I relocated to Toronto SPECIFICALLY to work for Joist, exactly one week ago. I was laid off along with everyone else within 6 days of working for them! Prior to that I was working in the USA for a few years; I'm now in a position where I have to figure out next steps with regards to my career :/ I'm still unsure why they hired me and brought me down here? I'm also hoping that they pay me for my time there (I worked my hardest to impress them, albeit only a week!)
By the way by my count it was closer to 90 people laid off, so they are depressing these numbers.
+1 for the above. This sure was a dick move, but from the past week OP has probably already discovered Toronto is an amazing, clean, and courteous city (from my limited experience) compared to many others. Don't know what their work/visa situation is, but it's worth shopping around for another job and giving the place another shot.
> Don't be thrown off of Toronto by one douchebag company
What do you think the company should do? It's a company not a person who left their spouse when they got cancer. They are doing what they feel they should do in order to thrive and survive.
Now you can argue that you think they are wrong, that is that they don't need to move. But then again you won't suffer the downside of the wrong decision. They will. Companies do what companies have to do in order to grow the business based on how they interpret the facts. That is what joist has done.
If you're considering laying off 2/3rds of your staff and relocating the remainder to another country, maybe you shouldn't be actively hiring. They didn't come up with this idea last week.
The company should be open and honest with it's employees. It shouldn't be telling them everything is fine, hiring new people, relocating them from other countries and then a day later firing most of the staff.
A decision like this isn't sudden. It's the difference between trying to work things out with your wife, talking through your differences and eventually deciding it won't work, vs leaving her without warning and taking the dog and bank account.
From the other comments in the linked article, it looks like they hired more than one person that relocated from another city and were let go in < 1 week of starting employment.
I agree with you that it's a business and they are always doing what's in their best interest which they have every right to do. I think even with that in mind, this could have been handled a bit differently to avoid really sticking it to some people.
Given the stories of how they continued hiring people until the end, laying off people who had moved there and had only worked for a month or less when it happened, I absolutely can refer to them as a douchebag company.
#joist60 is trending on Twitter and lots of Toronto startups and software organizations are supporting those laid off. Some of your peers are tweeting that hashtag as well. Head there and take a look at the offers.
Something similar happened a few months ago in a Dutch company that I was sent to have a look at. Utterly disgusting, to cause people to uproot their lives knowing full well that there is no intention to follow through.
That is extremely shitty, and the people in charge should be shamed. They had to have known this was coming far before you starting there. For them to continue with that, knowing the position it would leave you in, solidifies the idea that those in charge are awful people.
As an engineering student at UWaterloo it's pretty depressing to watch most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV.
There's logic in it for them: American companies are offering huge sums of money by Canadian standards, the weather is nicer, and the opportunities seem better.
If I didn't have serious reservations about living in the US, I would probably do the same.
However, I find it particularly reprehensible when companies make the move. For them, it's counter-intuitive: they have access to a huge pool of talent, both experienced devs and the vast armies of grads from UofT, UW and others.
Furthermore, they're getting this talent at dirt cheap rates, since the Canadian peso is awful at the moment and salaries are significantly lower here than those in SV and the wider US.
Their expenses go up because they have to pay in USD (instant 25% hit in purchasing power), and they get thrown into the rat race of competing for talent in SV.
I really wonder what goes through the mind of some of these moronic execs when they make moves like this.
Blanket statements are silly, "SF is better", "Toronto/Wloo is better". Silly blanket statements.
If you are a company that NEEDS high growth to be sustainable in the long term (Uber, Google's ML products for example), then SF is your place. Capital to fund your growth flows like the Niagara. If you are a company that is serving other startups, SF is also great for that.
However, if your company is solving an interesting technical/scientific problem or is a niche industry product or if you are not affected by high/low growth or easy capital, then the "value" engineering talent in Toronto/Waterloo is perfect (see: Geoffrey Hinton's NN group at UToronto). Keep grinding, you'll win in the long run.
Joist probably should've made this call earlier on. No idea why they waited this long.
P.S: Most smart advice in Waterloo and Toronto will tell you this exact same thing.
If "most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV" then "companies make the move". You've laid out in your comment exactly why a company would rationally choose to move from Toronto to SF.
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?
Generally for a tech startup, I do think it can make sense to move. Plus, necessity is the mother of invention, Airbnb and Uber were both started because of how painful it can be to live in SF. What if the founders had been somewhere affordable with great public transportation?
They would have worked on something else, and someone else, preferably someone who doesn't believe in just snubbing labor laws, would have come up with the idea. Remember, Uber isn't a unique idea. There were at least 3 companies that came up with it around the same time.
As I hear it, it all comes down to financing. Talent's easy to find, sure, but raising money anywhere in Canada vs. SF is no contest.
It's still a shitty way to treat people, but I can see why companies still want to be in the valley. I just wish we could attract more investors to Toronto. There are a lot of super-psyched tech and design folk in this city.
It's not quite that simple - for example Canada has a number of advantages and good programs for early stage startups. What is true is there isn't much access to SV style VC funds, so if your model is dependent on that, you have a problem. Other sources can be pretty good though.
What all of these tech hubs need is to popularize their own style of growth that can contrast favorably with SV's '80s Wall Street-esque brand of maniac growth chasing. Once a city figures out how to do that, then the "must be in SV" meme will weaken.
Yes, my current startup is finding it very, very difficult to raise the Series A financing here in Toronto. Canadian VC firms are few and far between, and concentrate on the oil/gas sector mostly, and find tech scary and unpredictable.
On the flip side, the SF VCs don't like investing outside their local sandbox.
In spite of the language, cultural and historic similarities between the two nations, the US and Canada do not enjoy free economic relations across borders.
This is the fault of both nations. The frictions are imposed by elected officials that limit the freedom of people to cross the border to work, dictate how taxes are paid, etc.
This also applies to investors, as investors must deal with the regulatory regime in the company's location.
I'd say things like this reflect a big failure of both the US and Canadian governments to make the borders transparent for business. All the moving expenses, severance packages, wasted training, visa fees, etc. etc. is all a total economic loss.
The people who suffer are those on the margin who get laid off or who can't afford lawyers to do immigration paperwork, or who don't quite meet the standards that bureaucrats outlined for a work visa.
Economic freedom is just as important, just as relevant to people's lives and futures as the other freedoms we value.
As someone working in tech in San Francisco I was thinking the same thing. Sounds like they left a lot of engineering talent twisting in the wind. Good luck replacing them in the Bay Area. Especially after this news gets out. In other news the phrase: "Canadian Peso" deserves a golf clap.
> most of the best upper year engineers finish their studies and then abandon Canada for SV.
That might have something to do with it. If none of the good people are willing to stay for reasonable rates, companies may have trouble finding people regardless. That can reduce the costs of moving to SV.
For example: if the people you'd want to hire are comparing your offer against a SV salary, you may need to pay SV salaries anyway. But you'll still lose out on people who also like the job density of SV, or the weather, or that their friends have moved.
Out of curiosity, how does the process of job hunting work in the Ontario area if they get a job in SV? Does the SV company offer a visa permit or does the student apply for work permit in advance?
I'm a Canadian who recently relocated to SV from London, UK. Before that I was at RIM/BBRY in Waterloo. After receiving my job offer and an invitation letter from the company I flew to the US and, at the border, applied for a "TN Status". Cost me $50 and about an hour and a half. It gives me a 3 year work permit at my employer, which is renewable.
Particularly for Canadians <-> Americans going across the border int tech, this is made quite easy by the TN "visa" program (it isn't really a visa, but part of the NAFTA agreement).
In other cases, the work status conversation is an important part of hiring and negotiation.
Canada is a country, not a dear friend. Workers and companies owe nothing to it. If it makes more sense for someone to leave, then more power to them. Canada can either try to make itself more appealing or deal with people leaving.
Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
Disclosure: UW Comp Eng '98 grad, still in Canada.
> Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Even foreign students who have no intention of remaining in Canada after university are still adding value.
Why? Because when they go abroad and do good work, they maintain and improve the image of UW. There's a reason it became a world class school, and you can think of former students doing work abroad as sort of like advertising.
Besides, foreign students pay more. Their tuition is not nearly as cheap as that of domestic students.
> Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
This is the case in many countries on earth which engage in socialism.
> I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
That would suck, quite frankly. I'm a Canadian who moved abroad after university because I wanted to gain some perspective and see more of the world.
I'm not a resident of Canada currently, so you're saying I should be saddled with additional debt because I left Canada without contributing to the economy?
Why shouldn't education be a right? I had to pay for my education, as I assume you did. Yes, it was subsidized by tax payer money, but in the end I spent ~$35,000 CAD (total) on tuition for my B.Eng.
I had to work summers and internships to pay for my tuition, and housing expenses when I was in university.
Will I return to Canada? I don't know, maybe. I'm still having a blast working abroad, and I'm still in my 20s, so who knows what will happen.
What I can say though, is I'm really glad that Canada didn't charge me an additional tax for going abroad after my education. If I had any kind of significant debt, I wouldn't have been able to afford to move to Europe and look for work.
This is silly protectionism. UWaterloo students abroad has arguably what's built its reputation. So goes for everywhere else you hear "Keep all my <local resources> in my <local area>"
If you require students to spend X years working in Y, then it's not a subsidy anymore, it sounds a lot more like a scholarship. What you're suggesting would have to somehow be structured to let students choose not to accept the agreement, and at that point its not "for everyone" anymore.
This sort of agreement definitely does exist, though. My sister in law went to med school under one requiring her to work a number of years in rural parts of the state after residency.
See, this is why everyone hates businesses and businesspeople. They say they "owe nothing to the city/state/province/country", yet still expect all these places to bend over backwards for them at the expense of the people living there.
Maybe your business should give reason for why it should exist, and why anyone should care about it first.
Now that they've gone to the expense of moving their remaining 30 employees to San Francisco and have demonstrated such incredible loyalty to their employees, let's see how many of those remaining 30 take advantage of the many opportunities in the Valley to jump ship.
I was apart of the reddit exodus when they closed the Salt Lake City and New York City offices (I was in SLC.) It only took me 90 days which was the minimum requirement to not have to pay your moving expenses back. Since then, which happened in January 2015, I would roughly estimate that 50-60% has turned over at reddit.
All of this to say it typically doesn't end well for the company unless this is what they're planning on.
The answer to your question is yes, that's the way it worked, but I didn't do it intentionally. My next company just happened to call right around then.
Not just that, but how many people will join their ranks as well? The story won't go unnoticed and most people in the Tech Industry will hear about it in some shape or form.
They will have a hard time to find new people. Especially seniors. They wont leave their good, stable jobs for an employer like that.
If anyone whose been let go by Joist is reading this: I'm a developer with Amazon in Toronto. There's a lot going on here- 300 developers in 4 or 5 major divisions doing all kinds of interesting stuff. The pay's good (for Toronto), we're well located (beside Union station), and of course we're hiring.
Like all of Amazon, depends on the team. Pretty much all engineers at Amazon have on-call rotations which is what most people talk about when they complain about work-life balance here.
On-call can be good or bad, but if you're a manager and your team's on-call is awful then soon all the developers move to other teams (it's pretty easy to transfer around in this company). Upper managers know this fact, and push their managers to improve this. My current team, I have never been paged outside of work hours since I joined 6 months ago.
In terms of working hours, when I first joined I'd let myself work crazy hours and my work-life balance was unhealthy. I soon realized that A: I didn't need to do this to get my job done and B: this was killing me. I work 9-5 now, plus delta (get in at 10, work to 6, get in at 8:30, maybe leave at 4:30). On occasion, I'll put in a crazy night or something to get a big project done but I take the hours back on another day to make up the difference.
If I was in Seattle, I'd be doing the same thing. I'd make a little bit more money and I'd have better beer available.
I worked at Amazon for four years and absolutely loved it.
I never understood the work/life balance problem people had.
Usually those that struggled were just weak engineers to begin with and felt like they had to put in 10-12 hours a day just to avoid being put on a performance improvement plan / laid off (i.e. wrong fit to begin with)
I'm sympathetic to the idea that people have different experiences with companies - especially large ones with a lot of variance between orgs and teams, but this:
> "Usually those that struggled were just weak engineers to begin with"
just seems like an awful thing to say that is almost certainly untrue.
Full disclosure: I spent 2 years at Amazon and knew many extremely strong engineers who struggled, as well as some who had great experiences.
I feel sorry for the guy literally working there less then a day and getting the boot.
Shows some really serious problems in management. Who the hell hires people when they know very well they won't stay and make the whole staff redundant. Well, except for friends and family of course. Either it was a lack of communication between management and HR, or they just really didn't give a flying f*ck.
Another grim story about startup life. Not everything that has four legs is a unicorn apparently.
I know someone who left a finance job in NYC to move to London. Was fired in his first week; the trading desk he had joined was abruptly closed down. I guess senior management kept the plans secret from the line managers who kept on hiring without knowing what was coming. So I don't think this sort of thing only happens in start-ups (if anything, I would guess this type of thing is more likely to happen in a large company where your hiring manager is several levels down from the CEO and might not have any idea that his business unit is about to be closed/divested/relocated/etc).
When I was hired by Google, I lived in Chicago. They wanted me to relocate to NYC because there weren't any open positions in Chicago at the time. Within a week of joining I got an email sent to all engineers in NYC asking if anyone wanted to move to Chicago. SIGH.
That's awful; not least because (depending on their role) gardening leave might apply, preventing them from getting a job in the finance industry for months
would get gardening leave for sure, prob 3 months. That doesn't stop you looking for new work tho, and the leave itself is not a problem, all banks expect to have to wait 3 months before a new recruit can join.
It's not just restricted to startups. I know a few stories of F500s who hired people then fired them days or weeks later. In one case one guy never made it to his desk.
I don't think HR was given any heads up. I imagine management wanted to keep everything business as usual until the last moment.
Atleast with F500s you could imagine that it's simply an issue of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. With startups of this size, you imagine that people doing the hiring are also aware of the pending move and mass layoffs.
Surely it's harder to get talent in the bay area? Lots of competition for staff and you can't attract people there because those who want be there would have already gone for one of the other companies.
What's always interesting is that every startup is building a world class team with some of the best developers in the world. Surely every startup can't hire the best because the best is finite, otherwise they'd be hiring the average.
If a company which does something in the diy space wants the best of the best then who is actually developing the languages and tooling? If the best developers are helping my tiler to invoice me then who is working machine learning, software to cure cancer, language design, software to control space travel, etc?
We can't all be the best, and sometimes you've gotta think. I help people in the construction industry, I'm not Google, and in fact it's irresponsible of me to try and hire the best people because they're going to do so much more for society working somewhere else.
This is a good example of why you should treat interviews as a two way street. Don't just worry about convincing them that you are the right candidate. You should also try to determine if they are the right employer.
I view unsuccessful interviews as a way to see some city I wouldn't have otherwise visited and more importantly get experience with current job interview styles. It takes time, but it's not a total waste. Though, some companies make it hard or take very long to get travel reimbursement.
Easy enough to say if you're a developer and can afford to be choosy. For most fields, though, the labor market is heavily biased in favor of the employer.
This has nothing to do with hiring and everything to do with finding a buyer. A lot of companies are told by potential buyers "if you were in SV we would buy you". Relocating lets them cut head count, improve financial outlook (new cost structure) and get closer to a potential acquisition. Definitely in the interest of the investors.
I came to the valley in a forced relocation some time ago. In that case, we also lost >50% of the team, including engineering. (I stayed until my green card came through then jumped ship.) It was clear, though, that the VPs and up didn't care, because they had their heart set on being Silicon Valley Executives, and damned if they were going to let the rank-and-file get in their way. They were so caught up in the glory of VC and speeding down 280 that they were not interested in the business argument. And as for the departing staff? "It's Silicon Valley, we can easily replace staff"
Here I get a sense of the same story. There is no way it's difficult to hire talent in Toronto, which consistently ranks as one of the most desirable cities in the world. A simple Google search also will produce hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about how the Canadian immigration system is a breeze compared to the US's. Thus I believe this executive team is the same as my own - determined to be 'San Francisco startup CEO', and damned the cost.
By the way, my company's technology fell behind its competitors' (perhaps because of the loss of talent?) and was sold off to a conglomerate ~5 years later, at the same valuation as it had pre-relocation. The CEO had departed the company by then.
Yeah, it doesn't feel like things really ever work out, retention-wise, for companies that move from elsewhere to SV. Invariably they make "cost of living adjustments" to comp, but never enough to actually be competitive with the infamous SF/SV market, and so their talent drains as soon as they set foot in the Bay Area.
This particular news about Joist is just confusing - it looks like they've laid off a huge portion of their staff, with no replacements on the immediate horizon. Doesn't this mean that the business has effectively ground to a halt while they re-hire in SV?
It sounds less like a move and more like a reboot.
It does sound like they kept most of their engineers, and shed mostly CS staff - which shows a remarkable disdain for those positions. I would be very nervous about working for this company in one of those positions in the future.
>> There is no way it's difficult to hire talent in Toronto, which consistently ranks as one of the most desirable cities in the world.
It's not hard to hire talent in Toronto if you're willing to pay full price.
In my experience, a lot of startups will try to use the lure of risky options/equity/bonus promises with the occasional signing bonus in exchange for a "startup discount" on the base salary.
Combine high living expenses of Toronto with the fact that there are so many large companies in Toronto offering stable jobs, your talent pool shrinks to those people who can or are willing to take on the risk of working for a startup.
Sure - now take that situation, and throw into the mix having Google and Facebook 30-mins away and them having the budget to outbid you on anybody they want at any time. That's what Joist management is walking into by moving to SF.
Half the team were employees in every legal definition of what makes an employee (they deducted and punished "independent contractors" which you can only do with employees" - as the case was with Uber and they settled) but were categorized as "Independent Contractors" until April, they were forced to sign new contracts saying they employees but were under "probation" for another 3 months, so until the end of June. They planned this from the beginning, so they didn't have to have a lawsuit when they did this and say "hey you signed a contract" .... forced signed, they changed the pay structure in May without a change in contract either. These employees only got 2 weeks, despite being a week and a half away from passing probation.
Does anyone know if this is true, because this is really poor behavior.
> to achieve our vision for Joist, we need the best talent in the world
This is a standard mantra of startup lore, but if I put on my nitpicking hat, is it strictly true?
I mean we're not talking about the Manhattan Project here.
Plus it's not as though there isn't intensely fierce competition for talent in the valley. Just because a lot of talented people are there, doesn't mean you'll get to hire them. The "best talent in the world" is already bid up to high levels by those few companies in the Bay Area who are straddling rivers of gold.
Where I work, we have offices all over the world, including one here in NYC and another in Toronto. Because of the timezone alignment and relatively short travel times, we're now experimenting with more and more remote pairing to share projects between the two offices.
In Joist's position I might have considered opening an NYC office instead. It's not as though this city lacks for talent either and if they feel like paying a lot for it, the finance folks have kindly bid up top performers for them. They can get all the difficulties of hiring in the valley, but much closer to home.
Well, we make them do a really hard HackerRank test, and then write syntactically correct code to print a binary tree in raster order on a whiteboard. And then we don't hire them because their salary demands are too high so we get someone cheaper with less experience.
We used to have a question for interviewers where I work: "Will this person raise the average?"
I used to detest it. I left no shortage of smartarse remarks about infinite limits in a finite world.
In fact nobody really liked that question and it was eventually removed in favour of variations on the core question: do you want to work with this person?
Yeah this really stuck out to me. Why does Joist require top talent anyways? It seems to me that the technical work they'd need is pretty routine web application building. I really don't see Joist attracting top-talent in SV anyways. Unless they're planning on offering top dollar why would any top talent go work for a startup in the home improvement space?
Why not run operations separately (those with limited ability to relocate, mentioned in article) from technology (those with easier access).
A 2-site center with good right people and good workflows (and established, in this case) brings compounded gains. A 90 people company is well above the border-line in establishing dual-site offices.
I interviewed with Joist 2ish years ago but after the first interview I didn't think the culture was conducive to my career goals. News like this makes me feel like I dodged a bullet.
Getting any tech job at this point in time is simply a matter of which bullet you will finally, defeatedly choose not to dodge. Every company wants your fealty, overt signals that you'll cower yourself to them, much, much more than any kind of technology competence or aptitude.
It's either this, or a person hasn't had enough experience yet to know this, and so they still have bright-eyed optimism that this one company is the one that's going to elevate their career, treat them in a minimally acceptable manner, etc., and you can bet the recruiting staff is banking on finding these people. It's very depressing.
I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of. I'm sure this decision was not an easy one.
Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business.
His company just hired a couple of people and let them go a week later in a layoff. Clearly, the problem is the international trade system, nothing to do with management's ethics or lack of commitment to its team members.
I can't speak for the ethics of the other members of the management team, but I think it's unreasonable to assume that the decision was made for any other reason than necessity.
It may be that the decision to hire new people a week earlier was out of optimism that moving to the bay area was not going to be necessary.
"I've worked with Joist's CTO before and he's got a very high ethical standard and strong commitment to teams he's a part of."
Clearly he doesn't, otherwise he wouldn't be doing shady stuff like having the company continue to hire people who have to relocate, only to lay them off a week later.
"Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business."
Why don't they just open a US office and get their "senior talent" there, if it's that easy to hire them in SV? And if it is easier, why would they cost more in SV? Maybe because there's competition?
Also, it's a bit of a cliche that you need the best people to be successful. Organisation is far more important. That other cliche that the team is more than the sum of its parts is far more true.
I moved abroad with a very small team a few years ago. It totally broke the culture. People went on intellectual holiday, and haven't recovered. We also became insanely insular, not getting any real inputs from other financial industry insiders.
I have to imagine they're going to have trouble finding talent in San Francisco for the same reason they have trouble finding talent in Toronto. It's not exactly a non-competitive area.
They might have access to more "top talent", but there will be 10x more companies after each of those 30 remaining employees as well who I'm sure will leave this caring company as soon as they get green cards.
> Kathan told BetaKit that the “incredible difficulty” of acquiring senior-level talent in Toronto
As some companies are (finally) starting to realize, there are incredibly talented people all over the world, who are not within 1.5 hours of your office. Allowing them to work remotely opens your company up to a much higher caliber of talent for the same, if not lower, cost. The tools are out there now and they work well. I have a distributed team of developers for my small consulting company, and I feel no pressure to open an office any time soon.
EDIT: Why was this post flagged? Comments now disabled?
Another option: offer SF "senior-level talent" salaries in Toronto. They'll be spending more than this by relocating and then hiring down there anyway. I expect they'd find that there's plenty of talent already in Toronto, or willing to move.
To me, it seems pretty obvious that the move to SF is more about image than about whom they can hire.
I'm not sure. If you're in San Francisco you can hire from any major metropolitan area in North America, and probably the world. Relocation tends not to be that big of an issue - it's Silicon Valley, there's tremendous opportunity. It's not just that the "talent" is already in SF, it's that the talent from all over the world is drawn to the Valley by brand recognition alone.
I disagree, I know a lot of people who reluctantly moved to the Bay Area for salary who would rather be elsewhere. The Bay Area appeals to some people, but not everybody
Yeah, but the question here isn't "Bay Area" v "Everywhere Else", it's "Bay Area" v "Toronto". Toronto has lower salaries, colder weather, and generally fewer investors that are more risk-averse (which puts companies there at more risk existentially, especially in early stages). It's a beautiful city, I love Toronto, I was born and grew up there. But there's a lot of work to be done to make it competitive with the Bay Area.
The saving grace is this: I imagine the counterintuitive first step of continuing to bolster Toronto's tech scene is actually efflux of talent towards the Bay Area. The few who do "strike oil" in SV are more likely to direct some of that capital back home, make bigger bets, and mentor entrepreneurs there.
Of course, your first qualm (lower salaries) was exactly what the comment said to remove by providing SF "senior-level talent" salaries. USD-converted rates and all. Quality of life in Toronto with those salaries would be excellent, and I think it would attract a lot of talent.
Expanding into the US is a great move, and creating a US office to support that makes perfect sense. Moving the actual HQ to the US seems more questionable. And getting rid of two thirds of their employees when they are still ramping up sounds just plain crazy.
I think the smarter move would have been to create a US office and locate it close to either customers (What is the main US center for the construction business, anyway?) or capital (meaning the Bay Area). But retain the office in Toronto and the current staff. They could then choose to hire additional staff in either the US or Canada, whichever made more sense. For ordinary talent hiring in Canada, even in Toronto, would be significantly cheaper.
I've encountered companies that are already globally distributed but try to force you to move to one of their offices permanently. I can imagine arguments for it, but the arguments I was presented with were unconvincing and more of the hand-wavy kind.
The person they want already exists in SF, because their perfect candidate hits the bullet point 'exists in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.'
As long as everyone continues to believe California is some sort of special, magical place, this will happen. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Everyone goes to California to work at the 'best' places, the 'best' places go to California to get the 'best' people.
It's amazing how many of these 'best' places are run by micromanagers who can not deal with remote workers. So to work at the 'best' places, the 'best' people all have to cram into one physical place to make web apps.
As long as everyone continues to believe California is some sort of special, magical place
It is when it comes to the enforcement of non-competes. True for the US in general, and a few minutes with Google makes it look like they're not well favored by Canadian courts, which prefer non-solicitation provisions, but non-competes still can be enforceable, and I can speak from harsh experience outside of California that they have a chilling effect without you ever stepping into a courtroom. Killed two neat pieces of/concepts of technology as well.
Non-solicitation can also get nasty, when it includes your former co-workers, and I've gotten the impression that they're also not very enforceable in California, I recall a court case where a salesman was able to take a customer list, which is considered to be a gold standard of enforceability in e.g. Virginia.
Massachusetts has finally started to realize this is crippling them, but the last time I checked wasn't able to muster the political will to make the change. Other locations that say they want to be the next Silicon Valley ... nope, they're not willing to give this up at all.
California isn't magical, but it's the only place where you aren't left with a dead sea effect of candidates who weren't willing or able to move away to a better labor market.
There's a guy in the comments that said he just relocated from USA to Canada to work with the company. So obviously they can find staff willing to relocate.
EDIT: Why was this post flagged? Comments now disabled?
I think you're running into the comment-cooldown feature. The reply button doesn't appear until a comment has been live for a couple of minutes. I'm not a big fan of the feature, it leads a lot of people to think they're being messed with by the moderators.
When you see [flagged] it means that users flagged the story and that there are enough flags to predominate over the upvotes. If [flagged] goes away it means that upvotes regained the upper hand.
But please don't take HN threads even further off-topic by editing your comment to complain about this kind of thing. The way to get an answer, as the guidelines explicitly say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is to email hn@ycombinator.com.
By the way by my count it was closer to 90 people laid off, so they are depressing these numbers.