From my experience on the media / marketing side of things, a lot of people moving here that didn't consider the U.S. as an option. For some roles, our entire crop of interviewees have moved to Canada from other countries.
Yes, the U.S. immigration situation is helping the Canadian tech scene, but cities like Vancouver and Toronto are more than a mere crashpad for people waiting to move to SV. There's real momentum here as well.
Spend any time browsing /r/vancouver or /r/toronto and you'll quickly realize that the cost of living is a huge problem. The Vancouver housing market in particular has been absurdly inflated by out of control money laundering. Local salaries and house prices are totally out of whack.
Follow https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/ to see what money laundering has done to the Vancouver housing market. https://twitter.com/mortimer_1/status/1221315000897163264 is a particularly amusing recent thread showing where a would-be landlord writes: "This home is in rough shape and needs painting, and TLC. Looking for long term tenant willing to put labour in while landlord covers all material costs." All this for only $5650/month!
It's inconclusive at best, and misidentifying the major causes in this complicated crisis could hurt any effort to alleviate housing pains.
Money laundering does happen in BC, and some of the proceeds do go into higher end housing. One can argue the restrictive zoning and ever-increasing costs and hurdles to new developments are orders of magnitude more influential on the market than the hot money. We have heavily left-leaning councilors in Vancouver that vote down any rental property project, solely to prevent private parties from making any profit.
The winters of the few years I spent living in Vancouver were the best in my life. I still go back (from the UK) now and then to enjoy it.
May be it's my bias but Toronto doesn't feel all that multi cultural. Sure you see people of different nationalities but something feels lacking.
There's really nothing like working in the Valley but not everyone likes it and if there's a solid alternative I suspect that Vancouver and Toronto will continue to prosper no matter what the US policies end up being.
I would think the great weather for filming and access to many kinds of terrain would is benefit New York can’t offer.
Edit: "Bay Curious" podcast https://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious
In fact in the last few years I've even been seeing young people coming up from the USA to live here for lifestyle reasons.
IMO the dominant thing propelling tech in Vancouver forward isn't the immigration law situation, but rather the low Canadian dollar makes our companies cheap to work with for SF giants.
Well, the climate in the populated parts of Canada parallels the northern United States, i.e. Chicago (9.5m in metro area) and Toronto (6.4m in metro area) have similar climate, as well as Vancouver and Seattle.
There are huge populations in these areas who are used to northern climate and have no trouble with it. I live in Chicago and really love the four seasons, prefer the cold to the heat and would never move to anywhere south of say North Carolina.
Climate preferences can vary quite a bit, I would say.
[0] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-profe...
Canada is a nice place, live there if you want, but “competitive compensation” is definitely not a reason.
Toronto has more construction towers (120) than any other city in North America (49 in SFO and LAX):
* https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/economic/2019/0...
It's still not keeping up with demand.
Well, India and China have even fewer immigration restrictions on Indian and Chinese workers than Canada does... why would Vancouver take San Francisco’s place rather than Mumbai or Shanghai?
The real problem is all the other nonsense people have to deal with.
We have a really great employee who single handedly wrote most of the company’s build infrastructure, and was happy in the US on his H1B because while it requires renewal every 3 years, he was well paid and enjoying his life.
Until about a year and a half ago when he went back to renew his visa in India but didn’t get an approval for about 6 months. The approval process required the company to submit the salaries of the entire 15000+ global employees from the janitors to the CEO.
Once his visa was approved, he packed his bags and moved to Toronto within a couple of months. And our company has stopped hiring more tech workers in the US because they don’t want to have to deal with this anymore.
Folks in the office have to rent/buy property, buy food, supplies, etc, all from local workers too. Taxes are paid. You know, business.
Note that this mostly applies to immigrants from India or China. I'm from India. This applies irrespective of education level (I did my Bachelors in the US, just FYI)
Currently I'm in the US on a student visa (currently during a period of that visa that permits me to work) that expires in a couple years. I cannot renew it. If I want to continue working in the US. My only option is an H1-B (work) visa.
There is basically no other option to me.
Okay, so let's say I do get the H1-B visa. Then, I have to work for a few more years on that visa, before I'm eligible to apply for a green card - which grants permanent resident status. Now, once I file that application, I'll be on a waitlist. Guess how much time it takes to get a greed card? Atleast 100 years. I'm not joking. Unless there's a policy change, there's no possibility.
Even if there's no possibility of me getting a green card, I can still work. I can still buy a house, get married, have kids, etc. A lot of Indians and Chinese in the US currently are in this limbo period, where they don't have a green card. So they still continue to work, start a family. Because no other country will pay as well.
But personally, I hate the uncertainty. While even getting a green card isn't a guarantee to get to stay in the country, not having a green card is much worse. A CBP officer has the authority to deny you entry at their discretion. If do deny entry, you are banned from entry for atleast 5 years.
That's it. You're life in the US has vanished into thin air.
While I love my current job, I trying to immigrate to Canada. You get a PR immediately if you quality based on a points system calculated using specific, meritocratic criteria. If I have a PR I feel I won't worry when I buy a house, plant roots, that my life won't be upended because I failed to follow my visa's restrictions.
If you wait long enough your US citizen kid can sponsor your green card as an "immediate relative" once they turn 18 :-)
The backlog for Indians and Chinese is truly ridiculous though.
I'm surprised at the amount of confidence you have in the USCIS that you might get a greed card. If you are still on a visa, I don't see how soon you believe you can get a green card in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not sure you can use the EB-1 category even with an L-1 - unless you're at a very high level in your company. Even for that category, the waitlist is currently about 5 years.
Those days are gone now. You go into EB-1 only if you get into the US on L1-A. They don't give L1-A's easily these days. For starters you need to be in director level positions to even qualify for L1-A's. Even then the waiting period for India EB-1 itself is growing and stands at 5+ years now. And it will only increase.
>>I've quite a few friends who easily got their green cards working for TCS, Infosys, etc.
Put the saddle on the right horse. People who come in from those companies often work for <$70K an year. Most are poor blokes who survive on ramen, and giving haircuts to each other so that they can save $8.
The real deal is Cgnzt which even until recently filed L1-A's and EB-1's for thousands/lacs of people by cooking up documents. Often promoting some one with a BCom degree to a director, granting them a GC and then rolling back the promotion. Thousands to lacs have made it to GC and Passports this way. When I worked for a short time in the US, it was painful to see PhD students in Stanford struggle for little extra stay, while some one with a basic 2 year diploma land GCs in like an year. In fact even until recently the biggest incentive to work at Cgnzt was this.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
8.4 lac Indians got citizenship only last year. 5.8 lac got green cards. This is basically abuse max.
Add this to manager's pets who routinely get their documents cooked to be Nobel Prize worthy talent and land GC's. Literally the wrongest possible people occupy the numbers these days. Add to this a large number of body shopping firms.
There are several top level doctors, lawyers and scientists who don't even get B1's.
In short we Indians bought this upon ourselves. Like everything else. We abuse things so much, so far and so blatantly it makes things impossible for the real people when they arrive at the scene.
I'm one of those people who got burned badly due to all these politics at every level. I have largely given up, you just need to get very lucky early life to win at these things. Or cheat shamelessly.
Please stop subverting our laws, you’re making it worse for people who don’t break the law.
For people looking for data backing what I'm talking about, here's[1] something that everyone looks at to track timelines. This data is released monthly. Search for "EMPLOYMENT-BASED PREFERENCES"
In that table you'll see China, India and Mexico specifically called out since they're the ones with such extreme wait times. EB-1 is extremely difficult to qualify for[2] so most people apply for EB-2. You can see currently applications from 2009 are being processed. That was more than a decade ago. Then consider the increase in applications each year since that year. That's where the 100 year figure comes from.
[1]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
[2]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...
Not disputing how ridiculous your situation is, but you do have a couple other options.
The most realistic one would be to save up all your money and apply for the eb5 investor visa. If you're making 6 figures, you should be able to save up the required million dollars in about 10-20 years, depending on how much you make, and how frugal you're willing to live.
The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.
The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.
I'm an early career engineer, and this is something that a few of my friends have looked into. The number was 500k when I started working 3 years ago. It's now 800k. It looks like how much ever I work, the number will increase faster than I can save, cause there will be more people like me. Unless I become sufficiently senior and comparatively rich like a VP, I can't realistically beat the trend.
> The other possibility is you marrying someone who isn't born in India. If you did that, you can use your partner's country of birth instead of your own, when waiting for the priority date. But obviously this isn't something you can plan for, and I wouldn't recommend letting this guide your life decisions.
This is true. Your tradeoff point hits the nail on the head. I have heard some cases of people feeling like they were married to just for the GC, and some from the other side who stand some abuse. But your broad point stands.
> The last option is progressing your career to the point where you can mount a realistic eb1 application. I've heard anecdotally that it's very hard, but not as hard as people may think it is. If you work at it over a 10-20 year time frame, it may be very realistic.
Need to progress outside the US though. Unless I become a Carmack/Jeff Dean/famous inventor, the logic of the law seems to suggest that if I could rise to this position here, then an American could too. That's why the EB-1 has an allocation for applicants who became managers outside the US and transferred in.
I have upvoted you and I feel you make some great points. I wanted to iron out some details in case a third person was reading this.
As I noted in my comment, I can stay here for a while hoping for some way of getting a green card. It's those 10-20 years that I don't want to endure, with which again I need extreme luck (I would consider me saving up $1MM within 10 years or becoming a EB-1 level 'multi-national manager' not a guarantee).
If I did go the Canada route, I can do these things there (making $1MM or becoming an C-suite executive) - however unlikely those goals are, while not risking having my life uprooted. Canada doesn't pay as high as US, but then again I don't have to worry about going back to India (where jobs don't pay as well as either US or Canada) and finding a job there without notice.
Full blown citizenship is another matter, you’d have to give up your US citizenship, which still has its benefits. I can say with a great amount of certainty the US government cares a lot more for its citizens than other governments of the world, whose governments are usually outright hostile to their own citizenry/populace.
So my entire family migrated from India (not H1B though, so no idea what that process is like), and some are still migrating, and this is just ridiculous. Green cards and citizenship are issued quite regularly. I'm not going to say its fast, but it's not literally 100 years (can't tell if you were being sarcastic or not). My uncle got his a few years back, and got his citizenship this year. The system works, as long as there're no discrepancies.
[1] - friends and my roommate here in the bay [2] - my application
Staying at the same job, my salary will go from $180k usd to $128k usd ($170k cad). (Equity comp remains the same)
That's a pretty big cut, though at least for me it's worth it because of non-monetary reasons, like being closer to family, not dealing with immigration anymore, healthcare/education.
The money stuff isn't so bad. A downtown Toronto condo is a lot cheaper than San Francisco. That alone makes the pay cut easy enough to swallow. Either way I can comfortably live on a tech salary.
Starting prices for:
3 Bed SF condo: 1.2M usd
3 Bed TO condo: 0.7M usd (900k cad)
No rigorous comparison, just from me house hunting in both markets.
I used to make ~100k/yr CAD (75k/yr USD) when I was in TO around 6 years ago. I bought a house around 7 years ago for 550k. I did a remote stint for a Boulder company for a couple years (~120k/yr USD working from TO), then moved to SF (~200k/yr USD + ~100k/yr equity).
I'm a bit out of the loop w/ TO salaries nowadays, but your 170k CAD definitely seems to be on the very high end of the spectrum.
A few thoughts:
The biggest difference in pay comes from equity. ~100k/yr is pretty normal in SF big tech companies, whereas equity comp in TO is pretty much unheard of unless you're a partner in a company. Caveat: not all SF companies offer liquid equity, or even equity that is worth anything.
Taxes are higher for me working in SF (largely because salaries of comparable positions are higher in SF)
Living costs depend a lot on whether you have a spouse and/or kids. A bunkbed in SF goes for 1.6k/mo if you're single trying to save up. In TO, you can rent a cheap room for $600/mo. But for families: 2 bed condo is ~48k/yr USD, vs ~24k/yr in similar distance in TO. Another very important point: in SF, a foreigner spouse's ability to work can be extremely tricky (e.g. spouse in non-tech field would often not be able be get a work visa sponsorship at all). Canadians can get a TN visa relatively easily, but the H1B visa required for other foreigners isn't guaranteed. Green card timelines range from 2.5 years to virtually impossible to get. By comparison, getting a work visa in Canada is pretty straightforward, and the path to permanent residence is also relatively easy, regardless of country of origin.
Preschool costs ~28k/yr USD per kid in SF, vs ~18k/yr CAD (13k/yr USD)
Healthcare in SF costs me ~3.6k USD/yr base (plus copays/other fees depending on how frequently I actually use it) vs free in TO. Dental and vision costs are similar between SF and TO.
Goods generally cost less in SF. Milk costs ~$5/gallon USD in SF vs $10/4L CAD ($7 USD) in TO.
IMHO: SF is better for saving up while young, Toronto gets pretty attractive once you have a piggy bank to afford housing/build a family.
Something happened in the last 2 years in particular that has caused salaries to skyrocket (trump policies taking effect?).
If you have a family, the public schools are generally better in Toronto as well.
I regularly pick up a 4 L bag of 1% for about CAD 4.25 (USD 3.00). Where the heck are you doing your grocery shopping, the food hall at Holt Renfrew?
But hey, everyone loves to knock expensive SF housing.
28k/yr for preschool in SF is on the high end. That is not the median.
Please re-do all your prices with the median, not your handpicked most expensive version.
There are a few people lucky enough to 'make the deal' that you have.
Also, there are very few 'great companies' in Canada to work for, that can leverage high end talent - Canada is 1/10th the size of the US and spends less than 1/2 on R&D per capita. This is because Canada doesn't generally have the kinds of companies that are R&D intensive. Unfortunately.
I think most Toronto devs would happily move to California for a huge pay increase and a chance to work for a 'great company' whereas I feel few wold do the reverse.
I'm really wary of reading NPR articles like this because I feel they are basically playing the facts into a narrative of their political viewpoint.
I acknowledge I'm not in a position many will find themselves in. The shortage of senior engineering positions that pay accordingly is real. There's much more selection of jobs in SF than TO.
In Toronto if you’re an experienced sr engineer you can get this in the tech scene. It’s a much smaller employment pool, it it’s there. And there is a lot of r&d happening within that scene. That’s nothing to say of remotely working for an SV company.
The tech scene has exploded here over the past 2-3 years.
Vancouver office had 2200 people, similar situation.
Can we just stop comparing cities? Everyone loves to complain about the cost of living in SF and always brags about how they could buy a mansion in the midwest.
No one cares. It's all about location. There is a reason why California is the most populous state in the union despite it being so expensive (weather and jobs). There is a reason the population in the midwest is so low (lack of jobs and weather mostly).
These days it’s been hard to peg a good day to go skating because it will suddenly warm up and render all the ice sluggish. It’s really disappointing.
In short: a lot of us like our weather for the variations in it...
In Toronto it is roughly comparable to Chicago or NYC. Vancouver would be similar to Seattle.
Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, etc, would be much colder.
Right this moment, they are almost the same (46F in SF vs 37F in Toronto). Toronto winter usually goes between 5F and 40F, but summer is way warmer than SF (between 75F to 90F vs 60F to 70F in SF)
IF you can find a 3bd condo it will cost you WAY more than 900CAD.
For people looking to migrate from a developing country to a developed one, the situation is quite different.
Now Quebec City is entirely different. I could see language being more challenging there.
Honestly, Montreal is a hidden gem. Low cost housing, ton of culture and history.
The only drawbacks can be the Québécois anti-immigrant and anti-business climate, but it’s not stifling, just more noticeable than the rest of Canada.
There's a fair share of Anglo QCs that will keep speaking English and everything will still work (be workable) in English.
It's not hard to learn French to a day to day level though.
Those are just the top two–there are many other reasons to move to Canada than just money.
Far harder to own a home in Toronto on a tech salary.
And if you get a tech job in SF, you’ve got great health insurance, so not a major obstacle.
Most importantly, you cannot do anything besides your job on an H1B. No start ups, no side projects. You can't even BE in the US without a job and just bum around for a year. Every interaction with the US border folks makes me feel like a criminal. The visa fundamentally restricts the shape of your life in a way thats hard for residents to really understand.
I already get paid enough to retire comfortably when I'm older and it's no fun retiring young! Retirement costs in Canada are also significantly lower if you can count on free healthcare. Not worth it. I do miss the weather though :)
This whole thing is just super depressing. I feel like I've worked all my life for a great career in the US and it's for nothing if I have to leave everything behind at some point.
I am a foreign person from ROW (Rest of the World) in the US studying with F1 visa and trying to immigrate here via employment based options.
I have friends who also immigrated to Germany and Britain. The process is definitely easier and guaranteed there but for us ROW, the process does not look so bad to me right now. Maybe I just don't know how it should be.
After I graduate with F1, I can work up to 3 years with my OPT, companies apply to H1-B in that period. Some start the H1-B process even before you graduate if you have a bachelor's degree already. You have 4 chances in H1-B in the end.
EB-2 green card is also an option for us, as far as I know I can get that in less than 2 years. I've read about people who applied to EB-2 directly without H1-B and got that in their STEM OPT extension duration.
Finally, even though it is a slim chance, there is also diversity visa lottery. I have friends who got picked from DV lottery while studying here with F1. Everything became easier for them.
The US is still attractive to people like me, I don't think how this article portrays the immigration is true.
"Due to US external policy and cost of life I can't see it being financially practical to move. Although, I would gladly consider any remote position."
I think the immigration complexity is the lesser problem there. My research based on housing, school, transport and food tells me it looks like absurdly expensive. To be able to even consider to move there I would need a salary bump of 3x-5x. No way this will ever happen.
* Sunnyvale, CA
* Bentonville, AR
* Bangalore, India
Of course they get to poke fun at how they cross two timezones and go back 3 decades culturally in time when they fly out to visit. ;-)
The Bangalore folk poke fun at the US based ones at how cold/wet/expensive/boring we all are. It's all in good fun but it really does hammer in how home is where you currently are.
Edit - I
My colleges take their SV salaries and retreat to somewhere else when they want a family.
I think Canada is a better place to raise a family. Or, many other countries are probably comparable (or better).
The whole thing here is stock, which takes a couple years to really stack up, but once it does, you’re making a lot of money.
You'd be surprised. Granted it was over a period of 4 years, but I did hit that 5x.
And from H-1B to greencard, you again need company sponsorship.
Canada looks good now because with Express Entry, you can become a PR relatively fast and from there within 5 years, you get citizenship. From there, getting work in the US as a tech worker can be much easier through a TN visa.
Even getting H1-B is challenging, especially as someone freshly graduated ("entry level positions do not qualify as skilled labour" is what the USCIS told me).
You can fill the blank with essentially any non-US location and it would remain correct. Nowhere in the world pays tech workers as much as US does, in absolute or relative terms. Most of the world, Canada included, has priced developer salaries close to engineer salaries. The US is the sole exception where developer salaries are priced close to doctor salaries. Let's not pretend Canada is the outlier—US is.
I am not saying US is wrong and the rest of the world is right or vice versa in figuring out the correct price for tech work. I am just saying that there are two schools of thought, one the US, the other the rest of the world, and I am sure both have good reasons for their approach.
This is incorrect. Good software developers in Poland, and to some extent the Ukraine, are enjoying salaries comparable with doctors there, if not more.
Actually, in the U.S. it is common for a FANG worker's salary to surpass that of doctors'.
Real estate is expensive to buy and salaries are low, though, that's for sure.
what's the cost of healthcare, childcare, and transportation like in Canada? I know this discussion personally because I've seen it play out between European and American tech jobs and I've seen a lot of difference in cost for raising children.
In Germany or the Netherlands good public education, kindergardens and so on set you back a few hundred bucks a month, I've seen Americans pay tens of thousands per year. Same for two cars that you don't need if you're an urban resident near a tech hub.
However, I think given the right opportunity I would still head back to the U.S. Things are fucked in the U.S. but the sense of scale, velocity is unmatched. In Toronto you feel that people's attitude is just not the same. There is no hunger or lust to be number #1 and I have always been competitive personality type. In NYC even traditional enterprise corporations (where I worked) there is an intensity and drive that's missing here. Call it the american spirit.
Salary as this stage is relatively unimportant, making 150 or 250k is about the about the same to me. But the scale and types of opportunities is something else. There are roles and jobs that only exist in the U.S.
That being said, for me going back is just a tour of duty, once you are past the journeyman stage of your life and wanting to start a family, then Canada wins unquestioned. The environment, benefits, healthcare, and most importantly education for your children will outweigh just about any salary you can command state-side. Because now you are talking about intangible things that are harder and harder to buy with money.
My opinion is, stay in the U.S. when you are young and/or talented. Then, if you are of Indian or Chinese birth, move elsewhere to start a family and take a senior position in Canada. Typically if you come from reputable shop state-side and demonstrate your worth, you can find a job where people will treat you with respect for that experience. They might not be able to compensate you the same way but you can usually get bumped up a notch.
If you are of white or European heritage and you are in a good place then you can consider staying the U.S. if you can make it work.
Also, if your hypothesis were true, you probably wouldn't see an influx of big companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Intel, Uber, etc.) opening shop in Canada - the companies are obviously moving to the people in this case. Seems fairly obvious to me (as an Australian looking at options for permanent residence in the US) that the US has sabotaged its brain draining ability in the last few years.
Why? Because it's very easy to do so and rent/property prices in Vancouver/Toronto have skyrocketed but tech salaries are nothing compared to what you can make in US in USD. Also taxes, cost of living, etc. in select states in US (texas for example) are much lower. Even in seattle, etc. you pay higher rent, but your salary more than makes up for it.
Canadian policy basically makes sure that we lose the brightest to US .
It’s really not, though - the point is to only allow people who literally can’t be found anywhere else to migrate. They’re looking for one in a million, not just anybody with a decent education who’s interested in living here. The immigration policy was broken for decades and is just now being fixed. We should expect to see lower, but better, immigration.
I’d say expenses are 50% higher (Toronto to SF, mostly housing), but income is 100-200% higher.
And whenever I'm making more than I'm spending, I'd happily multiply both numbers.
I hope these changes drive up tech salaries in Canada -- I fear they won't. Currently they're about 20-40% less than the US particularly due to the currency difference. Cost of living is also a bit higher, and absolutely insane in Vancouver (and a lesser degree, Toronto).
I suspect it will continue the H-1B trend, in that it companies won't pay better wages, just outsource to cheaper Canadian labor, who are in turn taxed higher and squeezed harder.
And along the way they will drive up housing prices, and drive up general revenue and consumer spending since there are simply more bodies in the economy.
The system benefits the owners of capital and the migrants themselves, but not existing ('legacy') Canadians.
Along the way you get all kinds of social problems caused by the excess of males and the preponderance of Asian families to selectively abort female fetuses.
It also depends on where the immigrants come from. Chinese and Indians have the longest wait list, and therefore its natural for them to look for better options. They are right to do so, imo.
There's also the weather and cost, the large cities in Canada can be insanely expensive, with terrible weather, and salaries aren't anywhere near US levels. If your rent is 2-3k and you're making 100k CAD a year, it doesn't feel like you're living the dream. Want to buy a home in Vancouver or Toronto? No big deal, just fork over 1-2 million CAD for a 1 hour one way commute.
The quality of immigrants is a factor too. The US still sweeps up the best and brightest of academia and business.
I know more than a few Canadians (from immigrant backgrounds) that moved to SV recently purely for the weather and salary reasons. I wonder if when they get their citizenship, many of those in the article will be back in the US or moving there.
(And no, I don't have a criminal record, or indeed any hint of what I might have "done wrong")
See charts here: https://medium.com/@petilon404/us-prosperity-is-dependent-on...
The average tax rate for a single person making 250K in Ontario is 39.80% [2]
But with the extra taxes you also get some better benefits like healthcare, cheaper education. Of course if your main goal is to save as much money as you can, then it probably better in the US because you earn more salary and USD converts better into other currencies.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#I4RNWQ9WYm [2] https://simpletax.ca/calculator
(Source: https://simpletax.ca/calculator)
You're immediately forgetting State taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and such. That 34% quickly becomes 44 to 50% depending on where you live.
Utter bullshit. Source: the many friends and family members who have been treated by the system.
I don't think I get it.
The Bay Area isn't even close to full, it's just NIMBYs who hate any change blocking things.
I meant politically, the Bimbys don’t want more people in the bay area that’s why so many anti growth politicians get elected
I was looking to move from the UK.
US salaries were the highest, but it was too difficult to get in.
So I started looking in Canada and found a job in New Brunswick.
I like it here, but part of me still wishes I could have gotten into Texas instead.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/internationa...
Over 44 million residents of the US were not born in the US, as opposed to 8 million in Canada. As a percentage of the population, that's lower than Canada, but by weight of sheer numbers, the US shouldn't have any problem with this.
The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year, we just don't have much of a skilled immigration system - ours is largely based on family reunification. Canada and Australia, on the other hand, have a points based system that favors immigrants with education and skills.
I actually do blame the high tech industry for some of this. I just don't think it's a "bug" that the US system was largely based on a very indentured approach, where high tech companies got to decide who is allowed into the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain, with long, grueling waits for a green card, where a would-be immigrant was beholden to an employer (called a "sponsor") and could be fired and deported at the employer's pleasure.
Facebook, Google, Apple, all the big companies - you see, what they wanted was a freer, more open system where skilled immigrants got to choose what they'd study, where they'd work, what companies they'd work for, and even whether they'd work in tech in the first place, in accordance with their own personal values and interests and market signals such as salary, cost of living, and work conditions.
That's what google and Facebook wanted. Unfortunately, all they could get was an visa that they bestow and control, putting them in a position to determine micro aspects of a would-be immigrants life.
Right. This utterly corporate self serving H1B guest worker visa system that undermines markets and is an affront to freedom did terrible damage to the public perception of skilled immigration.
Want to be clear, I don't blame anyone for working on an H1B, this wasn't your choice, and it was your only option. Don't blame you for going to Canada, either. But I just don't buy it from the corporate lobbyists. This was hardly a bug, to the companies that make heavy use of the H1B, the control over the worker's right to live int the US is a feature, and they lobbied hard for it.
It seems pretty hard to argue that the US's current immigration policies aren't helping out Canada right now.
It takes at least 5 years to get Canadian citizenship. 5 years is a long time to build a life somewhere that people wouldn't want to migrate to the US. You are assuming it's just more money that motivates everyone.
Whatever the ultimate corporate goals may be, this topic is clearly a control issue, not a talent one.
In software, talent can do what it wants wherever it feels like doing it--businesses will yield to it.
Now that the US has shot itself on its foot and others are waking up, the playing field appears to be getting more balanced once again.
One: These companies want to pay less for more. Smart developers are not going to go for that, so they'll look elsewhere. Then the companies can say "Oh, we can't find anyone, boo-hoo, let's hire someone cheaper now. From overseas."
Two: See one.
IF you don't believe me, just do a job search and see all the shit software jobs out there. 12 bucks an hour for a full stack? 75k a year for 5 years experience in five languages? Oh, and you gotta be DevOps too.
These companies are just trying to take advantage of a system.