| HN Mirror

You're both underestimating how many people would hate to live in the US, and overestimating how high salaries in the US are compared to Canada

red-iron-pine 1092 days ago

> and overestimating how high salaries in the US are compared to Canada

As an American STEM worker in Canada: salaries are definitely higher in the US. Not even close in some cases, easily a 40% difference for high-end roles. And while COL is high in SF or NYC, it's just as crazy in Greater Toronto or Vancouver but the salaries have not kept up.

Make no mistake, you can still do pretty well, but I could probably double my salary if I moved back to the big US East Coast city that I'm from.

Long-term I'm not optimistic about the US economy and culture, and my wife wouldn't be a fan, so I'm willing to miss out -- but sometimes it stings knowing what options are out there.

I feel you, it can be hard knowing that you could be making more money across the border.

However, I don't know if I agree with you about SF and NYC being equivalent to Toronto and Vancouver. They're just not. We complain about rent in Canada, but SF/NYC rent is another level of bullshit. And general expenses are definitely more expensive as well, I know I feel it whenever I travel to the US.

The other thing is that in most US cities you have to pay for a car. That's just not true in Canada. This makes up a huge part of the income gap.

Dig1t 1092 days ago

>but sometimes it stings knowing what options are out there.

Yeah I made the sacrifice and lived in the Bay, crammed into a hacker house for a few years.

It totally sucks, but working with all those smart people and stashing the money completely changed my life.

Definitely a sacrifice I’d make again

First, your answer has nothing to do with my question to xbonez about why, despite his being stuck in the US H-1B morass, he did not mention planning to take up this offer.

Second, your supposition of my under/overestimation has nothing to do with the factual composition of FAANG and other US tech companies' Canadian offices. As I said, they are a) mostly people who cannot and will not ever get US visas (i.e., those who didn't make the first hurdle that xbonez was lucky enough to cross), and b) a few native Canadians who for one reason or another don't want to move to the US.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/amazon-canad... [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/microsoft-vancouver-office-b...

morvita 1092 days ago

I am a US citizen who moved to Vancouver from the Bay Area three years ago.

I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.

I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.

Can totally understand wanting to leave the Bay Area for a Canadian city or any other developed place. Personally I went to San Diego instead, and I'm happy with that.

morvita 1092 days ago

I really liked San Diego when I visited, if I was going to return to the US, I'd seriously consider San Diego.

Yeah it's definitely an A-tier part of the US. I would've settled for pretty much anywhere outside the Bay Area, but SD is even better than the nice parts of LA I used to live in.

telotortium 1092 days ago

> I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half.

125k CAD is 94k USD. Going from 135k to 94k USD is not trivial, and Vancouver is pretty expensive as well. Skytrain is pretty awesome though.

morvita 1092 days ago

The relative costs didn't change for me significantly, I was paying 2600/month USD in rent in the Bay and 2700 CAD in Vancouver, so while it was a significant paycut if you look at the value in USD, the day to day wasn't noticeable.

latency-guy2 1091 days ago

So in absolute terms, you took a paycut, and in relative terms, you still had to pay more? I hope you really like Canada, because that sounds like a bitch slap to say the least.

Again, literally not true. There's plenty of people that would hate to live in the US, and much prefer Canada. Plenty of immigrants. Those people work in the Canadian offices.

I don't know if you know this, but the rest of the world considers the US to be kind of a terrible place. Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.

mywittyname 1092 days ago

> There's plenty of people that would hate to live in the US, and much prefer Canada.

For what reasons?

Having worked with a lot of Canadians over the years, I've discovered that a significant number of them have this very negative perception of the USA that is not accurate. I can see a lot of these reasons being based on incorrect assumptions, especially when considering how educated upper-middle class people live.

I spent a lot of time in Toronto about 7-8 years ago and I couldn't imagine living there as an American. Everything is so expensive (housing in particular), traffic is terrible, the weather sucks, and my role in Canada paid like 25% less. The food was pretty good, but that's about it.

Sure mate, you can think the assumptions are incorrect, but you're clearly biased towards the US. Everyone else isn't. If a bunch of people are telling you they don't like your country, maybe believe them.

Sounds like you moved to Toronto and tried to live like you were in the US. No wonder you had a bad time.

mywittyname 1092 days ago

I don't need to think their assumptions are incorrect -- I know they are.

Are you saying it's harder to get Canadian citizenship, and that's the only reason people go to the US instead? A lot of my college friends were Chinese-Canadian-Americans alleging that Canada was just their stepping stone to the US, but that's only my experience.

> A lot of my college friends where Chinese-Canadian-Americans alleging that Canada was just their stepping stone to the US.

Basically, yes. According to the Canadian government <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...> (table 1), for every two Canadian-born people moving to the US, one person born outside the US or Canada moves from Canada to the US. Given that during 2001-2006 20% or less of Canada were immigrants <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/g-a00...>, that implies that a Canadian resident born outside the US or Canada is about 50% more likely to move to the US than a Canadian native.

I've heard that New Zealand is similarly used by those seeking to move to Australia.

No, that's what the guy I'm replying to is saying. I disagree, plenty of people go to Canada as a first choice and love it there.

The Chinese Canadian thing does happen. It's usually 1st generation immigrants with very few ties to Canada and highly competitive families. They're parents usually barely speak English, and their entire families are still in China. Canada let a lot of Chinese immigrants come in during the 80s, and did very little to integrate them, and this is the result I guess.

hot_gril 1091 days ago

I'm just wondering which country is harder to get into, not trying to establish which is the better nation.

kafkaesque 1092 days ago

I'm Canadian and every single Canadian with a computer science degree I know either has moved to the US or is actively trying to. We are essentially trading in highly skilled developers with low skilled ones, with some exceptions, of course

Well, I'm Canadian and I wouldn't move to the US over Canada so you can add me to the list! Now you know someone!

Also, most highly skilled Canadian devs I know just negotiate remote positions with US based companies. That's what I used to do: US salary living in Vancouver

> We are essentially trading in highly skilled developers with low skilled ones, with some exceptions, of course

The exact same thing happens across the board, as I cite elsewhere <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512411>: The best Canadian scientists move to the US, while an equal number in absolute terms of (presumably not the top) American scientists move to Canada.

> I don't know if you know this, but the rest of the world considers the US to be kind of a terrible place.

Shouldn't you save Reddit-tier comments like this for /r/worldnews or /r/politics?

Meanwhile, in a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.

>Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.

Sorry to shatter your illusions, but historically, every year four Canadians move to the US for every American going the other way. According to the Canadian government, this has not changed in the 21st century <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...>.[1] According to Reddit, Texas is basically one step from Nazi Germany, but Texas is those Canadians' fourth-favorite state <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/t/11287/tbl002...>; if you exclude Florida and its retiree-heavy flow, it is their third.

From the Canadian-government analysis:

* "Canadian-born persons who emigrated to the United States between 2000 and 2006 were relatively young", with a median age of 31. Unsurprisingly, "Nearly two-thirds of recent Canadian emigrants to the United States were employed".

* They are also younger than Canadians in general: "Lastly, Canadians who emigrated recently were also generally very young compared to the Canadian population where the median age according to the 2006 Census was 39.5."

* Canadian migrants have become younger in recent years, implying that retiring is further decreasing as a cause of migration: "While the median age of all Canadians residing in the United States was 49 in 2006, the median age was only 31 for Canadians who emigrated between 2000 and 2006. In addition, many of these recent emigrants were of prime working age: over one-half (approximately 53%) were between 20 and 44 years of age. Only around 10% were aged 60 or older."

* While retirement was an important factor for Canadian migrants to Florida and Arizona, those states only received under a quarter of all Canadian migrants to the US, with correspondingly higher median ages.

According to that above-mentioned survey, if you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat:

*16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US.

* They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.

By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.

[1] It is true that from 2010 to 2012—during which the Canadian economy genuinely performed better than the US's—70,000 Americans moved north while only 20,000 Canadians moved south <http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/americans-mov...>, but this still puts the per-capita ratio considerably in the US's favor.

You claim I'm the one with Reddit comments, but you're the one vomiting a bunch of numbers to support your stance at me hahahaha

Anyway, I'm not denying any of those things. That still doesn't mean people think the US is a good place to live. They think they can make more money there, and the tradeoff is worth it.

But there's also plenty of people for whom that tradeoff is not worth it. Those people don't use Canada as a stepping stone, they just like living there. Because the US is kind of a shithole.

aprdm 1092 days ago

Yes USA population is much bigger than Canada , would surprise me if in absolute numbers wasn’t the case

You could've simply asked why he prefers US citizenship over Canadian citizenship without being aggressive.