I'll say this everytime Vancouver comes up in HN. It's a stunning city, full of modern amenities (including a public transit system that's actually awesome and very well used) and incredible access to nature. None of this is remotely enticing to young engineers when they make 2x-3x as much in SF and only pay ~30-50% more for housing.
Until wages rise in Vancouver, there will be much fanfare about tech companies moving north, but very little actual movement.
I'm sure Mexico would be up to taking advantage of the new congress's policies as a means to irk Trump.
Why not contribute to the economic growth of the underachieving neighbor rather than the overachiever? People talk about sympathizing illegal immigrants from Mexico, but when they have a real opportunity to help develop the place, they kind of forget about them altogether, as if it's just an opinion to have.
I have no insight into the decision process used by these companies, however there are several issues that would be less appealing to workers. I can only imagine that retaining talent and productivity is their number one concern. The most obvious is the language barrier. Many of these immigrant workers have invested a large amount of their time throughout their lives to learn English, and move their families to an English speaking country. It's a disruption to move, but at least the transition process can eased if the country speaks English.
The primary goal of these companies is to profit. I get the sense that many of the companies doing this are smaller venture backed companies that don't have enormous resources to spare. If they go under, then they won't be helping anyone. That said, Google has offices in Mexico.
I say this as an American born Latino who can speak Spanish.
If google can have offices in mdf, so can others --stay out of the illegal drugs business and you'll be fine.
This protest business is strange. We have many Indians here fretting and denouncing the temp refugee ban, but I'd bet most don't care about how the Indian government treats refugees back home (some in UN camps), many not recognized. etc., so it's all political selfishness which is why maybe Americans can be selfish till we get our own poor out of the dumps.
>stay out of the illegal drugs business and you'll be fine.
It's not that simple. Imagine if you have a relationships with the daughter of someone in the drug trade (or one of your children do) - and have a bad breakup. Imagine if someone in a cartel decides to take a liking to your daughter - it happens all the time in certain areas. It can happen in America or anywhere - you or someone in your family can get in an abusive relationship - but in Mexico, cartel members are used to getting what they want and acting very violently when they don't.
This happens in India too (replace drug lord with politician, someone influential) that hasn't stopped companies having offices there. And BTW, contrary to what seems common knowledge, there are a lot of expats in India (probably not as many as in the US).
Maybe Mexico is radically different, I don't know. But this seems far fetched to me.
I totally agree. I bet my bottom dollar that nobody gave a damn about refugees while they were in India and arguably don't care about them right now. Now that Trump administration is clamping down on H1B workers, all of a sudden many of them magically care about them. Pure selfishness...
You want highly-paid people who could live anywhere they wanted in the world to move to Mexico? How many people that get paid bay area salaries but work remotely do you think live in Mexico?
No the downsides of Mexico are the insecurity, the pollution and the endemic corruption of authorities.
Not speaking english is a fake problem. You can learn spanish in 6 months if you live in the country, it's not a very hard language and Mexican are very social people.
I have seen the responses to this, and all seem very reasonable. We have our fair share of problems down of the border.
However, economy triumps everything. Down here, you can hire talented, English-speaking recent graduates for USD$15k or less. Many companies are already doing this and the main reason they do not do it faster is that the talent pool is constrained. That, too, is changing, due to the growing pool of would be mentors.
Indian companies, such as Tata, are doing this too. Their main motivation is to have multiple locations around the sun to implement their "follow the sun" support system, but a huge side effect is reduced cost. They hire plenty of local talent too, but bring lots of immigrants from their mainland. In the last 10 years, all the posh neighbourhoods in the south side of my town are seeing the arrival of Asian populations, formerly unheard off.
Anecdotally, the Amazon/Microsofts of the world pay "only" 30% less in Vancouver than they do in Seattle. I haven't confirmed but supposedly Salesforce no longer discounts.
And despite what the local fear-mongering suggests, these companies aren't just using Vancouver as an H1B parking lot - they are establishing real centers of excellence and hiring plenty of local talent.
All this to say is salaries take a long time to adjust, but local companies will learn they will need to pay more to compete.
I think 2x-3x is not excessive at all. The exchange rate is ~1.30 CAD to 1 USD. I work at UBC and most software developers graduating here are in the $60k range.
Taxes are worse for Americans as you have to pay both US and CAD taxes if you make over $100k.
Downtown Vancouver is a bit of a dream (early) retirement destination for me. It's clean, beautiful, close to all sorts of outdoor activities, doesn't get cold, and apartments are actually not that expensive.
Late reply, but I'll argue you on the weather. Vancouver gets tons of cold rain, yes, but that is manageable. Just a few degrees colder and we'd get snow, which is infinitely harder to deal with on a infrastructural level.
Being so close to the freezing point has its perks: Vancouver's mountains get some of the best snow and longest seasons. I've skied in Whistler in late May and gone to the beach. Those days are amazing.
This is a reality of technology and remote work. There is no need for most tech workers to have any geographic proximity to an office.
I suspect the H1B situation will cause many that currently use the program for low cost staff augment to just move their whole IT operation to managed services. This yields a loss of American jobs since he majority of work is done off shore. I believe this is happening naturally right now in some companies but a $130k per unit cost might drive that much faster.
What I probably will never get is why - of all places - Silicon Valley is so obsessed with exclusively hiring locally.
You'd think that companies that are so eager to disrupt whole industries would be more susceptive to adapting more modern and efficient ways of organising work.
As someone who has worked in Dallas, Austin and now Silicon Valley I can answer this question with some perdonal anecdotes.
Silicon valley is miles ahead and will remain miles ahead of these other upcoming "silicon whatevers". The environment is just different here; people are willing to put their lives into building something (it's arguable if that's healthy disposition), people are smarter (and also smart asses) and there is general "itch" to do something entrepreneurial. To scratch this "itch" there are people willing to put money and everything on the line which I haven't seen in Texas. There is a reason why most major technological developments come out from Silicon Valley and not elsewhere. Hell, if I were a hiring manager, I wouldn't hire myself for a position here if I were working in Texas :P (I'm exaggerating here, the point is that I never had the drive and neither do most of the people there)
P.S: Please don't inundate with negatives of silicon valley, we all know about it. What's unarguable is the technological output of Silicon Valley.
I'm not sure you can say that most major technological developments come out of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the most obviously world-changing ones do but the majority of technological development still happens outside of Silicon Valley. Even if you just look at the software industry, where Silicon Valley clearly is leading, the majority of software is still developed outside of Silicon Valley. When considering other industries and disciplines this becomes even more obvious.
Regarding the entrepreneurial itch the same thing has been said about the US in general in the past. People elsewhere are just as smart and can be just as entrepreneurially-minded it's often just that the environment doesn't easily accommodate this drive (e.g. lack of adequate infrastructure or conditions not as amenable to entrepreneurship).
However, with the world becoming ever more connected and networked there is no good reason (other than VCs with ulterior motives as mentioned in the other comments) why people from different parts of the world shouldn't collaborate on new projects and ideas. In fact, this stubborn insistence on location might exactly be what's holding further innovation and entrepreneurship back because it excludes a huge number of people from taking part.
That's true. I didn't mean measure it by lines of code but more by impact and forward thinking.
Despite the connectedness and networking in the other parts of the world, I'm yet to see anything world changing come out from elsewhere. It seems everyone outside the US is just reshashing what's being done in the US (social media, networks, taxi apps, what have you in emerging markets). And my argument is that it is the environment of Silicon Valley that facilitates this enterpreneurship and is hard to replicate elsewhere (yet).
I think there are a few possible reasons (I don't pretend to know which of these it is, or if it's one I haven't thought of).
1. Remote workers are actually not more productive than co-located workers. (I don't think this is it personally)
2. Investors and/or founders have some financial and/or non-financial incentive to keep everyone in SV.
Forcing everyone to be there drives up the demand for VC money as everything is more expensive, and when a CTO leaves to do his own thing, he's already there but probably can't afford to bootstrap, so he turns to VCs. If you had the same CTO working in Omaha for 90% of the pay, he'd be able to bootstrap whatever he wanted and the original company wouldn't have needed as much (or any) VC money in the first place.
I'd love to set up VC meetings then say a few days prior that I'm only interested in 100% remote team and see how many of them cancel.
It's mostly because of the VC Ponzi scheme. US investors invest in US incorporated companies because it is easier to sell them and to get other later stage institutional investors interested.
There's two ways how companies can quickly exit nowadays:
1. Acquihire - and the companies buying normally want colocated teams. Acquihires are predominantly happening because the 10x-ers can leverage their capacities by incorporating and effectively bringing forward their entire future earnings to the present through an acquisition. The companies like it because the can lock-in 10x-ers for 4-10 years, which usually only stay for 6-24 months in one company and jump ship very easily, taking company knowledge with them. They generally have to be incorporated and operating in the US as it is difficult to enforce such contracts internationally. This is also the fastest way for seed investors to get big multiples back without having to wade through all the subsequent rounds. As a seed investor you also don't need to pick a winning product or biz model, rather just a very smart team. The best of these brain-investors have contacts in all the big corps to advertize their investments to them well ahead of time.
2. IP is most often useless without the people and knowhow who can use and implement it. That generally means the people who developed it. Most loss of IP value doesn't come from simply Chinese copying, or even patent wars, rather the people developing and using the IP getting hired away to the competition. By having them all in the US or even State such as California, and keeping them on a 4-10 year contract, you firewall that IP from the competition.
Combine the above two with the much larger and more liquid unified financial market of the US, and you can bid your equity up due to demand pressure. The same company, with the same tech, and same users, and same development team, can be 5-20x less valuable in terms of equity if located in the EU. This is also why there are so few large exits in Europe as compared to the US.
You don't pay more in Toronto. You don't even pay more in tax let alone healthcare and housing. Vancouver is really the only place it could reasonably be argued that you pay more while earning less, and it's one of the warmest areas in Canada, with awesome giant mountains, and a beautiful coastline.
Live in Halifax[1], earn $80k a year as a decent, but unremarkable, software developer and buy a house downtown or on the water for $250k. Don't worry about your girlfriend or brother asking for help to pay their $20k medical bill. Don't worry about getting thrown in prison for simple cannabis possession or other small crimes. Don't worry about getting shot, while still being able to buy guns if you're responsible.
[1] Or Ottawa, or Montreal, or Quebec City, or Kingston, or Waterloo. I choose Toronto because it's more fun, but even here my rent right downtown for my own place is only $1525.
Yeah, Ottawa is great. It's so cold for so long that the Rideau canal freezes and hundreds of people can skate on it at a time (in fact there's a whole festival that occurs on the frozen canal!)
Right if they make H1B1 more restrictive, companies can just expand their hiring overseas. Offshoring could also accelerate as technology improves so being in the same office matters even less.
The previous government was nowhere near the same. Where Trump is openly xenophobic, the Harper Conservatives were more dog whistle stuff, e.g. stripping citizenship from duals who were guilty of terrorist charges and proposing the creation of a hotline to report "barbaric cultural practices".
IMO, the unchanging thing about Canadians is we want to be able to look down our noses at Americans. This is a stupid way to govern, but it runs deep in the Canadian psyche. Trump has caused many people here to realize that our self-righteousness is at risk if we permit such a candidate to run, let alone win, here.
Consequently, the more moderate candidates in the ongoing Conservative leadership race are reaping windfalls from every mean-spirited or xenophobic thing that Trump does. After the shooting at a mosque in Quebec, Michael Chong (a front-runner in the leadership race) denounced demagogues like Trump and Leitch (she of "barbaric cultural practices" fame, also a leadership candidate)--and it was well-received by conservatives and liberals alike.
And, for additional context, the last time my hometown elected a non-conservative was 49 years ago, so if they're rejecting such leaders, I'm reasonably confident the broader country will, too.
WRT citizenship, if I googled it correctly, C-24 requires a terrorism-related conviction, or having obtained the citizenship by misrepresentation or fraud, in order to strip a dual citizen of their Canadian passport. It doesn't seem to be in the same category of things as the sorts of things Trump's doing. I'd say compared with Tories, the Republicans really are in a class of their own.
> It doesn't seem to be in the same category of things as the sorts of things Trump's doing.
Indeed. While we have similar laws regarding denaturalization, Trump did not make them. But you're probably right about the rest; I doubt a Tory PM would demonstrate the same level of sloppy, slapdash, incompetent jackassery we're seeing from the new occupant of the Oval Office.
Tangentially: I get there's a lot of fear going around on the subject of authoritarianism, dictatorship, Nazis, et al. I don't buy it, not least because we had the same with Bush, and the only difference of note in today's rhetoric is that it's as much hotter and faster as the Internet that powers it - remember that Facebook and Twitter weren't a thing back then. (So far we've come!)
Trump is no Hitler, though, any more than Bush was. He's not even a Mussolini. He might be some fraction of a Berlusconi, but most of all, at least to judge his performance so far, he's an utter boob, and not the first we've had in the office. I suppose an appeal for moderation in rhetoric, and awareness of history in one's analysis, is foredoomed to mockery and oblivion in this age of hot takes and clickbait. But it might ease the mind a bit to take, where you can, a somewhat longer view.
It could be that we've been reading different things (Twitter and Facebook aren't good for this sort of things IMO), but my impression is that people had justified suspicions, and that these weren't just Hitler comparisons (which really should be called out, they're too far out). Authoritarianism can mean a range of things, none of them good, and so so long as people base their arguments on things that Trump and his team said or things that they did, people should be on solid enough ground.
As an example, you say "he's an utter noob", and, sure, that is one of the possibilities. But it's not the only possibility, so one would be wrong to say that it's obvious, for example, that he's an utter noob. He might be, or he might not be. How do you know? And those other possibilities have to be considered too, to be fair. It'd be wrong to dismiss them straight up as clickbait without examining the merits.
(I'm not sure if you meant noob or boob, it looked like a typo to me, but as luck would have it, my reply works both ways.)
I think a problem with this administration is the ties to Bannon and Breitbart. There is a lot of white nationalism (alt-right) going on in those ranks.
Hmm. I know Canadians that have dual US and Canadian citizenship, and they had to jump through all sorts of hoops ~ 6 years ago. They live in the US. Not sure about the details.
You are thinking of Bill C-6, to repeal the changes from bill C-24. Although it passed over a year ago, it was referred to Senate Committee last December and since then, status hasn't been updated.
So "repealed" is premature, as C-6 still doesn't have any announced target date for entering in effect.
House price is about on par with San Fran. You can check it out via mls.ca and look around the Vancouver area. There is and has been a massive amount of money coming into the Vancouver housing market driving things a little crazy.
> Wasn't the previous Canadian prime minister at least as xenophobic as Trump?
God no. They passed a (bullshit) law saying that they could revoke the Canadian citizenship of someone under specific circumstances. You had to be a dual citizen (or eligible?) and commit one of a few crimes.
- obtaining citizenship by fraud (this I think is entirely reasonable)
- committing an act of terrorism
- treason
- taking up arms against Canada
The liberals repealed some of this already (IIRC everything but the portions about fraudulently obtaining citizenship).
> What will prevent Canadians from out-crazying the US in the next major election?
We have a sane electoral system and just generally aren't as crazy.
A correction to what you said: Bill C-6 (which undoes the damage done by the conservatives) has been stuck in the senate for many months. I followed it closely, and it was a bit disheartening. Checkout the forums of the website canadavisa.com to see people's frustrations.
I'm a Canadian and I am very worried about the future of our country. Due to various factors, new laws affecting large swathes of the population can get effected very quickly. What starts off as reasonable laws can get co-opted into something very crazy (any student of history should know this well). I echo the concern made by a few others that we are one election away from craziness. Not sure how things are going to go at this point. As a visible minority, I am scared.
The whole "this is crazy" bit is a matter of opinion only, you understand that, yes?
What tech companies are so upset about is being cut off from their cheap source of exploitable labor. The rest of the huffing and puffing is just a smokescreen to make you forget what they are guilty of.
Yes, it's funny how the wage slaves cheer along with their billionaire idols. Mixture of the lottery player's hope of also winning the jackpot, and fear of losing the job they realistically must expect to be chained to instead (at least until they hit 39, that is.)
Its crazy on a practical level because those tech companies aren't going to lose their cheap source of exploitable Labor..they'll figure a way around it. it's crazy because the country is going to be losing out on so much tax money from these countries Outsourcing and moving their operations overseas or to Canada.
Are they actually paying foreign nationals less? As far as I can tell, it's just a talking point about H1B, compared to "expensive" US talent. Google, Apple and the like seem to pay very high wages to all employees.
I'm so sick of the "moving to Canada" talk. You get to come if we say so, not because it's your backup plan.
I like living where I am now, and I don't want to leave to go back to Canada and earn drastically less with the same (optimistically) expenses. While working on less interesting stuff.
Let's be honest, Canada (like any other country in the world) is always happy when a wealthy company comes to invest and open an office, especially if it's to recruit qualified workers.
The equation is pretty simple:
1. It will bring jobs to Canadians (the offices won't be made only of expats, for many reasons)
2. Employees will spend their salary in Canada, and pay taxes in Canada
3. Knowledge: interns/employees go work to these companies then may move to Canadians companies or create their own with the knowledge they acquired
Basically it's a big win for the receiving country. Just ask Ireland how it worked for them.
It seems like you have no clue what's going on and what this article is about. It's not about Trump winning, it's about Trump having started to do its shit and forcing companies to find a way to make their employees work since the US doesn't accept them anymore.
Is this about the rising cost of housing? My understanding is that it has more to do with nimbyism and proposition 13 than just engineering wages pricing out locals. That said, I don't know about the situation in Canada, so maybe someone can shed some light.
Until wages rise in Vancouver, there will be much fanfare about tech companies moving north, but very little actual movement.