Simple is not available in Canada, which is what the above poster is referring to. Few (no?) Canadian banks offer email notifications for debit (Interac) transactions.
Yep. This is going to be the next cold fusion - the device will soon be debunked, but we will still be hearing about it from conspiracy theorists for decades.
ccTLDs can have similar issues to the new gTLDs - the administration of those is contracted out by ICANN too, usually to a State level body of some kind. The quality of these varies hugely as well. This is also why countries with desirable ccTLDs like .tv (Tuvalu) abuse their position by charging more for their TLD.
.io as used in this example was a ccTLD, and this issue was directly caused by its mismanagement.
The consensus standard for this sort of test is IEEE 1528, and you are absolutely correct. The test uses a gel phantom (the standard provides a few formulations for different frequencies but most are a mixture of water, salt, sugar, and a thickener) and it is poked at with a sensitive probe to measure local temperature rise.
There is the new Canadian SBIR analog (Innovative Solutions Canada [1]) which looks like a big step in the right direction.
It's having some issues getting off the ground though, it just kicked off a few months ago and I think they are way behind handing out funding. There's only been a handful of challenges and not many applicants (I submitted a proposal, which was serialized as a submission number just over 300). They are supposed to be distributing about $100M/yr, or 1% of the federal R&D budget.
There's no contradiction. Two things are happening here.
Foreigners in the US (H1B applicants) are heading up to Canada because the immigration policies are more lax.
Canadian citizens from Canada are heading down to the US because the salaries are higher, and under NAFTA Canadian engineers qualify for an easy-to-get instant visa (TN status).
The real fix is to provide appropriate incentives to build a technology industry. Unfortunately, programs to date have been rife for abuse and mainly only benefit those who know how to game the system (see the scandals around IRAP/SRED consultants).
The new government has introduced a Canadian equivalent to SBIR, called Innovative Solutions Canada [1], which seems very promising. It's basically a carbon copy of the American SBIR program, which had had a remarkable impact in the US for bootstrapping small high tech firms that are too risky for VCs to the point where they can seek investment.
The other piece of the puzzle is the VC environment. Canada simply does not have a cadre of experienced venture capitalists with access to funds and willingness to take risks. Until that changes, Canadian tech companies will continue to hop the border after reaching a certain size, because it's in their best interest to leave for the US where funding is better.
If Canadian companies were willing to offer a competitive salary, maybe Canadian grads would stay. It doesn't even have to be 1:1 with the US, even 75% would be nice.
As it is, there is little incentive to stay here. I know a new grad who was faced with the choice of staying in Canada to earn $40-50k CAD per year starting, or heading to the US where he had a job offer with one of the big five for $120k USD plus signing bonus. Guess which option he chose?
Canadian tech companies love to complain about lack of talent, but they're not willing to pay for it, and they seem oblivious to the fact that we have a professional worker mobility agreement with our southern neighbors that makes it very easy to get a visa.
Lower salary could be acceptable if the cost of living was lower, unfortunately it's often the same as in the US. Vancouver might even be more expensive. Maybe if provincial/federal governments tackled that first more people would stay, as it would be a better environment to raise a family.
Definitely not my experience (Toronto -> SF). My rent for a 2-bed apartment in SF is twice as much as my mortgage for a 3-bed detached in Toronto (both with similar commute times)
With that said, signing bonuses are definitely something that you don't ever get in Canada, raises and yearly bonuses are also categorically lower, and housing prices have been outpacing salary increases significantly.
However, there are definitely very good reasons to be in Canada instead of the US/Bay area. Healthcare, for one thing, isn't an opaque insurance clusterfuck. It's also much safer (both macroscopically, in terms of things like shootings, and microscopically, in terms of side effects of widespread homelessness).
Another thing to consider is that work visas are far easier to get in Canada, and the path to citizenship is also much less draconian.
This comes up in every thread about Canada, but it seems a lapse of logic to anthropomorphize a market like this. The market doesn't "will" anything, and people's willingness to offer/accept a salary is more a consequence of local conditions than a cause. Those conditions include the option of getting paid more if you're willing to leave the country, which some are. Presumably that affects the market for those who choose to remain, but it would be interesting to know by how much. It's not obvious.
Canadian companies complain about lack of talent about as much as their employees complain about lack of salary. Isn't it a sign of a market reaching its level when both sides complain about the price but nevertheless accept it?
Yes, using personalized anthropomorphic terms is silly.
Except that behind the Great Toronto tech market there are real people, making decisions. At the government, at the investment, and at the management level.
And by and large those people have made decisions which see engineering talent here as a resource that they have to push the cost down on even if it means losing domestic talent to the US.
Part of this is accomplished by importing talent from abroad or exporting the work abroad, or underpaying when they can get away with it. It's not a surprise that locally developed talent leaves after graduation, when the industry is actively recruiting from abroad.
And part of this is relying on the percentage of talent hat simply will not or cannot consider moving abroad (people like myself).
I didn't say they were paying "good" wages, but that they are paying market wages. The argument that Canadian software salaries aren't a market, but rather a stubborn choice by companies not to do the right thing, is curiously magical.
The question is, what would change the situation? Not some change of heart by companies to finally do the right thing, or come to their senses about what their self-interest really is. Those aren't real things. To change it would require some change in the fundamentals, such as if the government made it harder for people to leave.
> The question is, what would change the situation? Not some change of heart by companies to finally do the right thing, or come to their senses about what their self-interest really is. Those aren't real things.
This is a horrible false dichotomy. It takes time for companies to decide on and implement changes. Do you think that companies magically always make optimal decisions at all times? You claim that other people are anthropomorphizing companies, but that’s precisely what you’re doing here, on top of a healthy dose of failure to make the is-ought distinction.
I‘m also not sure why you are misinterpreting “good wages.” I’m not talking about “deserved wages” or anything like that. Again, read TFA.
Lastly, your suggestion that the Canadian government make it harder for people to leave is horrific, inhumane, and quite frankly the most regressive possible “solution” to this problem. I’m astounded that anyone would even suggest it.
I didn't any say of those things! From my perspective, you've put my words through a really intense filter and then gotten angry at your filter.
For example, I didn't suggest that the government should do such a thing. It's a hideous idea, besides being an obvious legal and political impossibility. What I said was that if they did, it might affect the software salary market in Canada, in contrast to other things people commonly bring up, which seem oddly imaginary.
It may be politically impossible, but it isn't legally impossible.
Laws, including constitutions, can be changed. This works for both sides of the border. Killing NAFTA is an easy start. Canada can have a wall to keep people in without even building it: simply lobby US politicians to have one built.
I meant impossible under the Charter of Rights, which could change, but isn't going to. You're right that that's for political and not legal reasons, so "politically and legally impossible" is in a way redundant. In another way it isn't, though, since constitutions do constrain politicians.
I get what you’re saying about feeling that other people are putting your words through a filter, but if you are concerned about that you seriously need to look at how you are reading other people’s comments. You wrote a whole comment based on making fun of my use of the word “good” as “magical,” which is the least charitable interpretation of an admittedly ambiguous word and not at all what I meant. It’s also clear from context (again from the article) that I didn’t mean “good” in a moral sense but good as in “these are good wages if you want employees.”
Conversely I don’t see where I’ve attributed to you anything you haven’t said.
To conclude by returning to something of substance, calling the market “oddly imaginary” and companies trying to make rational decisions as “not a real thing” is incredibly naive. You seem to think that the only thing that can affect the “fundamentals” of the situation is government intervention. I’m far from a libertarian, and even to me that does not at all resemble this situation. This is a simple case of companies in an area paying too low wages, employees leaving, and companies having to catch up.
You seem to be misinterpreting everyone else’s arguments as anthropomorphizing companies, which is not at all what people are doing when they are talking about a market. I think this derived from your fundamental understanding of how a market economy might work in the real world.
Companies and workers both take time to adjust to changing situations, and more importantly, situations can change, and the government shouldn’t always intervene to bring things back to the way they were. Otherwise we would still be a nation of farmers.
I’m not sure what else to say, and I seriously don’t want to sound mean or trite (like “just read a book!”), but I really think you should try and learn a little about economics. I think this is where your misunderstanding about anthropomorphization stems from. I tried to find a good introductory article, but I haven’t had much luck; here is one: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-market.asp
> Canadian tech companies love to complain about lack of talent, but they're not willing to pay for it [...]
They most likely to a large extent can't. It's just a different model both as comapnies and country. In general you can rarely win by being a lesser version of something else. Canada can, hopefully, do a lot of things the US can't. Those are the things it should do to attract people.
I think it's more a case of VCs not being calibrated to the real cost of doing business. Canada is a first world country with a GDP per capita not much less than the states. There is plenty of wealth available that could be invested in tech. It's just Bay Street generally doesn't want to, because they don't understand the tech business.
Name one prominent Canadian VC firm - I can't think of any, and I'm Canadian. But ask me about US firms, and I can name firms like Sequioa, a16z, and BVP. We don't have that here.
It's been suggested to me that because of Canada's long history of a resource-based economy, Canadian investors are far more accustomed to the long, slow model of: let's research a site for several years, make sure it'll be profitable, build a town, and get to work. The higher risk, fail-fast nature of VC investing is just too foreign to their business model.
One of the problems is the public demands a lower risk investment. A single Theranos would knee cap the entire VC industry in Canada. "How could this be allowed to happen?!" The stories of LPs losing their $50k investments would lead the newspapers for months.
In Silicon Valley its a, 'Oh that sucks, but the smart money stayed away, that should have been a tell for the other investors".
That already happened, to a degree. Canada's dot-com darling was Nortel, which at peak accounted for 1/3 of the total valuation on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Then the bubble burst and Nortel collapsed. A lot of institutional investors swore off tech after that, and it hasn't really rebounded.
Canada's main attraction is the social services and basicaly guaranteed citizenship. The US's main attraction is money and technical opportunities and also some vague promise of a green card.
If you were not born in China or India, then getting a green card isn't a vague promise. Go work at google, try to get an H1B or L1 ASAP and then get your green card in 1-2 years after that.
Given that much more Chinese and Indians still prefer US to Canada, further and further elongating the lines for green card, it seems the Canadian advantage is not so enticing after all.
> staying in Canada to earn $40-50k CAD per year starting
Amazon Toronto starts new grads at like $80-100k last I heard. It's not as good as you can get in Silicon Valley, but rent in Toronto (while still high) is much lower than in the Valley.
For another data point: I'm an Amazon SDE2 in Ottawa making CA$225k total compensation this year (about 2/3 of that is salary). That's very good pay locally. I'm not sure I can match that anywhere else in the city.
I might be able to get better in the States, even after cost-of-living increases, but what quality of life gain would there be? Would it be worthwhile to have to deal with all the crazy shit with the education and healthcare systems and the politics down there?
So I'm sticking here in Canada. I just don't see the point in moving south.
Developers in Toronto are getting a raw deal. The cost of living is orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the country and devs aren't making the difference up with higher wages.
So glad I made the decision to move from Toronto to Atlantic Canada this past year. I'm actually making more money in New Brunswick than I did in Toronto and can afford to own a 4 bedroom house instead of renting a 600 square foot condo.
I have been weighing making a move from Saskatchewan to New Brunswick. When I compare Regina to Fredericton (as an example) though, it seems like I must be missing something. On the surface, pay is generally better, the stacks/companies are more interesting, the location seems amazing, and comparable real estate is less than half.
I know that Regina->NB is dramatically different from Toronto->NB, but is there anything you wish you would have known??
Might be obvious, but the biggest thing you'll give up in this market compared to cities like Toronto or Montréal is selection. There's some larger companies with satellite offices here (IBM, Salesforce, etc), but not too many startups.
One word of caution about real estate in the Fredericton area; don't buy any property too close to the river. There's usually flooding in the spring from the snow melt up stream and this year was especially bad. I was lucky enough not to be affected, but there's lots of homes taking flood damage right now.
First, I apologize. I know that the river is flooding right now and I asked you 'should I move' questions when you could have been facing a tragedy. That was very selfish of me and I'm sorry.
I'm very glad you weren't affected by the flooding, and thanks for being kind, despite my gaffe!
It finally feels to me like things are on the cusp of getting interesting in Regina. Saskatoon's recent acquisitions (Solido bought by Mentor/Siemens, SkipTheDishes) seems to have raised a lot of eyebrows in Regina and there's at least some momentum building to get investors/business folks/tech folks together to start building things. Co-Labs in Saskatoon seems to have been a huge inspiration/wake-up call for parts of the Regina business community.
That being said... I've always had a bit of a longing for Atlantic Canada, and if the jobs are out there... that's pretty interesting!
What are rents like in Toronto? Are they $700 - $1300 per month lower (the difference of $20k - $40k net of taxes is about that)? If not, it doesn't make sense to work in Toronto.
The same situation exists across the US. For example I can get a mortgage on a nice place in the Midwest that is half my current rent in SV. That amounts to about $24k/year. However I'd have take a pay cut of about $40k gross (or more) for a job with identical responsibilities and to live in a region with far fewer opportunities. It's a net loss.
The equivalent of $1750 Toronto condo (modern high rise with all the amenities) is going to be very hard to find in SV except some of the newer constructions at $3500~4000.
A friend has a one bedroom in San Mateo in the sub $3000 range. The building is very old, no amenities or views to speak of, and not even in-suite laundry.
Your friend is getting hosed. I have a 3 bed, 2.5 ba 1600 sq ft duplex with a yard near downtown for $4k/mo. It's older, but there's nothing wrong with it, it has a garage and a W/D, driveway, etc.
I'm kind of in the same boat.
Vancouver making 135k approximately (based on 40hr week, since wage is hourly)
Have an offer at a FAANG company that when converted to CAD is the same as what my wife and I make combined.
Unfortunately we'd still lose a big chunk of our household income till she can find work there. Fortunately she's American but still in a relatively niche field so might take some time.
I'm wondering how that salary difference really is when comparing the cost of living of many Canadian cities vs Silicon Valley, the taxation rate and the social services provided (universal healthcare, etc).
That demographic you're referring to is no less likely to be involved in traffic accidents that can send you to the closest available hospital. In the US that means an ambulance bill and very likely a hospital bill that your insurance might not cover, and the high possibility of chronic pain that's not necessarily covered by your health insurance. And that's even before having to deal with lawyers in order to obtain compensation back from the driver's insurance company in order to repay the out of pocket expenses. (The system, at least in California is set up in such a way that the car insurance has to pay 3X the costs to divide in thirds for 1) your lawyer, 2) your insurance provider and 3) yourself.)
Give me a break. Healthcare in the US is a joke, but if you're on an engineer's salary and benefits plan, you're probably paying nothing for any of these things.
Protip: "treble damages" is not a thing California invented in order to pay legal fees
> if you're on an engineer's salary and benefits plan, you're probably paying nothing for any of these things.
My wife was hit by a driver while cycling. She was taken to an in-network hospital as it happened to be the closest one. A 10 block ride on an ambulance yielded bill for a few thousand dollars. On the day of the event, the only out of pocket expense was <100 USD, but since then we've incurred several thousand dollars in expenses to treat the consequences of that event.
You're right that as somebody with an engineer's salary who's been diligent in making sure we had savings for unforeseen events, we've been able to pay all of the required fees as they came, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken into account when talking about compensation across different countries, or that being young and healthy precludes needing health care.
> "treble damages" is not a thing California invented in order to pay legal fees
I prefaced with "at least in California" because it's the place where I've had to find this out. I'm more familiar with systems in other countries.
All lawyers that we had to contact (which was already a shocking thing to do for me) had the same payment structure and explained it the same way: there would be a settlement, to be divided equally by HC provider, lawyer's fees and victim. I mentioned this because I can assure you that most people that don't know the American system would be surprised about it.
I could tell you had a specific story, as you alluded to the details in your original comment, but again, these are the exceptions rather than the norm. I get it; my wife was in a car accident that sent her to the hospital for a week, almost exactly a year ago. I've gotten the $200k 'denied' explanation of benefits paperwork from the insurance company (and no doubt the total bill ran over $500k), I've been threatened with collections over a $3500 ambulance bill and had to sign up for the payment plan while I spend all the free time i can muster faxing paperwork to and fro with various insurance companies. It sucks, it's inefficient, and it's simply setting money and productivity on fire.. but ultimately, there's a chain of responsibility. It's the at-fault party's responsibility, whether you have to chase after their car insurance company or your own health insurance company.. eventually it can and should be covered if you're at a good job, but good god it's a nightmare to actually deal with.
In the end, though, I don't consider health insurance to be a cost an in-demand professional would factory into a decision to move from Canada to the US.
Yes, but most companies in this space provide some sort of healthcare, which covers a lot of that, and accidents are a small percentage of total healthcare outlays anyway. Much more healthcare spending goes to older people, for a much broader array of more common conditions than "got into a bad car accident".
Health insurance is much more expensive at 55 than at 25.
Younger people do have fewer needs to treat chronic illnesses. That doesn't mean that healthcare can never be a significant financial burden regardless.
- I've met people that have had terminal cancer in their very early 30s (didn't leave a giant bill to their state as this happened in the UK)
- I've had a friend that needed an ambulance for his pregnant wife from an airport (>10K USD in out of pocket expenses)
- I've been stabbed in an attempted robbery (again, no expense as this was in Argentina)
I think it's pretty clear from context that I was talking about average medical expenses by age, for which older people do pay much, much more.
Also, $10K is a low figure for medical expenses compared to how much one can spend. End of life care for the elderly can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. My grandfather has been in and out of the hospital a lot this year with a broken hip, complications thereof, and fairly advanced dementia, and his covered medical expenses have been astronomical. He gets full-time care every waking moment, 7 days a week -- so that's several full-time salaries on top of medical expenses. $10K doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how much it can cost to treat someone.
I believe that the disagreement we're having is born of what I'm possibly failing to do, which is getting the point across that talking about averages when the distribution is not anywhere close to normal is not useful and can be disastrous. If the average cost is maybe a few hundred dollars a month, but you have a low probability of having to pay several thousand dollars in an unlikely event, different people with different thresholds for risk will make different decisions. I'm just trying to make explicit to foreigners some things that are implicit to Americans so that they can make decide for themselves if it is worth it. I've clearly decided it was worth it, given I'm in the US now, but there's plenty I learned only once I was here that I would have appreciated knowing beforehands.
As an aside, the 10K figure was just he ambulance ride. I'm supplying that as a lower bound for the cost on an accident, which people in other countries would not believe.
Born/raised in Toronto, been in SF for ~4 years. It's not even close. Yes, my rent in SF is high, but my total comp is six figures higher than what I could earn in Toronto. Wages are considerably higher, even when you factor in cost of living, services, and everything else.
The cost of living in the major Canadian tech cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa) is lower than Silicon Valley, sure, but Vancouver is still one of the most expensive cities to live in the world. The drop in salary is way too low when compared to the cost of living.
The cost of living between Vancouver and Seattle is very comparable, especially when you account for your biggest input costs, housing, food & transportation. The Salaries most definitely are not. The biggies south of the border set the baseline salary for everyone; when they move north they match the existing, much lower rates.
If I was a new-ish grad and wanted to stay in the PNW there's not a chance I'd pick Vancouver. Seattle has all the same electric cars, dog bakeries and yarn stores that you'll find in the lower mainland, and heading to Whistler for the weekend with more US greenbacks in your pocket would be a lot more fun...
I can't believe how much Vancouver has changed (as far as attractiveness for recent grads) over the last twenty years.
When I turned 20 in 1997, Vancouver seemed like a personal version of heaven. Rents were more expensive than where I'm from, but that increase was easily offset by the ability to easily double my salary. Real estate was heavy, but not so heavy that it seemed unobtainable. Add in what I perceived to be real opportunity to work in an interesting field, a highly educated workforce and the natural beauty and I was completely sold.
Today, even if I were twenty again, I can't think of a single legitimate reason why I would choose Vancouver over Seattle.
The big tech hubs in CA (Toronto, Vancouver) are expensive and traffic is absolutely awful. A quick glance online shows average apartment prices are nearly $2000/mo. So it's almost like you're living in Seattle anyway.
I don't think CA has many technical equivalents to Ohama or Columbus that combine high salaries from numerous F500 companies with Midwestern COL.
Other than Montreal's cheap cost of living and good public transportation, everything else is not so great. Talented engineers graduating from McGill and Concordia are leaving the province in droves because of Quebec's weird language laws [1], high taxes and obsolete immigration system. (Eg: KFC was renamed to PFK to comply with the language laws)
MIDI, the immigration department of Quebec which has fully autonomy for selecting immigrants to Quebec fails to attract or retain the foreign talents. A highly skilled worker is not given any kind of priority in their immigration application.
On the other hand, if you only have a school diploma, but can speak fluent French, you get the top priority in Quebec immigration.
If you are highly skilled, but do not know a word of French, it will take a minimum of 4 years to immigrate to Quebec [2]. Montreal is just riding on their old inertia. There is a huge shortage of talent in Quebec. The policies of immigration dept. of Quebec and Quebec's language policies will drive Quebec down the drain. Some politicians have even announced that if they get elected, they will deport all the non French speaking immigrants out of Quebec.
So any startups looking to start their business in Quebec, you have been warned. Montreal is a great tourist city, no contest. But not so great to live or work for tech. If you immigrate to Quebec, your kids should go to French school only.[4]
I'm a US-citizen immigrant to Canada, selected by Quebec and living in Montreal. Many of these assertions, though commonly believed, are half true.
The Global Skills Strategy that the federal government here is running includes tech workers, and yes it includes Quebec. MIDI has facilitated processing for many of those. For kids of people here on temporary work permits, including that type, English schools are allowed.
For permanent immigration, MIDI currently gives more points for an applicant with a bachelor's degree in computer science from anywhere in the world - regardless of language knowledge - than it does for a high school-educated applicant who is fluent in French. There are lots of factors that affect the score. While they do value French ability more than English, it's not as overwhelming as that suggests.
Their autonomy in selecting temporary workers (including tech workers) is not full, btw - there are many cases where a Labour Market Impact Assessment is not needed, and then Quebec doesn't have veto power on those workers. Quebec will still give them a leg up based on that experience if they later apply for permanent residence - yes, even without French knowledge.
Last, KFC did rename themselves to PFK due to the language politics, but that was a business decision, not legally required. Subway, Banana Republic, Canadian Tire, and many other Anglo-named companies are still using their Anglo names as their brands here. It was similarly voluntary that Shopper's Drug Mart goes by Pharmaprix here.
As for taxes: it doesn't seem higher overall than NYC, a major US tech hub, and it includes a lot more for the money.
The Global Skills Strategy is only for a certain category of employers, mainly large ones. A startup cannot use that to hire a worker. [1]
> more points for an applicant with a bachelor's degree in computer science from anywhere in the world
Quebec's immigration system is not point based as of now. Its FCFS. Though they say its points based, there is no indication from statistics that MIDI selects workers based on points. In fact, MIDI is a blackbox when it comes to revealing the strategy that they use to select workers while Federal Express Entry is fully transparent. Bachelor's degree holders in Comp. Sc are waiting for more than 5 years for a CSQ from Quebec, while they can immigrate to other provinces within months !
There are reports of systematic discrimination by MIDI regarding the selection of applicants based on their citizenship. As a US citizen, its no wonder you are given priority than applicants from third world countries. There are two class action suites against MIDI currently regarding systematic discrimination in selecting applicants. [2] [5] [7]
Ombudsman's Annual Report About MIDI says there are 31,378 applications pending as of March 31, 2017. [3]
> Quebec will still give them a leg up based on that experience if they later apply for permanent residence
That has been on hold with no explanation from MIDI since 2017. [4]
MIDI systematically discriminates applicants even in French priority category (PEQ) if they are from China or India [5]
A forum where applicants discuss about delays from MIDI [6]
I'm going to have to defer a substantive reply due to weekend plans, but if I have time Sunday night or Monday and this topic is still receiving enough attention that it would be broadly useful, I'll do so then. (No point in a delayed reply if it's just two strangers arguing at each other in isolation from the community discussion.)
But again, many of these statements rely on inaccurate assumptions, overlook important nuances or past/present/near-future changes on each system, are not supported by the linked cites, or are otherwise inaccurate or leave the wrong impression.
I have no reason to doubt that you're discussing in good faith with good motives. But if you're learning conclusions like those in these comments from media pundits or social network posts, you may want to prefer primary sources, pay close attention to details when examining or discussing any source, and give targeted cites corresponding precisely to each point you want to support.
Have a good weekend, and see you here Sunday night or Monday if this post's conversation activity is still going.
I have no further interest in taking this conversation forward. I immigrated to Canada on Express Entry in which I got points based on my skills and that too within 3 months.
I feel for my colleagues in Quebec whose applications are on hold in Quebec with no explanation from MIDI for the past one year. If you start asking cites for all these from official source which is MIDI, I can't give you because MIDI don't have it either.
If MIDI publishes those numbers, it will reveal their discriminatory practices. Don't bother about replying. Have a great weekend.
If you meant me, I'll give a high-level reply now since the thread has mostly died down but you were still interested. If you want me to dig into the nitty-gritty nuances I was disagreeing with, and provide cites, I still can, but that feels less useful than it would have been on Friday or Saturday.
First, I actually agree with the other poster that the processing times for Quebec are too long and too slow. I didn't get any special priority as a US citizen, despite what he may have thought - it took me almost the same 32 months he found to get Quebec's approval and around the same 15 months for Canada's. This should get fixed.
However, the same was true for the federal system until 2015's switch to Express Entry. It was heavily slow and heavily backlogged. Quebec's similar switch is happening... this year. Quebec's block on most new regular skilled worker applications is to allow that. I say "most" since several types of applications are still allowed, especially from students and workers currently here temporarily.
Once that switch happens, I hope the Quebec and federal governments can work together to minimize processing time. The federal government will have to dedicate more resources if they want to reduce the 15 month part of the process - that's purely in their hands and not up to Quebec. They do the same admissibility checks much faster for federal Express Entry applicants.
Quebec's system generally lags behind the federal one. Right now, that's bad due to the slow processing times. It was however good during the time when Harper was restricting access to the older federal skilled worker system, since Quebec's was then more open. I think overall it's good to have these two different systems with different politicians making changes on different time scales, since it provides more ways into the country.
The main other important point: Quebec's system is only first-come-first-serve to decide whose applications to consider and when. The actual decision, once they've decided to consider you, is already points-based with the types of merit systems desired by the other poster. The Publications Quebec website has their legally binding regulations with the full points system, and the Immigration Quebec website has (in French) their internal administrative procedures guide which is far from a black box. Similarly, the federal government's Express Entry system is only used to decide who can apply when - a different system is used to make the actual decision on the merits, and their skilled worker program has a very similar points system to Quebec's (with different weightings).
The slowness of the current system, while it's very worth fixing, doesn't have quite the same impact as it does in the US because the options while waiting are better. Quebec graduates have the same access to post-graduate open work permits as other graduates in Canada, as do their spouses. As one pursues the permanent residence paperwork, there are ways to get work permits, temporary stay permits, and so forth without the same kind of crappy restrictions and lotteries that the US imposes on H-1B applicants and their families. The bureaucracy gets looser once you get Quebec's approval but is overall much more manageable.
In that case here are official links. Please note that Canadian permanent residency thru Quebec is a long two stage process. First obtain a CSQ document from Quebec and then apply to Federal (in paper format) which will grant you permanent residency.
* Processing delays as per MIDI's site for obtaining a CSQ:
* MIDI currently follows FCFS to issue CSQ, not point based merit system, which they are planning to implement soon.
" With the introduction of the new immigration system based on the declaration of interest, only candidates that meet the needs of Québec will be invited to submit an application for a selection certificate. This new system will make it possible to put an end to the principle of first come first serve, currently in effect for processing applications, and to considerably reduced average processing times. "
* To summarize, an immigration application thru Regular Skilled worker stream will take 15 + 32 months to complete if it goes without any glitches, but MIDI is plagued with operational issues such as loss of applicant documents, huge technical problems with Mon Projet and the recent refugee situation.
Now if anyone applies in PEQ category, you will still be delayed by 15 months in Federal stage.
So which graduate or skilled worker worth their salt will try to immigrate or stay in Quebec after graduation ? They can easily get their permanent residency within months if they move to any other province other than Quebec through the Express Entry system and other provincial nomination programs.
Why do I say all this ? Because Quebec's immigration system is so obsolete that it doesn't give importance for merit. I was a victim of the broken H1B visa system and I immigrated to Canada thru Express Entry which gave importance to my skills. How I did it might be interesting too -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15452647
The language laws thing is not a big deal. People just get on with it.
Montreal is great. I'm here, and if my kids don't go into IT they will work in another sector and will be able to afford to live.
I'd consider SV a death sentence. Who wants to work when you will never achieve financial independence because you'll never own your own land? And if you have a huge mortgage you are your boss's bitch forever.
Yeah I find the language laws thing funny. I've worked with a crapton of people who never had to learn a word of French, and if they ever have to, then so what? French is the language here. That's like complaining about Italian in Italy.
I'm a second-generation immigrant born and raised in Montreal.
Quebec's language is French and historically speaking it has every reason to attempt to protect it. Should immigration be more accommodating towards people willing to learn French? Probably. In my lifetime though I've mostly encountered anglophones who chose Quebec out of all provinces but then refused to speak the language, so shrug.
And yeah there are stupid politicians who say stupid things, just like in the States where some promise to throw out Mexicans and Muslims.
Yes having witnessed it myself, it's tragic the self inflicted wounds Montreal takes, while peoplr still pretend it's a tech hub (only in the tiniest of sense)
For AI and ML, it now has R&D centers for Google, Facebook, and MS. It also has McGill University which is quite well regarded for AI. In that niche it's becoming a hub, though this trend is recent enough that I have to use the present progressive tense.
Is Canadian healthcare any good? Where I live, you pay for this privilege quite a lot of tax at still you have to go privately, because the quality is just not worth your health. I really wish "universal healthcare" was scrapped, so I could afford better services privately.
Canadian living in the US: in my experience Canadian health care is as good or better than in the US. Waiting times are probably somewhat longer for non-emergencies because of triaging, but (again, my experience, subjective, etc) I've often felt doctors are more interested in providing care and less interested in unnecessary upselling.
I've only ever lived in the GTA, though. It's my understanding that in many places away from major cities there can be a shortage of doctors.
Canadian living in the US: in my experience Canadian health care is as good or better than in the US.
Canadian living in US as well. The one thing I've noticed is the choice of healthcare in the US (for those with good insurance). Have cancer? Pick the best hospital you can find in the area. In Canada, you might live next to a world-class institute or it might just be a regular hospital. That's where you go.
But yes, healthcare in Canada is very good. The other thing I would call out is that experimental/cutting edge technology is often available in the US before Canada.
Yup, Canadian healthcare is generally excellent. The main complaints thar hit the news are generally long wait times for elective surgeries like knee fixes.
For anything other than that I've had effectively zero wait time and excellent care. There are even free health lines you can call for basic info.
Canadian services are typically good especially for urgent care things, I only have gone private on one occasion and that was for an MRI years ago when there were fewer of them available. I had a tear in my MCL and they wanted to see the degree (relatively low priority, it wasn't a full tear and I didnt need surgery). The wait for the MRI was ~6 weeks but so just paid out of pocket privately and had the results sent to my doctor. Took 2 days and he got what he needed.
Canada has good Healthcare up to the level of US medtech about 20 years ago. Anything invented in the last 20 years is not available through Canada Health Care. They will have an occasional crock of s* like one or two radiation machines for cancer for an entire province of 5 million people.
I think the thing that improves country wide healthcare outcomes in Canada is that everyone can go to a doctor. However, outcomes for complex cases are not as good.
Here the problem is that specialists aren't that great, and combined with long wait time that leads you nowhere you potentially put your life at risk. Complaint procedures are as bureaucratic as possible so you get no redress.
Income taxes BC <> CA are pretty similar, but other taxes aren't. Gas is the equivalent of $6/gal in Canada right now (due to taxes), sales tax is 12% and a lot of products (electronics, etc) are just generally more expensive in Canada.
This is something I've been comparing. I'd pay a little less in income tax in California actually for my brackets, but even though rents etc in SV are higher, I also would be paying less for gas, groceries and any entertainment and tech purchases.
Oh they're willing to pay for the talent. They just bring it in from the PRC or Eastern Europe, or India. And they can pay far less for that.
I'm not opposed to immigration at all. But prior to coming to Google Canada most of the people I worked with in Toronto were not holders of Canadian degrees. They were recent immigrants, permanent residents and not citizens and therefore themselves unable to go to the US. Many of these people were underpaid significantly, and a lot of them mistreated, in my opinion.
The homegrown talent from Waterloo, etc. had mostly left for the U.S.
Some come back after a few years, but many never do.
Add to that the dynamic of many American companies opening offices here as a 'nearshore' lower cost shop, where all the important and interesting decisions are made in the US and the Canadian shop's job is to just execute it.... crappy.
I'm talking specifically about new grad salaries. It's not public information, but perusing glassdoor, H1B, acquaintances, that type of thing. I thought FAANG all adjust for location, with Bay Area being at the top. Is there any evidence that starting salaries are the same regardless of location?
It isn't in London compared to the Bay Area, nor was it in Chicago when I lived there, based on people I knew at some of those companies. This is the first time I've heard that starting salaries are identical regardless of location. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
As an electrical engineer - I think incidents like these are a pretty solid argument for incorporating overvoltage protection into 5V USB peripherals.
Even something as simple as a zener clamp with a polyfuse to make a dead-simple crowbar circuit will save a device and won't contribute a whole lot to BOM cost.
It's a bit odd, most older Macbooks have current limiting ICs on the USB ports. I've found this out when tinkering with devboards and accidentally shorting things. In fact most motherboards have some kind of protection for overcurrent conditions.
But USB-C isn't limited to 5V, power delivery is at 20V. That might explain what's going on here (since the user reports 20V on the output) - it thinks that the peripheral is a power hungry device and it's trying to charge it. That's a problem, but it could be that the peripheral is poorly designed and is mistakenly asking for power that it can't actually handle.
Edit: in this case the peripheral seems to be the Macbook charger... and plugging it in causes 20V on all the other outputs with only a dongle plugged in. Oops. Yeah not good.
I wonder what happens if you actually load the port? Perhaps it'll drop down to 5V? Or maybe it'll fry things.
That said, my comment above still applies: USB-C relies on both devices to be compliant with the spec. Otherwise you can get into situations where one device fries the other, or tries to charge things it shouldn't, etc.
> most older Macbooks have current limiting ICs on the USB ports.
And thank goodness for this, early in engineering school I was doing a project on an arduino and because I was young and stupid I kept accidentally shorting power to ground. Killed at least 5 or 6 ATMega328's but the MacBook just helpfully chirped that I was drawing too much power and it was shutting off the port. Saved my ass at least a dozen times over.
This feature has been on motherboards going back to the 90s. I remember that some DSL modem was notorious for requiring a reboot of the computer because the USB ports stopped working.
The reality was that the modem was drawing too much power and the motherboard just disabled every port on the bus.
I accidentally shortened my USB port on a PC in a long chain of USB peripherals and only realized when I almost burned my finger on the most remote (wrongly connected) peripheral. I am really happy my mainboard didn't throw in the towel then.
> But USB-C isn't limited to 5V, power delivery is at 20V. That might explain what's going on here (since the user reports 20V on the output) - it thinks that the peripheral is a power hungry device and it's trying to charge it. That's a problem, but it could be that the peripheral is poorly designed and is mistakenly asking for power that it can't actually handle.
This was my interpretation, the host sets the output voltage to 20V incorrectly (due to a software bug or a hardware failure). Putting a crowbar circuit defensively on the peripheral side would save the peripheral.
Ah ok, I misunderstood - yeah it baffles me why manufacturers don't do this. I make it a point to fuse absolutely everything at work, it's a minor expense to save a ton of time later.
Last week I blew up a $100 CO2 sensor because I wired it in backwards. Entirely my fault for not checking the pinout, but a 10 cent diode or a fuse would have saved me.
This is the same issue with telescope controllers. Plenty are rated for 6V absolute maximum, whereas typical power supplies in astro, e.g. the power tanks, or LiPos are 9V or 12V. Boom. Another $100 when a zener would have saved the day.
Hmm. Ever since I got the new macbook, my USB devices (especially my keyboard with built-in hub) often don't register properly when plugged into the Anker usb-c hub. I wonder if an overvoltage is happening and the keyboard has a polyfuse in it...
> I think incidents like these are a pretty solid argument for incorporating overvoltage protection into 5V USB peripherals.
That isn't going to fly for product companies in general. The issue? Cost, as usual.
Adding 5 cents of cost to a $15 USD (retail price) mouse is a non-starter, because the actual production cost is closer to $3. So even 5 cents is a lot.
Between this and the Nintendo Switch fiasco, I'm worried about the future of USB-C. It sounds like trying to combine primary power supply and all data transfer into a single port is more dangerous than was anticipated.
Nintendo Switch isn't using USB-C, officially. They're implementation is not spec compliant unfortunately so the blame should be 100% on Nintendo in this case for using a universal port with proprietary implementation.
One would hope, but these aren't shady Chinese knockoffs having these problems, these are Nintendo and Apple products. Part of the problem, though, is that the worst-case scenario is so much worse than before. If your regular USB accessory is shoddy, it just... doesn't work. But since USB-C has the capability to transfer tons of power, having something go wrong can have much bigger consequences. Also, as mentioned in another comment, you can't have things like a hardware fail-safe to prevent a certain amount of charge from going through a port, because they're intentionally left under the control of software, because sometimes maybe you'd want that much power going through there.
Nope. Not officially, one reason why I am against iPhone dropping lighting for USB-C. That was few years ago when no one see or believe this mess is coming.
"I think incidents like these are a pretty solid argument for incorporating overvoltage protection into 5V USB peripherals."
Agreed, though for some peripherals effective overvoltage protection that goes up to the maximum port output could cost more than the device itself. I would rather get the chance and redesign the connector so that there won't be any risks of exposing old devices to higher voltages, then introduce it slowly to new laptops (say one port this year, two the next two years, etc) and possibly provide small external adapters that fit on the new connector on one side and export the old one (maybe more if working as hubs) with adapted voltages for both signals and supply lines.
To me having multiple voltages driven by software on the same connector where one could insert devices that can't protect themselves in case of failure is asking for troubles. One day someone will connect a cheap LiPo charger to one of these ports and if the port firmware flips nasty things can happen.
That would require a catastrophic failure in the power brick which has significant separation designed in to the board layout to keep the primary line voltage side away from the secondary low voltage.
Well, from experience you'll be mostly fine with 100 VDC too. 100VAC is a different story though. (AC flows better into the body while DC remains on the skin IIRC)
Ultrasound processing is actually pretty niche: you have a whole bunch of channels with a very high sample rate (tens of MHz). In the case of medical ultrasound, a typical handheld ultrasound probe can have range from 50 to 150 parallel channels.
Because you need fast, parallel DSP, FPGAs actually really shine for ultrasound. And because production volumes are relatively low, the NRE to jump to an ASIC generally isn't justified. Just about every modern ultrasound machine does signal processing on an FPGA.
Today a graphic chip is also good to compute ultrasound images. I suspect that you can even do it on a CPU. I'm not sure if it is that practical to process in a FPGA if you want to compute non-potato image quality: you would need to handle tons of data by the FPGA, so either use a gigantic one (with a ridiculous price) or somehow page the data (but that's quite complex to do then...) -- this seems way more difficult than simply addressing the GiB that are avail in any modern CPU/GPU.
You don't understand. FPGAs are not used for their computing prowess, but for the ability to do highly timing sensitive parallel data acquisition. At 64 Msps you have <16ns for reading a sample.
Their most important feature is determinism. You can reason about and get an upper bound on how long something takes even while programming them.
Determinism is certainly a huge part of it, but FPGAs are insanely badass at computing prowess - you can create a custom architecture to execute whatever it is you're trying to compute.
Well kinda. The flexibility comes with a cost. Clock speeds are lower and for the same logic it's going to be less power efficient than a GPU or CPU or ASIC. Logic element density will also be lower so it'd be impossible to reproduce the entirety of a GPU or modern CPU (huge caches etc) on a similar-sized FPGA. I'd also imagine that the physical distance of gate paths are highly optimized in a CPU such that more gates can be traversed per clock tick there than in an FPGA.
If you have very specific compute pipelines with "colocated" (there's probably a better word -- basically data directly on the wire, not in memory lookups) data in parallel an FPGA can offer very high compute throughput.
But if you're having to do memory lookups and such for your algorithms then the memory bus is going to be your bottleneck and most of the FPGA's advantages are out the window. At that point sure you've got a few places where the FPGA does a few operations at once, but ultimately you just have an early 1990's speed processing pipeline with a few hardware-based micro-optimizations. A GPU and its custom designed baked in logic around memory buses and caches and such are going to blow it out of the water in terms of logical efficiency, power draw, heat dissipation, logic element count, and clock speed. Total throughput will be several orders of magnitude greater.
So, it depends what you're trying to do. It's dangerous to say FPGA is always badass. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not even close.
Its not just about the compute, but also the data acquisition. You can connect directly to your ADC without extra glue logic (and in some cases use the one embedded on the FPGA). Also a GPU is a lot more expensive than a $20 FPGA.
Not really: people have reacted to more capacity being available by getting in more channels. You can control a 1980s 20 channel ultrasound using even an atom cpu, not a problem (though will still get close to max cpu capacity). So what did we do ? Well we made chips, I believe the best one now has 4000 channels and there's test models of 8000 channels. A quad xeon can't process that. But it gets worse.
Because information is encoded both in the direct signal and in the interference patterns between different probes you'd want to evaluate both of those (if nothing else it gets you a wider field of view, but really it gets you more than that, for instance you can get full 3d from a cross-shaped array). Unfortunately that scales with the square of the number of channels. This doesn't even work on FPGAs at the moment, so they basically limit interference processing to only 100 or so of the 1000-2000 probes they have these days.
This is a problem that keeps coming back. CPUs can do nearly everything in processing, but with one exception they suck at it.
That means that when doing these things, you can use CPUs, and people are always pushing that, if you accept to be 2-5 years behind the state of the art for advanced applications, or you accept that you have to spend 50$ per piece where others can get more processing done for 1$, or "much less but still enough" processing done for 0.1$ (FPGA, DSP, microcontrollers, ...).
Good luck in the marketplace if you go CPU.
CPUs work where your complexity is above a quite high lower bound, and they stop working once you hit a certain level of data processing. Below that lower bound, they are absurdly expensive. Above the data speed limit they just can't keep up.
Now there's niches where the strengths of CPUs outcompete other approaches. For instance, you want to create stuff to interface with ancient equipment. Lots of that is necessary, and lots of it is custom. For telecom companies, banks, factories, ... here CPUs and the fact that you can do one at a time are tough to beat. Sure FPGAs can do it better, but that's not the point here. They're much harder to design, so a one-off (or couple-dozen-off) designs use CPUs, plus they're very unlikely to hit the data rate limits.
Even there CPUs tend to have a disadvantage. Lots of environments where these things have to operate aren't exactly pristinely clean, cooled and free of static and interference. CPUs don't deal with it half as well as especially FPGAs do. You want a closed box that has to operate at 70 degrees without cooking itself with constant electrical arcing around it ? Don't go for a cpu on a large mainboard. You can't cool because any cooler will get clogged and destroyed in a matter of weeks at the most.
" For instance, you want to create stuff to interface with ancient equipment. Lots of that is necessary, and lots of it is custom. For telecom companies, banks, factories, ... here CPUs and the fact that you can do one at a time are tough to beat. Sure FPGAs can do it better, but that's not the point here."
Guy I worked with had a recurring gig interfacing FPGA's to older Telcom equipment. Multiplexing multiple gigabit Ethernet channels into one very high speed channel which then was fed into a microwave up converter. Last and final one they did the FPGA put out like 25W. I can't imagine doing that with a CPU of any type.
Perhaps sounds like a use case for a streaming parallel ADC board into GPU memory? Maybe an FPGA can run ADCs and buffer into a FIFO and transfer over PCI in large, efficient frames?
