Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lewisl9029 3665 days ago
The US is a big place, so if you look at it as a whole it's definitely not going to look as attractive. If you look specifically at the tech hubs however, even if we don't account for the 2 biggest US tech hubs, SV and NYC, places like Seattle and Boston still have much higher median salary and salary potential compared to the two biggest Canadian tech hubs, Toronto and Vancouver, and with comparable cost of living to boot.

The AngelList salaries data confirms this at least when it comes to the startup job sector: https://angel.co/salaries

1 comments

Sampling a bunch of the jobs listed for Seattle shows that most are senior level. Senior level in Toronto is less on average, but it's definitely not half as much in comparable places.

One notable exception is Amazon, who starts people out of school at 90k. This is definitely an outlier. If you can get into Amazon out of school, might be worth taking advantage of it.

> Sampling a bunch of the jobs listed for Seattle shows that most are senior level. Senior level in Toronto is less on average, but it's definitely not half as much in comparable places.

I fail to see the value in making a distinction in terms of seniority unless you have good reasons to believe why the Seattle postings on AngelList might be skewed towards senior level to a higher degree than the Toronto postings, but your point is certainly valid.

If we look at the aggregate data, Toronto and Vancouver have average salaries of $61K and $59K respectively, and Seattle and Boston, $92K and $91K. That's closer to 1.5x, so "more than double" was definitely a bit hyperbolic, but this vicious death spiral (of low Canadian salaries -> brain drain into the US -> under-competing Canadian companies -> rinse and repeat) has been taking quite a toll on the Canadian tech sector, and has serious implications for its future, so I'd rather err on the side of hyperbole over understatement because I have a vested interest in this matter as a Canadian citizen and tech worker.