Is Toronto a good place to move to for a senior software engineer?

There's just more of a ceiling in Canada for jobs pay. There are SE's in the Bay Area making like $300K-$500K USD, whereas I have never heard of anyone making that much in Canada. Maybe there are --but it would be few and far between.

Plus, in SF you can get equity still at places like FB or Google and of course at startups. While some startups here give you equity, it's not as much and rarer with bigger companies. Companies up here seem have more traditional business models (i.e. they are part of larger companies or they have enough customers to pay their bills), so they aren't as reliant on giving out equity.

There's also a prestige factor I feel. In the Bay Area, I felt that being in tech as an engineer is kinda the top of the food chain. Here, people still think of you like some IT coding monkey, in the general public. It depends too on the company you are working for. If you are working for a software company, like Google, you'll be treated well. If you are working for a bank or a retailer, probably not so much, because they still see their core business as something else. So obviously, they aren't going to pay you what a software company will pay you.

It's just the mindset here. Tech isn't the "main" business of the town, so you aren't going to get the same wages or the same perks as you would in SF. Over the course of your career, it could add up.

I think the pace of work here is slower though in Toronto vs SF. But maybe by like 10-25% in the private sector (in the public, it's much slower). But the wage differential is like 30-40% lower, so I don't know if it's worth it or not to you.

/r/askTO Thread Parent