Canada Facing 'Brain Drain' As Young Tech Talent Leaves For Silicon Valley (theglobeandmail.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: Canada's best and brightest computer engineering graduates are leaving for jobs in Silicon Valley at alarmingly high rates, fueling a worse "brain drain" than the mass exodus by Canadian doctors two decades ago, according to a new study. The study, led by Zachary Spicer, a senior associate with the Munk School of Global Affairs' Innovation Policy Lab at University of Toronto, found one-in-four recent science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates from three of the country's top universities -- University of Waterloo, University of British Columbia and U of T -- were working outside Canada. The numbers were higher for graduates of computer engineering and computer science (30 percent), engineering science (27 percent) and software engineering, where two out three graduates were working outside Canada, mostly in the United States. Nearly 44 percent of those working abroad were employed as software engineers, with Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon listed as top employers.

Comments

So, people are moving around ?

[alexhs]

Two weeks ago, we learned that Engineers Are Leaving America For Canada.

Do the stories cancel out ?

Will we get a follow-up story about (for example) how young Canadians come to the Silicon Valley to get credentials, then leave because of the high cost of living / insecurity over employee buses attacks ?

This is a salary problem

[BigDish]

I'm a US citizen that moved to Toronto because I loved the city. What I found is that the tech jobs just don't pay there, while the city is rapidly increasing in price. My understanding is Vancouver isn't much different. I took a pay cut to move there, and ultimately left for a Seattle-based job. After the exchange rate, my salary in Seattle is double that of Toronto - while the cost of living isn't that much more. I talked to many tech people in Toronto, and never found someone who was making 6 figures Canadian even.

I would love to move back to Toronto, but the low salaries, high cost of living, and poor benefits (most companies only wanted to offer 2 weeks of vacation time, and my company didn't even offer retirement plans) made it a poor financial decision for me. If Canada wants to stop the brain drain, they need to fix the salary problem.