This just isn't true. Yes, ratio of salary to cost of living is better in the US, setting aside the precarious immigration process, political instability, high rates of gun crime, lack of healthcare, etc. I left this reply to someone else claiming the same thing:
You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver:
> Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver
> Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver
I was just transferred from the silicon valley to Vancouver so I have to comment...:
1. Vancouver is well regarded as one of the least affordable cities.
2. I stay in the same role but got a 40%+ pay cut so that offsets the "Cost of Living Including Rent".
3. If you compare other bay area cities (Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Fremont...) where tech workers live to Vancouver, it's not as dramatic.
4. While I support universal health care, which is good for average people in society, it's not necessarily a pro for tech workers. US tech companies buy good health insurance plans for their employees. I used to walk in my company's on-site health centers to get same-day health care in the US. In Canada, I have to wait for days to see the primary care provider and drive one hour to another provider to get exams.
Yes, I agree on all points. I have researched this a lot as I'm also planning a move to Vancouver for life reasons. I was just replying to the plainly false claim that cost of living in NYC/SF is the same as that in the most expensive cities in Canada.
Side note: if you're willing for me to ask you some questions about your move I would be really grateful.
This isn’t a good comparison because a better comparison would be the SF Bay Area (the metro) instead of just SF. Also my point is that the Canadian cost of living is comparable to the US while simultaneously having salaries that are a fraction of the US. I believe your nurses are also going south for the same reason though a few places like Vancouver have started to subsidize their housing.
Then we should compare to the Vancouver metro area, which is also cheaper.
I'm not denying that the cost of living to salary ratio is better in the US. But it is simply false to say that the cost of living in cities like Vancouver (widely considered the most expensive in Canada) is the same as SF or NYC. Rent in SF is roughly double that of Vancouver, which itself has the most expensive rent in Canada.
I was just in Vancouver staying with some friends who had a 3 bedroom in a nice neighborhood for $3700CAD ($2700USD) per month. I know several people in SF paying that for a studio.
Beyond anecdotes, various comparison websites have rent in SF at around 100% more than Vancouver.
Obviously salaries are lower in Canada and your disposable income can very likely be lower living there if you're in tech.
For the nth time, most people who work in Silicon Valley, even the ones who work in SF, do not live in SF where the prices are more comparable to Vancouver. This is one of the major reasons we didn't move to Canada.
And not everyone who works in Vancouver lives in the city of Vancouver either. There are 10 or so other cities within commuting distance.
A fair comparison would compare areas outside of SF with areas outside of Vancouver. There are obviously some outliers like Oakland, but on average you would expect to pay 50%-100% more in rent in the Bay Area than in the Vancouver area.
There is a lot of data available online that you can find very easily. Zillow for example, regarding rent for a one bedroom:
SF average rent: $4,440 USD [1] vs. Vancouver average rent: $2,500USD [2]
Mountain view average rent: $3,395USD [3] vs Burnaby average rent: $1,989USD [4]
Union City average rent: $2400USD [5] vs Surrey average rent: $1689USD [6]
1. Your comparisons aren’t that great. Burnaby’s twin is Oakland and not Mountain view.
2. You’re ignoring the option of buying homes which is impossible for Canadian vancouver salaries but still possible with American salaries in the SF Bay Area
Again, I am not making comparisons adjusted to salaries. I'm just proving that claims that the cost of living is "just as high or even higher than the US" (not adjusting for salary) are false. Simply looking around Vancouver on zillow proves this to be obvious. For example, I found multiple 3b2b houses with backyards for under $3kUSD in nice areas walking distance from central Vancouver, which is literally impossible in SF.
Otherwise, as I already stated, we agree that it is almost always better from an economic perspective to live in San Francisco as an engineer, given the vastly higher salaries.
NOTE: I'm specifically responding to your claim that "the cost of living in Canada is just as high or even higher than the US", in the context of HCOL areas where tech workers typically reside.
Honestly I don't know what can convince you, so maybe we can just agree to disagree.
Too many strange datapoints in that comparison. I never paid that much for utilities in CA but who knows. It’s anecdotal but at the time which this link does not cover it was simple math of taking a 2x paycut (not counting RSUs) to have roughly similar expenses.
I don’t know if current SF prices are reflecting the boom in AI. Another anecdote I look at the areas I used to run in under a decade ago and they are all around 60% higher. Really hard to do exact apples for apples between geographies so at the time I just went off basic necessities and it was skewed heavily in favor of SF.
There are several websites aggregating rent data that put SF rent at around 2x that of Vancouver, which is itself the most expensive city in Canada. I agree that many people would be worse off financially moving to Canada due to the lower salaries. But the claim that cost of living is the same is categorically false.
Yet you keep missing the point. “Was”. I am not saying prices today or equal. I am simply saying when I did the math pre Covid the cost of living was very similar all things considered. Like I already said the link you provided looks like a bunch of bad data so truly hard to tell. Categorically false are strong words without any data!
I would say categorically false is accurate and an anecdote from 7 years ago isn't adding anything productive to the conversation.
EDIT: Sorry, I just saw that you said "all things considered". I think we agree that when you factor in salary, it is financially worse to live in Canada. I just noticed a lot of completely inaccurate statements about the rent being the same which I was trying to correct. Apologies if you got caught in the crossfire.
If Claude is doing your job for you do you not worry that you won't be employed soon? Big tech eventually won't pay people to drink coffee and work on their personal projects while Claude does their work for them.
Yes a bit but I work in a highly regulated corporate environment in which Engineers spend around 30% of their time with actual coding and the rest is gathering undocumented and silo’d knowledge through endless meetings and alignments, designing business processes around regulation obstacles and legacy apps, agile overhead and of course MFA processes and role ordering.
Right now I don’t see much threat since it seems they have to dim down on autonomous workflows due to regulatory requirements and token costs.
I mostly agree with this sentiment, and have a hard time describing anything LLM generated as "mine". However, would you say that the designers at Apple, or Steve Jobs for example didn't "bring the Macintosh to life" because they didn't work on any of the engineering or code? It's a hard line to draw.
Leading a collaborative effort can obviously be described as bringing the project to life. People want to feel like they are collaborating with LLMs and are still the visionary in the process. As the performance of these systems improves that becomes less and less the case.
E.g. if Steve Jobs had simply handed a slip of paper to a team that said "make a new kind of computer", then no, he would not have brought the Macintosh to life.
No, its a very easy line to draw. Rallying and bringing together humans is COMPLETELY different than having an LLM do something. They are not comparable.
I completely disagree. The mindset that leaves you trapped is focusing on the destination and not the journey. I will never paint like Michaelangelo but it feels good to apply myself to the pursuit of painting, even if the resulting paintings aren't good.
A point is coming very soon where coding agents are not tools but are just your replacement. If you prompt a coding agent to make you something then go have lunch, you didn't make anything, it did.
"But I don’t think you do love it. I think you love being praised for being smart. The pats on the head. That’s the most likely explanation for why your motivation for coding by hand has disappeared."
I think you (and almost everyone in this thread) are missing an important point here: even without relying on external input on our work, we feel less proud of the work we produce by hand when we know we could have prompted our way there orders of magnitude faster.
If I build something cool by hand, and I enjoy the process of building it, then why does AI affect anything? The problem lies in how I feel about the final result. It feels fundamentally bad to know that however hard I worked on this, it would have been better, faster, or both had I used AI to produce it. I think it really is that simple.
This is the first comment in this thread that adequately captures how I feel. If I spend a weekend working on a project, there are two equal parts that make it worth my time: enjoying the process, and enjoying the final result.
It's inevitable (no matter how much you enjoy programming) that you will run into frustrating parts of working on code. If at the end of that process, you end up with a product that you know could have been better if LLMs were used, its a shitty feeling and makes it harder to power through the frustrating parts of the work.
It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.
