Canada's Challenge Is Keeping Techies, BlackBerry Inventor Says (bloomberg.com)

The former chief executive officer of BlackBerry added his voice to the chorus of people saying that Canada's main economic hurdle is keeping technology talent. From a report: "The biggest challenge as a country is retaining and recruiting the best people to build industries in Canada and not lose them to other jurisdictions," Mike Lazaridis, who left BlackBerry in 2013, said Thursday at the Waterloo Innovation Summit. Canada is pushing to become a technological leader as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tries to shift away from a commodities-driven economy by increasing funding for technology and offering fast-track visas to highly skilled workers. Cities like Ottawa, the capital, have stepped up recruitment efforts targeting expats in the U.S., while Toronto and its surrounding cities submitted a regional bid Wednesday for Amazon.com's second headquarters. The BlackBerry inventor sees Canada as at the forefront of the development of quantum computers, technology that could transform the world by allowing computers to operate much faster and on larger data sets than ever before.

Comments

Pay more

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think people leave Canada because they want to?

Re:History

[mangastudent]

Not sure about the CF-105 Arrow, I mean, the first flight of the US F-102 Delta Dagger was 5 years before, I'd have to look a lot harder to see if they had any special sauce we didn't. But Colossus et. al. were the equivalent of ASICs, useless once Nazi Germany was defeated and no one was sending messages using their particular devices. But in general purpose AKA "stored program" as it was called back then computing the U.K. was quite competitive with the US in the immediate post-WWII period, especially given the economic constraints. See for example the EDSAC and Mark I.

The Old-Fashioned Way

[seven of five]

Want more tech talent?
Fucking pay them.

Re:The Old-Fashioned Way

[Moof123]

This. Money talks.

We have have 4 Canadians in my small design group of ~20, though only 2 at the moment. For them the pay delta was a 50% raise combined with many more tech options if they needed to change jobs for any reason.

So not only does pay need to be higher, but you need to attract enough companies that folks who move to work their will feel secure enough in the job market as a whole to be willing to put down roots. The magic of Silicon Valley is that despite being a traffic snarled expensive mess you know that if your current dotcom, or startup folds you can go a couple doors down and pick up a job at the next wiz-bang scam shop, likely with a raise.

Companies know that if they setup shop it is easy to hire just about any techy person, though it might cost a pretty penny. If time to market is important, then growing talent internally is foolish.

"we make the same dollar salary as US people"

[enjar]

Some time ago, I went to up to Montreal for a business trip. Talking with the engineers there, they told me that Canadian salaries are largely the same dollar (number) amount as US firms pay, but their tax burden is far higher, with federal, provincial and VAT taxes taking away a good deal of that salary, plus then the cost of things like gasoline were considerably higher, making the cost of living greater. That can't help. There's also the issue of the climate. Given a choice between working in a warmer climate (California or Texas), working in the Great Frozen North is a really hard sell. There are also other issues like travel hassles to visit family, crossing international borders and so on. I've also been to Toronto a number of times for vacation and I've enjoyed it, but I always went in the warmer months. Toronto reminded me a lot of a cleaner and more polite version of NYC and I enjoyed my vacation, but I've never been there in winter time. People say the lake "helps" but I can still imagine the winter nights being dark and full of Horton's. I can't stand the darkness of winter here in Massachusetts, and geometry tells me it's far worse in Canada. So Canadian firms need to come up with means of sweetening the pot to attract talent, one knob being paying more.

Disclaimer list: 1) anecdotal, employer could have been stingy, employee could have been a poor performer 2) a big metro area, as they are expensive in the US, too 3) years ago, when the US dollar was stronger vs. CAD 4) comparing COL across countries is hard, as I pay more out of my paycheck for health insurance in the US than a Canadian does, who pays it in taxes.