[triceratops]

Gotta pay more money to keep the talent. This isn't rocket science.

The crazy thing is Canada has so many advantages that should make paying higher salaries easier. University is cheaper, so people don't have as much (or any) student debt. Healthcare is cheaper for companies to provide - since they generally only have to offer supplemental coverage. And so on.

[dcolkitt]

American firms tend to have much higher quality corporate management than their Canadian counterparts.[1] To be profitable at FAAMG salaries requires leveraging your engineers to achieve very high levels of productivity and execution. That's generally not possible without management that consistently adheres to best practices.

[1]https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.1.203

[danielscrubs]

I was just about to say the same. What was striking to me that the managers I’ve met in SF had all been swe:s and worked up the ladder. In my country it’s very rare, most managers have a background in economics and can’t really help the swe:s with anything besides internal politics. The lens they use is that everything is a cost. Even if the system they bought is the problem of why things take time. They also rely heavy on Garter of what is popular.

We are even starting to have them manage doctors!!

[trinovantes]

I think a bigger issue is the lack of venture capital. It's significantly harder to to raise the multi-million seed rounds needed to sustain Google/Amazon salary in Waterloo/Toronto

[RestlessMind]

Based on my 15 years of experience (similar for my partner), there are a lot of cash flow positive companies in the US who pay a lot. They don't need venture capital at all. So there must be some other reason (profitability? SV culture of valuing engineers?)

When I was at Google, I learned from an internal pay comparison spreadsheet that a person in the same job at the same level is paid much worse in Waterloo (and in the UK as well) compared to SV / NYC, and the reason cited was "cost of labor" or some such fancy term which essentially meant "we want to pay as little as possible, so a little bit more than our competitors". So ultimately, it boils down to "prevailing wages" in Canada (and the UK).

The first company to offer SV level wages in Canada / UK will see a deluge of high quality applicants who want to stay in those locations for whatever reasons. I wonder why no one has tried that yet.

[johbjo]

Since marginal cost is essentially zero in software, productivity as measured in revenue per head is not really relevant.

The business climate might just be better in the US.

[AzzieElbab]

Direct taxation is not the whole story. Prices of anything including Canadian made goods are higher here than in the states. We basically earn in cdn but pay in usd. Healthcare is debatable, availability is actually a problem.

[908B64B197]

Why not simply get paid in USD then?

[AzzieElbab]

Why not btc?

[AnimalMuppet]

It doesn't work that way, especially with student debt. If I were a child and could choose, it might make sense to choose Canada. But children don't usually get to choose. When do you choose? For many people, when they graduate from college. At that point, you're from Canada and don't have student debt. Great! Wonderful!

But the salary is still higher in America. So you can go to America without the student debt, and still get the higher salary. And why not? (You could think of this as arbitrage between two ways of structuring society economically.)

But maybe the thing to do is to go back to Canada when you have kids, so that their university won't load them down with student debt.

[cesarvarela]

But aren’t those things cheaper because there are more taxes? And more taxes mean less salary?

[redis_mlc]

No. There's a US media narrative that taxes and health care are worse in Canada than the US but:

1) You will likely pay more in taxes in California than Canada.

2) It's easier to itemize self-employment tax expenses in Canada, so you can easily pay half the taxes of the US. (I paid 12% of total income the last year I worked in Toronto.)

3) Everybody I know in Canada is happy with health care, and infinitely happier than Americans who've received false bills.

4) Startups have a big advantage in Canada because of the state health care, and unrelated lower salary expectations.

However, salaries are lower in Canada because companies pay less (like Europe or anywhere outside the US), but that's not related to taxes or health care.

[francisl]

This is a personal conclusion having work in both, some US and some Canadian based companies. What I realized, the reason we are pay less in Canada, is caused by our perceived value from management.

In the American company, the managers want me to succeed because that is directly link to their success. I'm part of the team, I'm accountable, but I had more freedom.

In the Canadian one, managers want all the credit (pay+bonuses+recognition), because they are the incredible one who made the monkey produce the value. I'm part of a pool, managers will decide what programming language I'll program in, he's managing the risk after all. Oh, and by the way, it was a hard year, not all goals where reached, so they need to cap the bonuses, but the company is glad for the all-time profit record.

Of course, it’s a bit of a caricature. It surely applies to US or Canadian company. But our perceived value struck me in all my employers.

[imtringued]

This appears to be a general problem in politics (both corporate and governmental). The person in charge is surrounded by experts (in a specific subject) but he doesn't listen to them.

Yes, sometimes those experts are wrong or their ideas are not compatible with the general direction of the company and that's where you really want a leader's judgement but the solution to this problem isn't to ignore the expert, it's to find a compromise, verify information by asking multiple experts with differing opinions, make the experts understand the goals of the company.

In theory being a manager is the easiest job in the world. You delegate all your competence away to people who are better than you at the skill you are delegating. So the only challenge is to utilize the value of that competence properly.

[arcticbull]

One thing folks don't account for is that the Canadian tax bill includes healthcare, which is something US employers pay $600 per month for. It's effectively a private tax. Comparing like-for-like, one should really include the health premiums paid by employers in the tax total when comparing to Canada.

Even with that in mind, in a number of recent years, the median Canadian tax bill has been lower than the median American tax bill [1]. And to your point, it varies by state/province. The most expensive state OR province for high-income folks is California (51.9%) and the lowest is Alberta (39%). [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/canadians-may-pay-more-taxes...

[AzzieElbab]

That makes 84% of Waterloo grads idiots for leaving Canada. They will all wise up and come back