Obviously everything is local. 40k is about $20/hr, which where I live is just a tad above what new fast food workers make. Fresh CS grads make more than $100k (or at least they did, obviously the past year and a half has been brutal). This is not in SV.
In most of the world (even just considering developed nations) fresh CS grads do not make more than $100k. Senior software engineers don't even make that much anywhere in Europe or most of Canada.
Senior software developers definitely can make that much in parts of Europe, and not just at banks or the big 5. But also 100k USD isn't what it was 5 years ago.
Why the disparity? Especially with Canada - no language barrier and no time zone differences. Why doesn’t the free market equalize Canadian dev wages with American ones?
This is not speculation, it is what multiple Canadians I've tried to poach have told me: they don't want to move to a country where one medical emergency can put them in 6 figures of debt
Not that our health care system is going that well these days but true.
Also being called a freaking non-resident "alien" is so demeaning, sorry I am human.
None of those reasons make any sense to me. The US health care system is truly fucked, but nearly all the companies paying well for SWEs also provide good health care plans. It sucks that things are so complicated (deductibles, copays, coinsurance, in-network, out-of-network, etc.), but people with good health insurance aren't getting bankrupted by health care costs. And I've seen plenty of colleagues with super-expensive conditions in my lifetime ("million-dollar babies", cancer, losing limbs in car accidents, etc.)
And bitching about bureaucratic terms like non-resident alien? All countries have silly bureaucratic language and words can have multiple meanings. Nobody thinks "alien" in this context means you're a little green man from Mars.
Sure until you lose your job, I think having your health insurance tied to employment is really scary for a lot of people (me included). Not everybody has the same tolerance to risk. Our safety net isn't what they have in europe, but it is still better than the US.
No offense but it is spoken like a true American. I have dealt with European immigration and it was pleasant/painless for the most part. In the US they make you feel unwelcome and they drown you in paperwork. Not that Canada is much better these days, but I am a citizen so don't need to deal with it.
> Sure until you lose your job, I think having your health insurance tied to employment is really scary for a lot of people (me included)... Our safety net isn't what they have in europe, but it is still better than the US.
100% agree, but we weren't talking about which system is better, we were talking about why Canadians may be reluctant to relocate to the US. It's not like Canadians who come to work in the US give up their citizenship. Worse comes to worst and you lose your job and health care and have a major medical issue, the Canadian safety net is still there for you.
Yes and no, you lose access to it 6 months after you leave and to have access to it again to need to wait another 6 months while being in the Province. But I get your point, when you are a fresh grad it makes sense to spend a few years in the US. Though less relevant now with remote work, you can get a US salary here its just a bit harder.
I am convinced that the WFH movement is responsible for the recent offshoring trend.
Before 2020, it was fairly uncommon to work remotely and most employees were expected to physically come to the office. You would relocate if you got a job in another state, and employers had to go through a painful visa process to access foreign workers or set up expensive international satellite offices.
The great WFH experiment kicked off by the pandemic concluded that no productivity was lost, so many employers realized that they did not actually need to hire domestically at all. Everyone can be remote and work from wherever. LCOL in the US is still extravagant compared to many other regions, so a top engineer can now be hired for pennies on the dollar. I think there's a very good chance that tech salaries in the US have begun to and will continue to equalize with the rest of the world as a result.
I definitely agree with this. In addition to WFH, consumer-grade Zoom/Meet/etc. got good enough right around the pandemic (just before really) where it made off shoring really feasible. I've especially seen an explosion of offshoring to Latin American and Eastern Europe. The time zones make things much more workable than, say, India or China.
Yep. My previous company almost exclusively hires in Latin and South America now. The interesting thing to me is that it hasn't affected the executives themselves yet. If employees from one region work just as well as employees from another for other roles (or at least cost to performance is favorable), then it seems hypocritical and counterproductive for them to insist on US-based execs. The vindictive part of me hopes that it catches up with them next.
That will change once legislation gets passed requiring remote workers who are not located in the same country to need to go through the work visa process. The outsourcers are shooting themselves in the foot. Once the law drops and they cannot bring over the cheap remote labor due to visa limits, they will end up with skeleton crew teams that cannot maintain the spaghetti systems that are being built.
Legislation could easily be crafted to block even contractor firms from circumventing the requirement. Either way, someone remoting in from abroad would have to get a visa. This will solve the problem. It's definitely coming, because to work domestically they'd need a visa...so doing the work remotely is not an exemption to that.
In my experience the best Canadian devs came to the US specifically because they could make so much more. Not sure if that's changed much over the past 5 years given the explosion of remote work.
The better question is why doesn't the free market lower Silicon Valley pay to be comparable to the rest of the world. SV is the outlier. Even other forms of engineering don't pay compensation anywhere near what SV software devs get.
