Were you very specialized in a certain field, filling a senior position?
As a Canadian with a CS degree who's been trying to get into tech for years, this is horrible to hear. We have thousands of new grads in Canada who end up working in fast food because they get passed over for cheaper immigrants. I've seen it first hand, all my tech friends have seen it. We're worse than the US for this, and we have even less tech jobs here.
We don't need to be bring more entry level talent, we have tons of that not being utilized here.
There's plenty of talk about greedy corporations until the topic of using immigration to increase their profits comes up. Then it's silence.
I was coming in as a ‘normal’ developer design manager, but that is likely fairly specialized. I’m guessing that was in my favor. I know others with a couple of years engineering experience under their belt having a similar experience. But yes, the lack of jobs can be an issue. Lots of folks I know, myself included, now working remote for US-based companies.
In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.
The entry positions are FLOODED with new comers. We aren't hiring them because they're the best fit, we have plenty of unemployed locals begging for work. To say we only bring in the best because we cannot fill the roles is a blatant lie.
You sound like you're describing senior position, which I would say is fair.
I’m talking about intermediate to senior—we haven’t had junior roles for a while, and junior roles have never _really_ been good for immigrants anyway. I’m a hiring manager and can tell you that it’s true in my experience that it’s not about money or being ‘cheaper’ but who is the best fit.
The weirder thing that’s going on right now that’s counter to all of this is US-based companies _only_ hiring Canadians, rather than Americans, when people leave because Canadians are cheaper overall—even though American companies tend to pay more. It’s kind of a paradox, but works out well.
But this one of those places where I with a boomer voice have to scream, “stop being a victim”. The picture you are painting is a complete misrepresentation of reality. I think this stems from the fantasy of thinking that tech workers right now, are akin to factory workers and are being exploited by greedy capitalist overlords, who are using immigration as cudgel to ground them down further. Tech is nothing like a factory job. The demand for talented people in Tech has never gone down (probably higher because of the AI boom). Just consider the fact that openAI is willing to pay 800k+ to employees and it is not even profitable yet. And OpenAI has hired quite a bit of immigrants, and most immigrants come from much poorer backgrounds than natives. Develop your skills and you will easily find a place in the tech industry that will pay you 200k+. The fact that your friends can’t means they did not put in enough effort to develop their skills, while an immigrant from a likely poorer country did.
Lots of tradesmen will go "up north" into the oil fields for some hard hard labour but with incredible pay.
Most do it once or twice in their life for a couple years and come back to normal relaxed day job (although some are absolute champions and will tough it out long term).
I've always figured a job like this at Nvidia would be the equivalent of "I'm going to go up north for a while and come back".
Canada has always seemed like a unique situation. We're a massive country with tiny population. This opens the door to cheap remote land. Lot of cottage land in northern Ontario goes for pennies and has acres. Infact a lot of it so rural that they don't belong to RMs and don't require building permits or inspections. Building a cottage is straight forward just building it.
I figured if you're living off grid and working online, you can just acorn and get way ahead. Moving to a major city for a job that pays 2x more usually isn't even worth it when you factor in cost of living. Obviously, you cannot have kids. This is for a young kid-less couple.
It's not ideal. Our parents many years ago would just buy a home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore. You will never get ahead doing that.
Working online really is a unique situation to get ahead now.
The solution to the affordability crisis shouldn’t have to be withdrawing from society and homesteading in the woods.
Humans are social animals and social connection is essential to our health [1]. This strikes me as trading one problem for several.
You lose access to quality food you don’t have to spend all summer growing yourself (too bad if you didn’t harvest enough for the long, long winter; you don’t have a passable road). Good luck raising children with no help, and no education beyond Kahn Academy. You must purchase a ton of equipment and learn how to use it and maintain it for self sufficiency. And on and on. It is not for the faint of heart.
> home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore.
Enough should be what we want. A happy middle-class life avoiding the extremes of poverty or excess.
> You will never get ahead doing that.
Join the escalation against yourself (the joneses): a zero-sum ladder climbing game where everyone is a loser.
One oddity of modern society is that even the "winners" are often losers - become a sociopathic CEO or entrepreneur - win toys with more bling but lose other critical things. Being a country leader doesn't look like fun to me.
Weirdly enough modern society is pretty good at sharing: winners have there same phones as I have and commonly the same entertainment media.
And one important resource (time) has a hard upper limit for us all.
> It's been living in the reverse repo market, it's slowly trickling out.
While this is true, the "trickling out" timing doesn't appear to correlate very well stock market increases.
It's true that reverse repos have been decreasing and the stock market increasing. But the timing of movement seems too far out for there to be much of a causal link.
I wondered how many bits per silicone atom these SD cards are capable of now. Quick back of the envelope calculations say we're at 300 million atoms per bit of capacity.
Assumptions:
micro sd cards weighing 250 mg, resulting in 0.25/28 moles of silicon.
I think the cards are mostly plastic by mass, and the silicon is doped with other elements. (mostly lighter, some heavier. IIRC)
The actual metal storing magnetic charge in a hard drive is tiny also, with some drive platters being mostly ceramic. Regardless, if you were to personify the force of entropy, it would be greatly angered by humanity and modern computing.
Sure. I completely agree. Also micro sd cards are certainly not optimized for weight and I wouldn't be surprised if I made a mistake in my "calculation".
Looking at the leaked GTA VI videos and seeing ImGui being used by Rockstar internally is pretty neat how even a multi-billion dollar studio will use the same open source project we all use.
Interesting. I've been running that for years in my diesel truck. A mechanical diesel will run basically whatever you can pump through its fuel system. I assume jet engines are roughly the same. However they have some major standards, and can't risk running recycled fryer oil from the Chinese restaurant down the street.
> A mechanical diesel will run basically whatever you can pump through its fuel system. I assume jet engines are roughly the same.
This is very much not the case. They run on kerosene which is highly refined and pure. It has a lower freezing point, higher flash point and lower viscosity, which are obviously positive characteristics when flying in -45C temps high in the atmosphere.
I ran my 1999 Nissan Primera 2.0 turbo diesel on virgin vegtable oil for a couple of years (I had about 400L in the back when taking the channel ferry to to drive around Europe). It cost 0.40p/l instead of 1.20/l in the UK. Bought it from a farmer from an ad on eBay. No modification needed, but you need to have a couple of fuel filters and a tool to change it handy, in case you have a blockage (more common when first starting to run on oil). In winter add 5-10% petrol to keep the viscosity down. You can always add diesel to the tank without issue.
I think many 90s indirect-injection diesels can run vegtable oil without modification, but some ppl add a fuel heating system or a dual-fuel switchover system.
There were newspaper stories of ppl going into Tescos and filling their trollies with 5L bottles of vegtable oil, then going to the parking and filling their tanks. Later (virgin) vegetable oil became more expensive than diesel, used oil is a different story.
Bonus: when reversing, or at the lights with a breeze, you often notice an odour like fried chips. :)
It probably wasn't more common because it was some hassle with the fuel filters and potential damage to fuel pump (some are built better than others). The Nissan had a license-built Bosch design that was solid.
Perhaps you need to consider when you want to buy a switchover system from eBay: If caught, obviously by police with a nose for chips. They will take your car milage multiply that by the amount of fuel tax you did not pay, double it as punishment and give you a set fine while they are at it.
Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this vehicle was operated under illegal conditions for the entirety of that duration? What if it were imported? Used?
In my country the tax law has a reversed proof clause. Meaning, you are guilty until proven innocent. This clause is activated after you get caught, or even when you did not comply with administrative requirements. Other countries have similar clauses.
So in this case, if you have hard proof, meaning a proper administration, fuel tickets, etc. Which you all don't have, there is basically only a central milage database and ownership records that can hedge your damage.
1994 Toyota pickup with a Om617 swap. I bought a kit for the engine swap then did all the work to swap it.
I did nothing to handle the oil. It just works. You pour it in the tank and go. However, it doesn't work in the winter without a heater or additives.
It's not more common because a) mechanic diesels are old technology and means you'll be driving an old vehicle. b) WVO is a hit or miss in your area. Lots of restaurants will get paid for their old oil by recycling centers so most wont give it away. c) processing it is tough until you get a system in place
As well you can run on so many different fluids. Waste motor oil, waste transmission fluid, brake fluid, etc.
Motor oil burns more rapidly than diesel. You'll get more "power" but also less durability.
Burning motor oil happens when your turbo breaks down and puts all your oil via the air inlet to your engine. It's hard to stop that engine until all the oil is used.
You absolutely can and I have before. However, I blended it 70% WMO and 30% diesel. Used motor oil WILL carbon up everything. It's so full of ash that it'll pool up internally.
You need to used a centrifuge to pull out the carbon. Sounds intense but it's not.
You can pour it entirely in your tank without any filters but your fuel filters only go to about 10-30 which will not pull out the tar. Small amounts like that won't do any damage really.
The Caterpillar diesel engine manual says you can burn up to 5% used motor oil without affecting the warrantee. It does say to make sure you filter the used oil so as not to gunk up your fuel system.
For a large engine that produces many buckets of oil at each change, this is a good way to get rid of the stuff.
In Poland at least, people were doing it - mostly rural in their tractors - but just straight using cooking oil for your trucks&tractors is illegal - too much pollution.
Of course SAF is cleaned up to different standards. Also, SAF is not just cooking oil, they use various kinds of tech.
Running personal cars on cooking oil was legal in the UK up to a certain number of litres/year. I think it was more an issue of taxation, I'm not aware that it creates additional polution.
I'm a Canadian that's been trying to get into this field. There is no "talent" issue. Any job that pops up is flooded with applicants.
It's night and day compared to America. All the companies are in America, while we find only a handful of start ups or some branch's of corporations in Canada.
Give a read to the /r/cscareerquestionscad subreddit
There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".
Articles like this make me want to quit everything. I try so hard to get into these field then the government claims no one can fill these roles and we need to import more people instead.
The "digital nomad visa" is for foreign workers working for foreign companies to work while residing in Canada for up to 6 months (there are tax and residency implications if you stay longer than 6 months).
This is not directly competing with Canadian citizens looking to work for Canadian companies.
The directly part is because while in Canada, it is possible that a digital nomad may apply for and get a job for a Canadian company in which case the visa can get changed and they can stay longer.
But the digital nomad 6 month part isn't competing... directly.
Promoting Canada as a destination for digital nomads
A digital nomad is a person who can perform their job remotely from anywhere in the world.
Under current Canadian immigration rules, a digital nomad only needs visitor status to relocate to Canada for up to six months at a time while they perform their job remotely for a foreign employer.
In the months ahead, IRCC will collaborate with public and private partners alike to determine whether additional policies to attract digital nomads to Canada would be desirable.
We expect that some digital nomads who initially enter Canada to work remotely will decide to seek opportunities with Canadian employers. When they receive a job offer from a Canadian company, they would be able to bring their skills to a Canadian employer by applying for a temporary work permit or even permanent residence.
> There's countless stories of "I have CS degree, intern experience, and portfolio of projects but after 500+ applications I can't land a job".
That's bullshit, or you're looking at the tail end. Or these people are applying for jobs that require experience without any. What's their interview success rate? What's their target salary? They can't land any job? Ridiculous.
If there really was an overload of talent in Canada, it would be pumping out unicorns - it's not.
If there's 1M canadians in tech I would expect tens of thousands of those stories to be true.
The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done. The two most famous tech companies were founded by people without college degrees, just access to the American talent market. You can look good on paper, complain to the world about it, or actually get shit done.
Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Canada has high taxes and a difficult bureaucracy. If Canada's government is business-unfriendly and their closest neighbor and competitor is the USA, then Canada might face a lack of people with talent for business. As in, the sort of person who would pump out unicorns would rather move to the US.
Then they would have lots of talented CS people, but nobody to hire them.
Yeah that comments is bullshit. It’s very easy to establish a business in Canada. The bureaucracy is efficient by comparison to most developed countries including the US. The tax authority is not scary like the IRS and the rules are reasonable and easier to understand. The provinces have considerable control over economic policies and taxation, generating competition between regions.
I’ve run tech companies in Canada for over 20 years. It’s a perfectly fine place to do business.
With the U.S. tax changes preventing early stage startups from deducting their employees' salaries from revenue outright, I wonder if we'll start seeing more Canadian-based innovation.
I think historically the thing preventing startups here from taking off was lack of access to capital
I’m guessing that change will be eliminated by congress. It’s sort of an unthinkable disaster that will find a compassionate ear on both sides of the House.
It seemed very intentional. Along with the recent monetary policies I would be surprised if this wasn't another hammer they're intentionally swinging to cause recession
It's very easy to set up a company in Canada. Taxes are an issue, but not that much more than CA or NY.
The issue is that you'll get offers of 75k from angels and 500k from VCs. You go to SF, and before your pitch is done, you have a seed of 1M signed and ready to go.
> The more talent there is in Canada, the more talented work can be done.
Eh, no. If you ship a bunch of CS majors off to a cattle farm, they aren't going to get hired to do websites for the cows.
You need demand for the talent or the talent is not economically useful.
The is more obvious when you think about other areas that require talent but underpay (or have a talent glut), e.g. music, art, dance. Becoming a musician on average will not result in fantastic pay, yet composing music and playing an instrument both require talent.
> or actually get shit done.
You assume there is shit to get done - new companies take venture capital (either from a VC or a Bank) and a business plan to be profitable. Lacking those, if the companies that are successful are not going gang-busters wild profitable, they likely don't have the capital to expand their operations, and new people seeking to break into the market won't be able to fund themselves to do so.
There's no unicorns because there's no VC. Everyone here is busy using their capital to trade houses with each other. For the few investors that do exist, you're expected to show multiple months of profit just to get tiny seed rounds.
I don't think it's day and night compared to the U.S. I was looking for a job for 7 months already and can't land anything. 10 years of experience as DevOps/SRE, permanent resident.
So tried to find some basic job and it is even worse there. DoorDash is not hiring anymore, all my applications to custodian and similar jobs got rejected. I went to a bunch of restaurants around the town and applied to dishwasher, cook and similar positions, filled their forms and never heard back. I don't know what to do.
Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.
The choice is between jobs going offshore or people coming to work here as most new grads are not job ready. I have interviewed ones who have never done a pull request before.
>Those are new grads and frankly most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those, may as well hire an Indian contractor remotely.
Presumably you exclude Waterloo, Toronto, UBC, and McGill from the list of awful programs. What do you have in mind? Brock? Guelph? UVic? UPEI? MUN? Lethbridge? USask?
A lot of those are likely mediocre, but probably ok(I have never encountered a grad from those programs admittedly), but many aren't even coming from undergrad CS programs but from the diploma mill colleges like Seneca and Sheridan that hire fake professors or from one year masters in CS programs. Don't get me started on the career colleges, one of which offered me an instructional job in my third year of university.
How do you expect a new grad (assuming no internship experience) to have done a PR? I agree the university should've taught version control, though.
I am an Indian graduate who has decent experience with actual programming, even contributed to open source, and yet struggled to get a job in between my peers who have done 300 Leetcode problems and nothing else.
So I assume the hiring meter for most juniors is not "can use version control" or "can architect a 1000 line codebase with decent OOP". It's "can recurgigate 300-500 common Leetcode problems and can cheat in online coding tests". We are all in a bubble.
I don't really care how they get it, just that I do not have to train them in it. An employee who requires tech training is a pain to have around. You need people ready to get to work.
Some companies do focus on Leetcode, that is true. Mine do not, but on the other hand we expect you to fit neatly into the role of developer without needing to be told about Docker, GitHub, testing. Tons of grads have no idea of the difference between a unit test and an integration test.
As someone who hired a bunch of recent grads in Canada, you couldn’t be more wrong in your assessment or in your conclusion, but, this is the internet so :shrugs:
Booming field that outsiders don't understand will continue to attract deadweight useless people.
Of course there's a bunch of people that can't find jobs, a CS degree is not a rigorous endeavour, there's no bar exam, no MCAT. Just a bunch of people who think it's a free lunch surprised they have to compete for it.
That is a lot of it. There has been a proliferation of Masters in Software degrees up here that anyone can sign up for, pay a few grand, and graduate with a degree from in a year.
99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code
and
most Canadian CS programs are awful to the point that if you are forced to hire one of those...
are incompatible with one another. Which is it, HN? Do you want the Indian guy who can't speak English, doesn't understand you, but can whip up a microservice architecture in a week or the Canuck with whom you can communicate, will learn from you, but does not know anything outside of Java?
> 99% of CS is about communication, not your ability to code
There is a minimum level of useful skill that is required to avoid having to spend a bunch of time training them.
Neither the Indian CS person or the new grad are great options. Ideally you want senior devs. But given the choice, I would prefer the Indian CS person as then the communications become more Product's problem than technical mentoring which is mine.
