1y ago

Report: Canada saw over 30,000 tech workers immigrate while losing nearly 1,700 to the US

betakit.com Report: Canada saw over 30,000 tech workers immigrate while losing nearly 1,700 to the US

Canada saw an intake of over 30,000 foreign tech workers within the last year, according to a new report from the Technology Councils of North America and Canada's Tech Network.

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I cannot say for how it is for other companies, but for the tech company I work for it was the immigration and visa mess that pushed us to move all of our operations from the US to Canada. These are not call center jobs either, they are good high paying development jobs, from our architects to junior developers.
The United States has made it too hard and slow to get the visas we need to conduct business. We sell our software online, we have customers all around the world. When we need to get the right employees and customers in one location to meet, we can do that in Canada. The United States, starting around 2016 and getting worse from then, there just became too many random work permit denials and extra hoops to jump through.
- Interesting, it's not the first time I've heard this. There an Ottawa office that hosts a few examples of this for an American company I know of.
  
  Ottawa (kanata) is like the landing zone for American tech shops sourcing people into the Eastern time zone for NYC and Washington. There are SO MANY familiar logos up by March and TerryFox .

The top five [hiring companies] includes financial institutions such as TD, RBC, and Scotiabank, along with Amazon and Bell.
It would be interesting to know what roles the banks are filling with these newcomers.
- You might be surprised how inefficient banks can be when it comes to tech. As years go by I see an increase of tech workers but a decrease of experienced or competent ones. My view is those competent tech workers tend to be more expensive than Canadian companies are willing to pay, thus end up hiring 10x the staff. The banks simply have more money to waste that way and thus are doing so by hiring a lot of tech workers.
  
  The article doesn't provide enough context to say.
  There is also the possibility that they're being swallowed into the great fintech pachinko machine.
- If they're like most places, they're going to front-line support and/or front-line development.
  Banks and other institutions with a massive legacy codebase and/or infrastructure are keenly aware of how much it costs them to maintain, COBOL code on zSeries. They'd very much like to replace the currently-irreplaceable mainframe wizards with interchangeable "full stack developers" that they can outsource or subcontract to.
  There's a lot of Gen-X and Millenial managers that really struggle with having whole chunks of their infrastructure that they can't commodify (source: am a Gen-X IT manager). Part of this is a legit concern: COBOL+zSeries or RPG+iSeries devs are not exactly common, and they take a long time to train up. Senior architects are even rarer, and most of them are a heartbeat away from their, ahem, last promotion, so it makes sense to try and move that you can to something that you can more easily support.
  The other part of this is that there is a type of insecure douchebag manager that hates having indispensable employees, and there's nothing as indispensable as the greybeard who knows the COBOL code that your billion-dollar company runs on.
  
  Agreed, we can make assumptions, but it would be cool to have accurate stats.
  It would be interesting to know if these employees helping improve Canadian productivity by building new products and services that being money in, it are they support that has little to no positive impact, while discouraging innovation?
  (I suspect you're right, btw)
- Also interesting would be knowing what those "tech" roles are.
  Sometimes first line call center is labelled as tech.
  Which is a much different role than engineering, or installing, or maintenance or coding - which are the types of roles I typically think of as "tech".

Well, how else are they going to suppress wages?
- The report says the current average annual compensation for Canadian tech occupations in this study is $100,400 CAD, with a salary range of $50,200-$167,700. Comparable jobs in the US could earn an average of $175,600 CAD, ranging from $72,600 to $313,000.
  Working as intended!

Canada needs a more competitive tech pay environment. For that, we need a better startup environment.
- The environment for startups is harsh all over. The reason 99% of startups die isn't because of environment: it's because pies in the sky are VERY often unattainable.
  You'll be happy to know that Universal Basic Income will allow more startups to flourish, but I really don't expect we'll get there under a Red government, let alone a Blue populist hellscape.
  
  A healthy startup environment in a country is basically an indiscriminate venture capital firm... As long as your average startup founder has a bust-out rate (99%) lower than the return on a success (>100x), you're winning.
  Thing is, there are no industries where this is viable relative to the US.

Chances are those 1,700 were some of our best and the 30,000 incoming are mostly junior / helpdesk / support people.
- 30 of them work for my company. They are all very senior, making good money, and paying Canadian taxes. Paying a lot of taxes that pay for social programs that all Candians enjoy.
  
  I hope they can use part of those tax revenues to fix our healthcare.
  Canada is no longer a shining first world example of success (if it ever was). We used to boast about how great our healthcare system was, but it's had serious problems for years and those problems just keep getting worse. If I were a tech immigrant looking to move to a rich country I don't think I would choose Canada at the moment.
- Your psychic skills are impressive, but they rest of us may want sources for these confidently-created conclusions.
  
  hello police i'd like to report a murder
  
  🔮🧙‍♂️
- I wouldn't just assume that. There are a lot of university grads that go to the US. It's a lot easier to immigrate when you don't have to worry about kids or family.
  
  Aaand the healthcare brings us all back. Okay, the plural of anecdotes isn't data, but among my circle of re-pats, we all came back because the undercurrent of worry moving from a country of simply (not easily; just simply) accessible healthcare to one with so many extra steps (even with an excellent plan) and the chance of going bankrupt through decisions made for an unconscious person, it wasn't balanced out by the raw paycheque upgrade.
  F that. Life's too short to hoard against the day when you get in a car accident and go to the wrong hospital.

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