[morvita]

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.

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

[hot_gril]

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]

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

[hot_gril]

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]

> 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]

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]

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.