when Google is around the corner giving them 130k USD + 25k signing bonus and stock options. You're gonna have to pay at least 130k USD (=165k CAD) plus the signing bonuses and equity that are necessary to attract talent in SV. We're still not talking about how much more an office costs in SV, how much more of your employee's salary is going towards comically overpriced housing etc.

Let's dispense with the idea that moving to SV is some sort of rational or genius executive decision: does it really make sense to fire 2/3 of your staff, move everything to SV, and rehire 60 people in an expensive city for far higher rates?

[0] - http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/EIU_BestCities.pdf [1] - https://angel.co/joist/jobs/112984-data-warehouse-engineer?u...