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Canada Businesses Education Technology

Canada Facing 'Brain Drain' As Young Tech Talent Leaves For Silicon Valley (theglobeandmail.com) 326

Posted by BeauHD from the disappearing-into-thin-air dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: Canada's best and brightest computer engineering graduates are leaving for jobs in Silicon Valley at alarmingly high rates, fueling a worse "brain drain" than the mass exodus by Canadian doctors two decades ago, according to a new study. The study, led by Zachary Spicer, a senior associate with the Munk School of Global Affairs' Innovation Policy Lab at University of Toronto, found one-in-four recent science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates from three of the country's top universities -- University of Waterloo, University of British Columbia and U of T -- were working outside Canada. The numbers were higher for graduates of computer engineering and computer science (30 percent), engineering science (27 percent) and software engineering, where two out three graduates were working outside Canada, mostly in the United States. Nearly 44 percent of those working abroad were employed as software engineers, with Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon listed as top employers.
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Canada Facing 'Brain Drain' As Young Tech Talent Leaves For Silicon Valley More

Canada Facing 'Brain Drain' As Young Tech Talent Leaves For Silicon Valley

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  • Damn right (Score:5, Informative)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:03AM (#56558792) Journal

    If were young again, I would leave Montreal as if it were a medieval plague city.

    Sky high taxes, dirty, gray downtown, corruption everywhere, low wages, endless regulations, terrible weather.

    Young people! You are free! Enjoy what you can.

    • Re:Damn right (Score:5, Funny)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:06AM (#56558804) Homepage Journal
      Would you go to Silicon Valley though? You could go to Toronto instead.

      • Re: Damn right (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:15AM (#56558842)

        Like a parasite leaving the heart for the rectum.

        • Man I wish I had mod points right now...
        • OK, what about Vancouver? It is lovely I have heard.

          • Re: Damn right (Score:5, Informative)

            by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:56AM (#56558946)
            VC is a lovely city for sure, but itâ(TM)s getting to be just as expensive as SV. A lot of property is being bought up by Chinese investors for tax purposes so the costs are out of control and the demand hasnâ(TM)t changed because many of those properties go unused.

            But if I were going to live in Canada, it would definitely be somewhere in BC. Lots of beautiful country up there.

            • A lot of property is being bought up by Chinese investors

              That is only half the problem. The other half is severe restrictions on new construction.

              for tax purposes

              It is not about taxes. China is backsliding into a Mao-style personality cult, and Xi Jinping is talking up "traditional" socialist values, while using "anti-corruption" to target his political enemies. This could go in some really bad directions, so prosperous Chinese are looking to move money abroad so they have a bolt hole if there is another Cultural Revolution.

              This is bad for China, but is a GOOD THING for Canad

          • Vancouver has become poor man's Seattle. Can't afford Seattle,you live in Vancouver.

          • Re: Damn right (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashiki&gmail,com> on Saturday May 05, 2018 @11:23AM (#56559320) Homepage

            Vancouver is getting as bad as San Fran is, especially with the homelessness and rampant public drug use. It was bad 10 years ago, it's gone downhill since then. Seriously, I fully get why young Canadians are trying to GTFO from Canada. The taxes are high but you see no return. Whether it's at the city, provincial, or federal level. The government(federal and many provincial governments) would rather throw money at illegals entering the country then help people who desperately need help. A person can be disabled, qualify for disability, and not get anything at all. No financial help, no training, no tax deferments. The number of disabled who now live full-time and dependent on their parents has gone through the roof. Workers Comp(WSIB) in the most populated province in Canada(Ontario) almost never pays out to workers who are injured on the job(94% refusal rate), so good luck if you get a life changing injury. If you need low income housing, in most places the wait is between 4-10 years. Healthcare quality is decreasing in nearly every province. It's becoming a rampant politically correct mess, where people fear speaking out on issues because we have a kangaroo court system that can fine you into oblivion and leave you financially ruined so you can't take it through the normal courts to try and clear it up. The current government is pushing anti-egalitarian laws, best example is their desire to modify the law on sexual assault so exculpatory evidence can't be used.

            Energy prices are through the roof, but wages are stagnant. Gasoline, NG, electricity are massively expensive. Housing prices are touching the moon, and wages are stagnant. $500k for a 40 year old house, in areas where the media income is $41k, $1.8m house prices in $70k median income. Provincial governments are doing stupid things like trying to ban NG and oil for heating and forcing people to use electricity only. Again in Canada's most populous province(Ontario), the government had to ban winter disconnection of electricity for fear of people freezing to death. Roughly 1:5 people are 3 months or more behind on their electricity bills.

            Many provincial governments(Liberal and NDP) are pushing "service industry" policies for jobs, and trying to push out manufacturing jobs. Ontario again, a great example. The same province, pushed $15/h minimum wage and in the first fiscal quarter after it was implemented the economy lost nearly 50k PT jobs, the high min. wage has basically stalled the economy.

            Yep, I full get why they want to GTFO. And I live in Ontario.

            • Re: Damn right (Score:5, Insightful)

              by JMJimmy ( 2036122 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @11:46AM (#56559420)

              The 50k job loss was expected. It's a short term decline that happens with every minimum wage increase which is inevitably recovered within about a year. 100% of the increase at the bottom end is spent because it's still impossible for the poor to save money, they just end up with slightly more to spend on the things they need. Thus, in the long term it grows the economy by circulating that money through the economy.

        • Well that made my morning! Somehow, your line reminded me of the movie "The Bothersome Man". [imdb.com]

          The scene were he's digging in the basement.

      • Turanno is definitely looking good these days. I have a few leads over there but I am a purple-scaled horned dinosaur as I work in hardware. I'm not young, I'm not pretty, and I have nothing but scorn for what passes for "software" these days.

        I don't care about AI, 3D printing, social media, or any of the dozens of increasingly incomprehensible and dubious phone-based "services" plagued with ads and no privacy.

        If I could, I'd work on 60GHz systems at work and use a AM radio and CB at home. In other words, I

        • It must be sad to live in such an oppressive country you aren't allowed to use an AM radio and CB at home. Canadians should rise up!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Hey, a Montrealer!

      The problem with Montreal is that when you're young you're willing to ignore all that stuff because people like to go out and party a lot and everyone insists that it's the greatest city on the planet. By the time most people realize there's a downside, they're so far behind everyone else that they can't leave.

      • Re:Damn right (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:48AM (#56558926) Journal

        Yeah, that describes it quite well.

        " everyone insists that it's the greatest city on the planet."

        I think the reason for this is quite simple: when you're young, you're surrounded by young people. Pretty much anywhere is the greatest place to be when you're surrounded and accepted by young people. (Barring war and disasters)

        I experienced this in the 1990s, I was a 20-something doing equipment installations in factories in Poland and the Czech Republic. In my spare time I went out and was immediately welcomed and accepted by the local young people and I had a blast.

        Now I'm in my 40s and life is now a mix between being invisible or viewed with suspicion. It's like humans have the life cycle of a barnacle. A few years floating around with millions of baby barnacles, then decades being attached to a house and marriage, and only seeing the 4 or 5 nearest barnacles while the ocean passes you by.

        • Get a job where you can be surrounded by 20-somethings into your 30s and 40s. e.g. teaching, some forms of engineering, research, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Are you sure you're not talking about Canada in general? I for one am sick and tired of the high taxes (especially income tax) - maybe a lot of people have already reached their limit and are leaving. After all, tech is a highly mobile job.

      • Re:Damn right (Score:4, Interesting)

        by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:50AM (#56558930) Journal

        "Are you sure you're not talking about Canada in general?"

        I haven't lived anywhere else in Canada, so I don't know.

        "After all, tech is a highly mobile job."

        It sure is, and from the employer's point of view this is great advantage, whereas as the employee, you have to physically move...

        You must be young because selling a house and moving a family is not trivial. What do you do once you're in SV and somehow something better pops up yet somewhere else?

        • Montreal is cheap vs the rest of Canada.

        • Assuming your spouse can find a job or doesn't need/want to work...

          Rent out your home. Furnished.
          Rent something where you're going. Furnished.
          Send your kids to the local public school.
          If you can't take your car, buy something where you're going for $5000, used.

          Many people over-think this kind of thing, and are far too attached to personal possessions.

    • Lol better change your view. I live in Montreal and think it's a fantastic city. Try living in a shit hole like Toronto, Montreal is cheap compared to Vancouver.

      • How old are you? Do you own or rent?
        What parts of it are fantastic that you think don't exist anywhere else?
        What is shitty about Toronto?
        What does Montreal being cheap have to do with not finding properly paid jobs?

    • As a Montreal's solution architect, I can't contradict you. I just leave a job because of corruption and incompetence, I'm so tired of this shit everywhere here. I just over 50, and I can't get over it anymore. people try to avoid working by arguing over everything. Sucking couillard is the new orange!

    • Montreal has relatively cheap housing, interesting people, good universities (McGill), and most importantly, doesn't only speak English. It's nice to be away from Anglophone paranoia and media when I visit there.
    • Cucks or Canucks; I simply can't decide...

  • Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:04AM (#56558796) Homepage Journal
    This is unlikely, since we all know from comments on Slashdot that the US is a third world hellhole no one would want to even visit, much less live in. Surely they meant they fled to Europe, which as we all know is a welcoming, enlightened place for humans to live in peace and harmony.

    • Re: Unlikely (Score:3, Informative)

      by dnaumov ( 453672 )

      Wasnâ(TM)t it just weeks ago when a Slashdot article was proclaiming Trump is causing a brain drain with techies fleeing to Canada? And they are all reversing course within weeks?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      This is unlikely, since we all know from comments on Slashdot that the US is a third world hellhole no one would want to even visit, much less live in. Surely they meant they fled to Europe, which as we all know is a welcoming, enlightened place for humans to live in peace and harmony.

      They are leaving for the coastal area of California, which has little in common with most of the US. It even has little in common with the non-coastal areas of California.

      • Wait, so the US isn't one homogenous entity? There are different places in the US with different experiences and lifestyles and living conditions? Amazing what you learn on Slashdot.

    • Despite your best efforts to fill up every single thread reently there are actually multiple people here with different opinions. Fancy that!

  • Who writes these summaries? An exodus implies that there is a mass. It's like white mustang, ATM machine, LCD display, and free gift.

  • So, people are moving around ? (Score:5, Informative)

    by alexhs ( 877055 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @09:23AM (#56558860) Homepage Journal

    Two weeks ago, we learned that Engineers Are Leaving America For Canada [slashdot.org].

    Do the stories cancel out ?

    Will we get a follow-up story about (for example) how young Canadians come to the Silicon Valley to get credentials, then leave because of the high cost of living / insecurity over employee buses attacks ?

  • AFAICT, top grads from top schools move to Silicon Valley. Period. We only have a couple of the top schools in the bay area so that implies that the rest of them are coming from top schools outside the bay area. We have top people from Waterloo, Georgia Tech, IIT, basically everywhere. It's not even complicated, the top jobs are mostly here, most people don't want to play second fiddle in a securities trading shop or insurance company when they can be top dogs in a software firm. Silicon Valley's posit

  • I thought the techies were leaving the US for Canada [slashdot.org] because they couldn't stand Trump?

    • Yes, and due to changes to the immigration system [slashdot.org]. A month ago, it was claimed Canada had pulled off a brain heist [slashdot.org], but now they are supposedly suffering a brain drain. It's all a bit inconsistent.

      • A fair number of the IT world do go to Silicon Valley due to the wages and opportunities. Canadian IT wages are a joke for the most part. That said, it's because we have a higher level of general computing knowledge. It's a good thing in that we are fairly computer literate, but it's also a bad thing because there's a lot of people who've gotten minimal education in IT and are filling roles they have no business being in. Security is going to be a big problem here.

  • Without numbers from other non-US countries to compare against, we can't say whether 27% and 30% are actually that bad. I'd like to see comparison numbers for other commonwealth countries (UK, Australia, New Zealand), the U.S., and possibly Mexico since it's close to the US. It's possible Canada's numbers are "normal".
  • Seriously, lots of engineers and good non-software talent is leaving America and going to Canada. Smart on their part.

  • Make up your mind. (Score:3, Informative)

    by snoig ( 535665 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @10:11AM (#56559016)
    So last week all the tech conferences were moving to Canada: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] Two weeks ago all the Engineers were moving to Canada: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] And this week all Canadian tech is moving to Silicon Valley.

  • ... and they want their news back.

    Old news is so exciting.

  • 15 years ago a buddy told me "you have nothing lost here in Germany, you should go check out Silicon Valley". For just about 2 decades I've dealt with plain and utter idiiots when it comes to IT and the Web and professional work in those fields and it's slowly dawning on me: The places where I can meet people who understand me are very rare and one of those places where I would be in my waters professionally is Silicon Valley and the bay area.

    At a certain point it becomes more and more difficult to even mov

  • Earlier this year I discovered I only knew one other Canadian born and Canadian university educated engineer still working as an engineer in Canada. Excluding that one person all my class mates are either in the USA, immigrated to Canada as kids or are no longer doing engineering. All but one of my coworkers at my last 4 jobs is foreign born. When I worked in the Bay area I had lots of Canadian born co-workers and friends. I've been asked at engineering pickup soccer games in Ottawa, Canada where my acc
    • By "engineering", do you mean the building-things/designing-things kind, or the appitty-app designer kind of engineer?

  • This just means that the Silicon Valley computer industry is larger than any Canadian counterparts. People go where there are the most jobs in their field. Tech companies in particular locate jobs where qualified people are looking.

    That creates a Catch-22, and there's something to be said for a contrarian strategy where you locate jobs where the cost of living means people can live better on lower salaries. But it doesn't entirely negate the networking effect advantages of being the biggest technology c

  • When you institute redistribution in a society, the people who are redistributed to like it, and the people who are redistributed from leave.

    So, the problem with socialism is not that you run out of other people's money, it's that you run out of highly productive people whose money you can take.

  • I live in Vancouver. I'd totally pack up and head to the states if I wasn't sharing custody of my kids, who go to school here. It's an instant 40% raise as soon as you cross the border, especially when you consider the USD/CAD spread. Salaries in Vancouver are terrible even before you start considering the cost of housing, and the government markets us as a place to get world-class talent at cut-rate prices, so that's unlikely to change.

  • This is a salary problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BigDish ( 636009 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @01:03PM (#56559670)

    I'm a US citizen that moved to Toronto because I loved the city. What I found is that the tech jobs just don't pay there, while the city is rapidly increasing in price. My understanding is Vancouver isn't much different. I took a pay cut to move there, and ultimately left for a Seattle-based job. After the exchange rate, my salary in Seattle is double that of Toronto - while the cost of living isn't that much more. I talked to many tech people in Toronto, and never found someone who was making 6 figures Canadian even.

    I would love to move back to Toronto, but the low salaries, high cost of living, and poor benefits (most companies only wanted to offer 2 weeks of vacation time, and my company didn't even offer retirement plans) made it a poor financial decision for me. If Canada wants to stop the brain drain, they need to fix the salary problem.

  • Canada vs USA (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday May 05, 2018 @02:20PM (#56559874)
    I looked several times into moving to the US but it never made sense.

    Reasons I never moved from Canada:
    1) I wanted kids, and didn't want to pay for some stranger to bring them to swimming classes, music classes. Having my parents do it saved me thousands, and the kids got to know their grandparents.
    2) I like nature, prefer at least an acre of land. Definitely don't want to live in some concrete land where you can touch your house and the next one at the same time. I like a private lot.
    3) I don't like spending time in a car
    4) Cheap mortgage
    5) We still have communities here. Our kids played on the front street with other kids in the neighborhood, while the neighbors chatted. IN the US it seems like everyone just looks out for themselves.
    6) Peace of mind for healthcare. I have to dick around with insurance companies for dental and I hate it. Can't imagine fighting for health. We ended up having a lot of health issues in my family and I would have hit a lifetime cap a long, long time ago. I would have been bankrupt right now.

    I always put a cost to myself and my family on those things and no matter what job offer came up, it just wouldn't cover it.
    • 6) Yep, that's one advantage of public insurance. Lower stress, knowing you and your family have a right to basic health care no matter what...
  • Didn't we just have a story a week or two ago about how Canada's attracting tech talent from the USA? Is it really brain drain if they're draining in both directions?

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