[blindriver]

I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?

I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships.

The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-set on trying to get into the US because the Canadian tech scene can't compare based on base pay, annual bonus, starting equity or refreshers, etc. I make more money than all my friends combined. One of my friends is a teacher in Toronto and my annual bonus is more than his entire yearly salary.

I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers. There's literally trillions of dollars in tech ideas that could have been created in Canada but all of the founders left for the US.

[cogogo]

Something feels deeply wrong about comparing your tech income to a teacher’s. Especially outside the context of an argument like “teachers should be paid more.”

[throwaway-blaze]

"teachers should be paid more" isn't an argument, it's a statement. But perhaps I've made your point for you.

[blindriver]

I don't understand your injection of your own morality into my statement, it is completely orthogonal to my point.

[cogogo]

I did not mean to make a moral judgement. I was too flippant. It is a weird comparison. You compare a salary in an industry where people are known to be paid well to one where people are known to be paid poorly. Of course you make more money regardless of USA or Canada.

[blindriver]

My point was that someone I've known for my entire life, I earn more than them through my bonus than they make working an entire year. This is a personal connection. The amount of money I make in Silicon Valley is enormous compared to people I know very well. It should be the same way in Canada and maybe having a solid layer of well-off tech workers will raise everyone's salaries. Experienced teachers in private schools in Silicon Valley make well over $100k, unlike my friend in Toronto so there is something to be said about the trickle down effect (even though I mostly don't believe it).

[Majromax]

> I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers

I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.

Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.

The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.

This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.

[throwaway-blaze]

You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

It's concentration of nodes in the graph that makes SV unlike any other place on earth.

Other places that want to be SV need to solve the cold-start problem to build up their local node set, not emulate what SV is like today.

[Majromax]

> You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?

I believe that my comment above was aligned with your premise here. I say that the tax difference is not sufficient by itself and that Canada reportedly has a very non-SV-like venture capital ecosystem.

[nxm]

It’s actually policy that incentives risk taking where 1 in 50 bets will succeed

[loloquwowndueo]

> I make more money than all my friends combined

Get richer friends! Problem solved!