
Google Raids Threaten Canada's Lead in Artificial Intelligence - bko
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-17/google-raids-threaten-canada-s-lead-in-artificial-intelligence
======
vkou
When Google offers triple-the-pay (Overall compensation) for low-level
Canadian SWEs, is it any wonder that it has no problem picking up AI
researchers?

Software engineers are paid relatively poorly in Canada, (Vancouver in
particular) - and this is discounting the poor performance of the petro-
canadian-dollar.

~~~
api
Why? I've seen this before but it always mystified me.

Oh, and totally tangentially but: how do human beings actually live in
Vancouver? The rents and real estate prices are almost as bad as the Bay Area
but minus the high paying jobs.

~~~
stanmancan
The Lower Mainland is a pretty big area, the farther away from Downtown
Vancouver the lower the rent is. I rent a small 3 bedroom house in North Delta
(about a 45 minute drive to Downtown, no traffic. An hour if I park and take
the train in) and pay $1550/m plus utilities. The house we're in sold for
$510,000 in November 2014. It's very difficult for any single family to
purchase even a small house. The vast majority of the houses being sold where
I live are being bought by Indian/East Asian families who will buy the
property, tear down the house, build a massive multi-tenant home, and have 2-3
families living under the same roof. A ton of property is also being purchased
by people who will get their Canadian residency, buy a bunch of property, but
still live in China. The property is bought as investments and left empty.
There are area's downtown that are full of 20+ story residential buildings but
yet the streets are deserted since nobody is actually living there. Super
strange. Everyone who I know who's purchased recently is either buying
townhouses or condo's (which are both still going for a minimum of $350K for
1-2 bedrooms).

------
potatolicious
Disclaimer: I'm a Canadian expat who's been living and working in the US tech
industry for a few years.

> _" Google Raids Threaten Canada's Lead in Artificial Intelligence"_

This seems like an unnecessary specific title, I'd suggest the following edit:

"US Tech Company Compensation Threaten Canada's Trailing Status in All of
Tech"

For one thing, this isn't just an AI thing, US companies have been moving
Canadian tech workers south of the border for years across the board,
regardless of specialization or focus area. Everyone from the humblest code
monkey to the brainiest algorithms wrangler is being exported from Canada at a
rapid pace.

This has been happening for long enough that a significant fraction of
Canadian tech talent is _already_ residing in the US, which sort of raises
eyebrows about any claims that Canada "leads" in tech currently. If there ever
was a lead the brain drain has certainly put that to bed long ago.

And it's not just Google, _all_ of the major companies recruit Canadians
heavily, and even startups have gotten in on the game in recent years.

And these aren't "raids". Google isn't marching off computer scientists at
gunpoint. There's nothing predatory about this - if Canadian companies want to
play in the same league as US tech, they need to catch up, the least of which
is narrowing the pay gap.

Right now I am literally making 500% the salary a similar position pays in
Canada. Even accounting for the living costs of SF/SV/NYC it's not hard to see
why people make the move. Canadian tech pays _incredibly_ poorly in comparison
to US tech, and that's far and away the #1 reason the brain drain exists and
will persist.

I'm a proud Canadian, and all else being equal I'd rather live in Canada than
the US, but one of the persistently annoying things about Canada's tech
industry narrative is the continuous denial of just how far behind they are
compared to the US.

~~~
branchless
500% ? What field? I'm in Canada and earning a good wage. I could go to some
hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work
longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids).

I don't see 500% as a likely pay gap for most.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm in iOS dev.

> _" I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and
> up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with
> my kids)."_

I hear this a lot from Canadian colleagues who stay in Canada, and I dunno, it
always irks me a little bit.

Increasing your wage doesn't necessarily entail longer hours or fewer
holidays. It seems like it's a popular perception in Canada to imagine all US
jobs as some kind of hellish sweatshop where you're chained to your desk all
day in exchange for more money - but in reality the spread of job quality is
the same here as it is in some place like Toronto or Vancouver. You will find
the same shitty sweatshop jobs and you will find great jobs - the pay increase
seems entirely orthogonal to that. The market rate is simply higher - _much_
higher, across the board.

~~~
branchless
But not 500%, I'm quite sure.

I think large urban centers generally have longer working hours. Such as NY
and London. Typically the living quarters are smaller, the commute is longer
and the culture is more "you shall be here until at least 6pm because you live
to work". Not everywhere, but on average.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm in NY, my office is empty at 9am, mostly full at 10am, starts emptying at
5pm, and is mostly deserted by 6pm. People work from home all the time, and
leaving early is entirely accepted and even encouraged.

This feels like it lines up with, well, everywhere else.

I've had 4 jobs in this city and this has been the case with every single one,
and they've ranged from tech megacorps to startups. This isn't some pressure-
cooker investment banking job...

I feel like your impression of NY tech (I can't speak to London) is drawn from
stereotypes more than reality. I've worked also in Toronto and the work
expectations do not feel much different - if anything it feels a bit _more_
lax here in NYC than TO.

> _" But not 500%, I'm quite sure."_

I dunno, what do you think an iOS developer with ~4 years of experience
fetches in Toronto or Vancouver? Let's say total comp (i.e., salary, any
guaranteed bonuses, public stock).

~~~
branchless
I'm afraid this is anecdata. I'd expect a dev with ~4 years most places to not
get that much. The how much doesn't matter, it's the idea that you get 500%
that is clearly nuts. I mean - why would firms not be queuing up to cut their
wages by 80% in the same timezone? Makes zero sense and doesn't accord with
any figures.

Also it's not a sane comparison at the start of your career. You have ~2 years
then move and have ~4 years and your salary went up? Is that location related
or related to the fact that you are now actually useful instead of learning
the ropes?

Avg developer salary in the US is ~80k. So to meet your 500% dev in Canada
would be earning less than part-time hot-dog sellers.

I work with people in NY every day. They work longer hours. I think if you
asked most tech in big cities if their day is longer they'd agree.

------
jbob2000
We can't compete, a research lab and accelerator won't change the fact that
our dollar is 3/4s the American dollar. I could move to the states, take the
same salary, and get an instant 30% raise. That, coupled with the fact that
our goods are 10-20% more expensive than the states and our housing prices are
skyrocketing, you're just shooting yourself in the foot by staying here.

~~~
rdtsc
But are goods and services in Canada correspondingly cheaper. In other words
converted to US dollars, devs make less there, but is food, housing and
healthcare also costing less?

~~~
stanmancan
No. A ton of Canadians close to the border regularly cross the border to buy
goods, including groceries, gas, and electronics. All of which are typically
substantially cheaper even if it's only a 30 minute drive away. The Canadian
dollar is doing terribly right now, so it's not as beneficial, but even but
even though our dollar is only at $0.72 you can STILL save a bit of money
after the exchange rate.

Services tend to be significantly cheaper. (Cell phone plans, taxi's, ect.)

~~~
klipt
Isn't that mostly because the US has lower sales tax? Technically you should
probably be paying import taxes on stuff you buy in the US and take back to
Canada.

Similarly Californians can cross the state border to Oregon (which has no
sales tax) and buy cheaper stuff there, but technically they have to pay
California a use tax on those items equivalent to Californian sales tax.

~~~
stanmancan
Sales tax is a small part of it, but most item's just cost less period. When
you declare at the border, as long as you don't have more than a few hundred
dollars, you're typically alright. I've declared up to $350 worth of groceries
and they let me go through no problem. Liquor/Tobacco is a different story,
however, once again, I've crossed and declared a flat of beer (24) and was
asked to pay.

------
graeme
The increase in the purchasing power of the US dollar relative to the Canadian
is surely having an impact here, particularly the large increase over the past
year, from 1.12 to 1.39.

In the 90s, when Canada's currency was low, there was similar talk of brain
drain amongst highly educated professionals.

USD to CAD chart for the past five years:
[http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CAD&view=5Y](http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CAD&view=5Y)

------
peter303
For us old timers this is the third AI boom (including two "A.I. winters" in
between). In the 1980s the boom was experts systems and logic inference
supercomputers. Many computer science departments were decimated then.

~~~
rdtsc
> In the 1980s the boom was experts systems and logic inference
> supercomputers.

Would you consider any current system or approaches are a continuation of that
or did that end up a dead branch in the AI evolution so to speak.

I can perhaps think of IBM's Watson as sort of continuing in that legacy.

~~~
hiddencost
This "third wave" isn't really AI, it's more "Machine Learning". Watson's
question answering service is basically an ensemble of statistical methods,
like everything else these days.

------
serge2k
> “We are losing our top talent, the talent at every level,” says Ajay
> Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of
> Management. “While we had that advantage, it is slipping through our
> fingers.”

well yeah, people want to go to the states and be paid more while working on
interesting things.

------
api_or_ipa
The article brought my ML prof at UBC, Nando de Freitas. Absolutely stunningly
brilliant, in a way that inspired deep questions in philosophy, CompSci, math
and psychology. It's a shame he no longer teaches at UBC and now works at
Google.

------
ChrisArchitect
ridiculous unexplanatory title had me wondering about 'raids'. "Brain Drain by
US firms threatens Canada's lead in AI"

