As someone who graduated from Computer Science at Waterloo, this is common for anyone with the ability to do so. Pay is not competitive in Canada, and contrary to the common refrain here, taxes/rent/general CoL does NOT make up for this, not even close.
It's not just the taxes/rent/COL. I know three Canadian SWEs whose parents could have easily bought them a nice house or condo in any major Canadian city, if they had wanted to stay.
One of them explained it to me this way: the quality of employers, coworkers, and the overall software engineering work you'll do in Canada just doesn't compare to the US. Even if pay/finances were exactly the same, going to the US would still be the better career choice, because that's what everyone with talent and ambition does. The people who stay behind aren't people you want to work with, if you can help it.
I was with you up until the end. There are numerous reasons why people “stay behind” beyond them not being “people you want to work with”, so don’t just lump everyone in that bucket of “they’re not good enough”.
I "stayed behind" because I didn't qualify for an H1B visa due to being self-taught, but now 25 years later I'm glad I stayed here with my free healthcare and high standard of living. Yes, lots of talented people leave but lots stay as well, for reasons beyond the mighty dollar.
Without any sarcasm, do you use that 'free healthcare'? Because in QC it's not that available. Wait times are really bad, even once something is scheduled it can be pushed to future multiple times. Screens are constantly 'forgotten', pushed to the future. All of my colleagues with European/Indian passports traveled for medical reason to their home countries. Again that's Montreal experience, and as I read that's typical for Canada in general.
I have a primary care physician who I can book online to see usually within a few days, or if I choose one of the other oncall doctors I can see them same or next day.
I recently had a referral to a specialist for a non-emergency exam that was scheduled out two months. When I've had an emergency I've gone to the hospital and been seen within a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on the issue.
I would say I am fairly satisfied with the access I get, and I'm especially happy that I never have to worry about being denied coverage, or ending up "out of network", or having different levels of coverage depending on my employment.
'was scheduled out two months' - that's in fact a very long wait. Again, speaking about Montreal, I was able to see a specialist for 'problem A' in about two months as well, while had to wait for another 'specialist B' for a year+. I find those times just horrible.
I'm glad that you had good experiences, but I don't share it.
I don't like to live in 'unknown' or pain for months just because generalist thinks it 'not life threatening'. Of course my ankle pain was 'life threatening' - it's degraded my quality of life every day.
Then why didn't you pay to get in sooner? The option is available.
The argument here is about whether socialized medicine is better than the horror show that passes for medical care in the US. I contend some small delays on non-life-threatening procedures is worth never having to worry about having to pay for it or risking bankruptcy.
> The people who stay behind aren't people you want to work with, if you can help it.
This sounds like a generalization in need of evidence. Ultimately, the co-op program at UoW has a long history that includes ranking/matching data for co-op employers and students. It would be interesting to see the trends over time. My intuition is that the top ranked students accept jobs from their co-op employers after graduation but that may have changed.
I and three other CS/Eng seniors were going through full time job interviews on campus in Canada. We interviewed with the big Canadian software firm at the time and with a large US software company.
Three of us got offers from the Canadian company, four of us got offers from the US company. All of us ended up going to the USA.
How many of the CS students are non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job, or perhaps even move to California for weather?
Edit: I found the answer in the attached document [1]. About half the class immigrated to Canada. The stats for non-immigrant Canadian might be more interesting.
There are two survey questions concerning non-Canadian born students in the linked 2020 profile PDF:
1) International vs Domestic students (6.2% vs 93.8%)
2) Did you immigrate to Canada? (47.56% yes)
You used the answer for 2).
I think the answer for 1) answers your question better than the answer for 2), which doesn't answer when/why they immigrated to Canada.
Plus you're looking at the profile for the 2020 Software Engineering class. Computer science is a different program in the Math faculty. The two programs may have different international student composition.
Tuition is one of the reasons there are so few international students. International students in UWaterloo SWEng pay almost 4x as much as domestic students (C$61.3K vs C$17.1K) - see https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition.
International CS students pay C$45.5K vs C$9.3K for domestic CS students.
One factor I'd like to bring up here is that it's significantly easier for Canadians to work in the US than it is for people of other countries. Canadians have access to the TN visa, which is effectively automatic, while most other countries need an H-1B, which is lottery-based (last time I was in the lottery it was about a 1/3 chance of getting it).
As a result, I think "non-Canadians who came for their undergrad and now moving to wherever they get the best job" is a smaller set of people than you'd think, simply because they're held back by the (Byzantine) immigration system in the US.
Another related factor is that if you go to an American university for undergraduate CS rather than a Canadian one, you get the opportunity to use OPT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training), which gives you up to 36 months to roll for an H-1B visa. Add onto that the fact that there are so many good American CS universities to choose compared to Canadian ones, I'd expect most international students to study in the US versus at Waterloo if their goal was to work in California.
I mean just looking at the aerospace sector and the CSeries saga, Trudeau immediately bowed down to Trump when tariffs were imposed, despite later being thrown out in courts. All he did was to basically threaten to not buy Boeing fighter jets and instead get f35 from Lockheed (which he was contractually obligated to anyways). No support for the industry, nothing. And that was for a flagship prestige technological project.
I still don't understand why he reacted so submissively to Trump. Having the CSeries sold to Airbus at a huge discount was foolish: The plane already had a profitable amount of orders. Now Europeans are reaping the benefits.
Canadian politicians even pitched Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. I mean I'm all for it, my comp being stock-based I'm pocketing the difference.
Is that something the Canadian public... approves of?
I think a lot of the problems are deeply ingrained in society and culture. In the UK for example, engineering, especially software engineering is just fundamentally a low social status job, and people with high status running companies are fundamentally adverse to paying for it, and that's unlikely to change for a generation or more.
If you try to recommend people pay more to get better engineers and stop them all going to the US so they can build bigger and stronger companies here you just get dead eyes back - they can't comprehend why you'd give an engineer money.
At some point you need to look after yourself and go elsewhere.
Software Engineering was low status in US as well until they started to have a ton of software engineer first companies like Google where engineers hires and bosses around business people instead of the other way around.
Basically if typical engineers have business people anywhere in their management chain it is not an engineering first company. Not a lot of large companies are like that outside USA.
If the government fight hard, then lose, the opposing party will blame them for that and most likely make them win the next election. If they just do a marketing campaign telling they did the best possible, winning the next election is more probable.
And Trudeau has nothing to do with that, conservative or liberal, it will be the same strategy.
In order to make Canada more competitive, I think it should be addressed on the provincial level. We definitely need more startup to change the culture and have a place to keep the best talents. High risk funds, change in laws (so anybody can freely invest), etc.
Speaking only w/ regard to tech salary differences:
How do you compete against the VC-powered economic system in the US? VCs allow startups with often pie-in-the-sky visions and shaky business models to recruit the best of the best from across the world. The recruits know that they may be looking for a new job in a couple of years if the cash dries up. For them, it's OK because there will be another startup flush with cash. For the VCs, as long as 1 out of 10 of those bets go public, the ROI still works out.
This is simply not something that exists at a comparable level outside of the US, outside Silicon Valley even.
I have worked for 15 years in tech (in the US) and hardly ever worked at a "VC-powered" firm. All the companies I worked at were cash flow positive and payed a lot. Bulk of the compensation came from stocks specially for senior levels. So there must be something else going on here rather than just "VC-money".
Bombardier is a badly run company that consistently fails to deliver. Government money kept being poured into them for mediocre results. At a certain point they had to be cut off.
Bombardier Aviation (planes) and Transport (trains) have been distinct since the 80's. The business jets have been tremendously profitable.
Train is a different market. Rail projects are a political nightmare, as every buyer is a government (municipal, state, national) and wants their rail equipment to be manufactured in their jurisdiction. So they can make a big announcement that the X millions they just paid is actually creating good jobs. Then a few years later the job dries up for a designated site (project completed) so the local government keeps bailing it out else they'll get voted out for getting rid of all these jobs!
Plus, of course, every project is custom hardware. And is long enough that it will span at least two municipal, state or national administrations so expect a feature creep/change of requirements in the middle.
Gotta pay more money to keep the talent. This isn't rocket science.
The crazy thing is Canada has so many advantages that should make paying higher salaries easier. University is cheaper, so people don't have as much (or any) student debt. Healthcare is cheaper for companies to provide - since they generally only have to offer supplemental coverage. And so on.
American firms tend to have much higher quality corporate management than their Canadian counterparts.[1] To be profitable at FAAMG salaries requires leveraging your engineers to achieve very high levels of productivity and execution. That's generally not possible without management that consistently adheres to best practices.
I was just about to say the same. What was striking to me that the managers I’ve met in SF had all been swe:s and worked up the ladder. In my country it’s very rare, most managers have a background in economics and can’t really help the swe:s with anything besides internal politics. The lens they use is that everything is a cost. Even if the system they bought is the problem of why things take time. They also rely heavy on Garter of what is popular.
We are even starting to have them manage doctors!!
I think a bigger issue is the lack of venture capital. It's significantly harder to to raise the multi-million seed rounds needed to sustain Google/Amazon salary in Waterloo/Toronto
Based on my 15 years of experience (similar for my partner), there are a lot of cash flow positive companies in the US who pay a lot. They don't need venture capital at all. So there must be some other reason (profitability? SV culture of valuing engineers?)
When I was at Google, I learned from an internal pay comparison spreadsheet that a person in the same job at the same level is paid much worse in Waterloo (and in the UK as well) compared to SV / NYC, and the reason cited was "cost of labor" or some such fancy term which essentially meant "we want to pay as little as possible, so a little bit more than our competitors". So ultimately, it boils down to "prevailing wages" in Canada (and the UK).
The first company to offer SV level wages in Canada / UK will see a deluge of high quality applicants who want to stay in those locations for whatever reasons. I wonder why no one has tried that yet.
Direct taxation is not the whole story. Prices of anything including Canadian made goods are higher here than in the states. We basically earn in cdn but pay in usd. Healthcare is debatable, availability is actually a problem.
It doesn't work that way, especially with student debt. If I were a child and could choose, it might make sense to choose Canada. But children don't usually get to choose. When do you choose? For many people, when they graduate from college. At that point, you're from Canada and don't have student debt. Great! Wonderful!
But the salary is still higher in America. So you can go to America without the student debt, and still get the higher salary. And why not? (You could think of this as arbitrage between two ways of structuring society economically.)
But maybe the thing to do is to go back to Canada when you have kids, so that their university won't load them down with student debt.
No. There's a US media narrative that taxes and health care are worse in Canada than the US but:
1) You will likely pay more in taxes in California than Canada.
2) It's easier to itemize self-employment tax expenses in Canada, so you can easily pay half the taxes of the US. (I paid 12% of total income the last year I worked in Toronto.)
3) Everybody I know in Canada is happy with health care, and infinitely happier than Americans who've received false bills.
4) Startups have a big advantage in Canada because of the state health care, and unrelated lower salary expectations.
However, salaries are lower in Canada because companies pay less (like Europe or anywhere outside the US), but that's not related to taxes or health care.
This is a personal conclusion having work in both, some US and some Canadian based companies. What I realized, the reason we are pay less in Canada, is caused by our perceived value from management.
In the American company, the managers want me to succeed because that is directly link to their success. I'm part of the team, I'm accountable, but I had more freedom.
In the Canadian one, managers want all the credit (pay+bonuses+recognition), because they are the incredible one who made the monkey produce the value. I'm part of a pool, managers will decide what programming language I'll program in, he's managing the risk after all. Oh, and by the way, it was a hard year, not all goals where reached, so they need to cap the bonuses, but the company is glad for the all-time profit record.
Of course, it’s a bit of a caricature. It surely applies to US or Canadian company. But our perceived value struck me in all my employers.
This appears to be a general problem in politics (both corporate and governmental). The person in charge is surrounded by experts (in a specific subject) but he doesn't listen to them.
Yes, sometimes those experts are wrong or their ideas are not compatible with the general direction of the company and that's where you really want a leader's judgement but the solution to this problem isn't to ignore the expert, it's to find a compromise, verify information by asking multiple experts with differing opinions, make the experts understand the goals of the company.
In theory being a manager is the easiest job in the world. You delegate all your competence away to people who are better than you at the skill you are delegating. So the only challenge is to utilize the value of that competence properly.
One thing folks don't account for is that the Canadian tax bill includes healthcare, which is something US employers pay $600 per month for. It's effectively a private tax. Comparing like-for-like, one should really include the health premiums paid by employers in the tax total when comparing to Canada.
Even with that in mind, in a number of recent years, the median Canadian tax bill has been lower than the median American tax bill [1]. And to your point, it varies by state/province. The most expensive state OR province for high-income folks is California (51.9%) and the lowest is Alberta (39%). [1]
I've been in the USA for 12 years because of the pay difference, and job perks. I'd move back, but I'm married and have a family now.
The biggest stress down here is the healthcare and the immigration status, if you are at a stable enough company these aren't an issue, I'm lucky I only had 1 startup fail and cause me months of stress as I tried to fix those issues.
I've been in the US for 10 years because of the pay difference. Perks I'm over. I really don't care, I can buy my own perks with the pay. I've saved up enough to buy quite the lifestyle back in Canada, and I plan to move back before I start a family. I'm just a few months from getting my green card, and I'm genuinely over it.
I can't imagine raising kids in the US. The healthcare, oof. Even having kids, maternal mortality is 4X higher in the US than it is in Canada - among the worst in the OECD, and rising, while the rest of the OECD is falling. [1] Healthcare is just about the worst in the OECD along every major metric, even though it's by far the most expensive. [2]
The capital was just insurrected, is currently a military encampment, the school shootings/drills, the school metal detectors, the homeless, the riots, the lack of community. The general lack of progressivism. My street was looted a few months ago. Every business was walled off in plywood before the election. I mean, America doesn't really have a "left," just a center-right and a far-right, which really doesn't align with my personal politics. I'm not sure how I'd explain any of that to my kids.
I plan to go back in the next year or two - likely to BC, and I'll try to shore up the startup ecosystem there, investing, advising, and raising awareness of principals and practices.
After all, I graduated with no student debt. It's time to give back.
Healthcare in USA is expensive because it's bad. If you have cornered the market on a necessity, and healthcare providers absolutely have, the way to get people to pay more is to deprive them.
As a Waterloo CS grad who moved to the US, I'd say while I am quite happy here and have no plans to leave, all else being equal, I probably would have preferred to stay in Canada. In fact, we had a faculty member who moved to Canada from the US and was somewhat shocked to hear I accepted a faculty position in the US because dealing with funding here is much more painful than in Canada.
As an Australian living in the US, I understand the dynamics. Canadians and Australians have special access to the US labour market, most of the high-prestige work is happening here...
It's not too surprising. They pay is better and there are more opportunities for more interesting work. I didn't go to Waterloo, but I've met a number of other Canadians who, not unlike myself, made the move south. That being said I do miss living in Canada sometimes, just not enough to take a two thirds paycut.
My first real job 5 years was remote for a US company working from home from Montreal. I made about 120k USD which is pretty high for Montreal.
I am still working remotely, but for a multinational with offices in Canada. I manage to keep my US-like compensation by pointing out that with remote work there is very little frontiers and that the market is now global. This was pre-covid.
I imagine this new reality will drive pay down in the US and up in Canada.
As a person who's had the pleasure of working with many who've worked hard to build excellent products and thus raise all our incomes and stocks, you are welcome.
I understand this is not great for Canada but as an American I cannot complain.
I’m glad they all went south, I immigrated to Canada and it didn’t took me long to get a 6-figure job, its not Silicon Valley salary but I’m not paying 5k in rent either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Could it be that a lot of these young, bright folks would just rather live in the US, and getting a valuable degree enabled them to do what they've wanted to do for some time?
UWaterloo is one of the most rigorous schools in Canada, particularly in CS, math and science subjects. A six-figure job in America is pretty much the only light at the end of the tunnel for them.
Sometimes Waterloo kids take friendly jabs at the other school in the city, Wilfried Laurier. But the image of the two schools couldn't be more different. WLU is the party school that grades on a curve. Waterloo is much harsher academically, and the jokes and memes are usually focused on CS/Math kids having no friends, playing DoTA and waiting for their summer placements in SV.
I would be curious to see the number of students with immigrants parents; maybe they tried to go to the US but couldn't due to stricter policies. Now the kid can.
That doesn't explain why the rate is that high. It only explains why those students move to the US and I personally would rather stay in Canada if I were born in Canada.
We welcome our Canadian brothers and sisters with open arms. My cofounder came from Waterloo and together we built a good company with good jobs here in the US.
You should let the border guards know ;) the last time I got a TN my immigration attorney told me "honestly, you're lucky you're white, so you shouldn't have any problems."
Canadian TN packets are adjudicated at the border, by a border guard, in person. The immigration attorney was conveying experience with the adjudication process of comparable packets as a function of visual appearance of the applicant.
Other than those who have left Canada for the US and a few other small circles, the preference for Canada's best talent to leave for the US and the dramatic difference in career prospects doesn't get a lot of discussion in public discourse.
I believe in part it's because doing so would force us to publicly confront the uncomfortable truth that when it comes to ambition, creativity, and grit, Canadian companies don't employ the A-team. There are exceptions, but they mostly get the B/C players. Some broad generalizations are below, but I've worked in the tech industry for 20 years across multiple US/Canadian cities and in my experience they hold up.
Broadly speaking, you can split Canadian tech worker employers into a few categories:
1) Big, noncompetitive, unambitious, staid large companies making decent money via rent extraction in the Canadian market. Often times "by Canadians, for Canadians". They're minimally innovative and have largely incremental growth prospects, but because they have pricing power over their customers they subsist by turning the screws on customers and tweaking to control costs. They don't grow productivity or produce consumer/market surplus. With a few exceptions, they don't compete abroad (either they do and they're bit players, or they don't but we know they'd get creamed).
2) Small/medium sized Canadian companies. There are some genuinely interesting ones here but honestly, most don't even theoretically have a shot at hitting really big. There are a ton of small/medium sized niches with increasing venture funding, and that's great. But they are just never going to be large or profitable enough to compete with deep-pocketed US employers for the best talent. They'll end up successfully extracting rents from a niche or become the branch office of a US company. If you listen to the Canadian business/tech press we're on the cusp of a major breakout here, but we've been undeservedly pumping this narrative for almost as long as Torontonians have been the only ones in the world pumping the city as "world-class". Is 2021 the year Hootsuite will finally become a unicorn? (spoiler: no).
3) Shopify. They're special (relative to the rest of Canada) because they're a high-growth business in a huge, scalable, global market. Unlike #1 their industry isn't protected, so they actually need to compete on merit and generally do. They're recently profitable, but not that profitable.
4) Canadian satellite offices of US tech companies (some highly profitable, some highly ambitious, and some just there for skilled labour on the cheap). They mostly skim the cream off the top of the local labour markets, paying much better than #1, #2, and usually #3. They also bring skilled talent in from abroad, particularly those with trouble clearing US immigration.
The entrepreneurial A-team generally leaves to start businesses in the US. Canada is too small for them and the environment frankly seems to clip their wings.
The non-entrepreneurial A-team will move to the US to 2-3x their salary and 10x their personal growth (since they're now surrounding themselves with the A-team), which they can do because US immigration is a non-issue for most Canadians in tech thanks to NAFTA. Or they'll stay in Canada and work for either #4 or Shopify, since those are the best jobs. This is really hard to overstate. Anecdotally, from tech people in my social/professional network, with 1 exception the best people are either in the US or work for US companies from Canada.
The B-team works for #2 (who only pays enough to attract the B-team, so it's self-fulfilling) and can still do well for themselves, but it's a very different world. Slower-moving, less excitement, less growth.
The C-team works for #1. They're the ones who work on billing systems at Bell, keep the lights on at BMO, maintain inventory management systems for Metro, or are perhaps involved with government contracting at IBM/Accenture.
#1 are highly politically influential oligopolies. #2 captures a lot of mindshare and (in)direct subsidy ("X is the next Shopify!"). Neither want Canadian tech workers to become more expensive, and they all resent having to compete with #4.
You see this once you look for it. Toronto's Amazon HQ2 bid was run by Ed Clark, former CEO of TD. Part of his pitch was that Toronto software engineers were 30% cheaper than in other markets (if you’re a software engineer who can work for Amazon, 30% is a significant underestimate). Not because of health care. Because of wages. All the while, local tech employers complained about how difficult it would be for them to compete against Amazon for talent. This got a fair bit of press and no one with voice in Canadian public life is willing to fight back. An industry and culture that complains about the presence of competition is not an industry which will stimulate the growth of competitive businesses.
So US companies continue to quietly be the first choice for Canada’s best. Everyone else makes do with what’s left behind.
I don't have any proof, but I think it's wage fixing. Not just in Canada, but nearly everywhere outside of the United States.
I'm personally convinced that the only reason that engineer TCs in the United States are so high in comparison to everywhere else is because wage fixing is no longer an issue, thanks to legal action in California in the late 2000s/2010. It's kind of crazy to think how recently it happened. Just in the last ~10 years.
Top-band compensation for ICs went up significantly year-over-year, and it hasn't stopped rising yet. It's also dragged pay for engineers in the rest of the industry upwards. Startups and non-FAANG companies can't directly compete with top band TCs, but they're forced to at least try with higher salaries.
Because there are very few software/IT companies in Canada (or Europe or almost anywhere else except China) with revenues like US software/IT giants.
So software engineers tend to work in supporting roles / costs center departments in other industries (finance, manufacturing, logistics) or do non-scalable work such as contracting or small/medium-enterprise front-end/back-end dev.
> Because there are very few software/IT companies in Canada (or Europe or almost anywhere else except China) with revenues like US software/IT giants.
I replied elsewhere in the thread but this is simply not true based on what I have seen first hand at companies like Google. They have a presence in Canada / UK, but pay at a much lower rate than SV for the same job/level/performance. So profitability or a lack of revenue seems just an excuse.
One factor is less opportunities also means less competing offers. Having solid competing offers can boost your initial offer by another 33%.
On the next job switch you can now use that higher salary and get another set of competing offers. Since it's not an option in Canada there's not a lot of upward pressure on compensation.
In my limited experience the top tier employers are very strict with their regional market assessment. When I started to negotiate above that range with a FANG Canada they converted my offer to SF Bay Area. The difference has everything to do with market assessments and nothing to do with cost of living.
I looked briefly to find the compensation of the head coach of the Maple Leafs. It's not easy to find, but I'm guessing it's a lot based on how they talk about the contract.
Most Canadian employers are not VC-funded, the pay they can offer has to be in line with general rules of finance: spend less than you make.
Compare that to something like Uber where the company makes 9-figure losses, and yet can afford to pay high six-figure salaries. Someone has to make up the difference, and as is often the case with tech companies, it'll be venture capital firms.
I recall during either during the 90's or mid 2000's that Canada was loosing a lot of medical school graduates to the United States for much the same reasons as well. There was some articles about it reversing in the last decade though.
On a personal note: I did QA, test automation, and current am technically Sales Engineering (though I'm finding I dislike it quite a lot). My last raise brought my salary to $52,000 Canadian a year at year 9 of my career. That's about $34,000 USD or so. I'm guessing that's not exactly stellar pay in the US.
Personally I'd seriously consider heading State side too if I could. As is I haven't the foggiest idea if I am qualified, how to find out, or what companies would even consider someone like me.
> As is I haven't the foggiest idea if I am qualified, how to find out, or what companies would even consider someone like me.
If you are considering QA or test automation, almost all software companies have openings in those fields. FAANGs perennially have shortage of these positions and they can take care of all the visa issues for you. Startups are also an option if you know what you are getting into.
A variation of sales engineering that you might like is solutions architect role. This role would be more predominant in larger companies, where you might interface with sales engineers but have more technical responsibilities in everyday work. Any large cloud service provider would list dozens of open solutions architect roles.
I'm curious what the data looks like for the last 4 years.
I recall some clickbait articles about how websites to immigrate to Canada were flooded during election night, and commentators speculating that US academia and tech sector were doomed by the incoming administration.
It would be interesting to see if these predictions held true. Was there a notable change during the last 4 years?
There's been no change, in fact the numbers have gone up because the program has become even more competitive.
Some people in my year (2016) couldn't leave Canada due to visa issues. Most who left are still in the States. 2018s had a higher % US-bound, and so did the 2020s.
Why is this notable? Canada and the US are friendly neighbors and quite similar (from the perspective of the privileged types of people getting these jobs) and the US is bigger so you’d expect there to be more jobs there.
Canada is paying (I presume, not an expert in how Canadian universities are funded) to educate these people, but then they immediately take all their wealth creation out of the country.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be able to do that if they want, but it has long term impacts on the country's wealth, but also its ability to more generally develop, to keep educating itself, and to perform jobs that can't be done by another a company in another country, like some parts of government, defence, healthcare, etc.
It's also just a bad indicator. Why do they need to move? Why can't they get what they want here? If the first thing 84% of your graduates do is get the hell out of your country as fast as they can then you should probably stop and think about what's going wrong that makes them want to do that?
I left the US to explore living abroad but the paycut really hurt. It's funny too because in my experience the quality of engineering in Europe is higher, but the market is so uncompetitive.
