The problem gets worse. American corporate hegemony has a lot to do with America’s market size, but that size also generates lots of genuinely world-changing ideas. By contrast, many of the biggest TSX-traded tech companies care more about mergers and acquisitions than innovation, sell boring business-to-business software, or both. Even among Canada’s more innovative mid-sized companies and startups, few are trying to build the next great platform.
Nearly every Canadian tech executive is sweating this change. Talent was already hard to come by before 2020. Now its scarcity is driving salaries up by as much as 30 per cent a year for some companies, executives say, as they battle for Canada’s best engineers, scientists, developers and designers. Cory Janssen, co-chief executive of the mid-sized Edmonton-based artificial intelligence firm AltaML, puts his struggle plainly. “Can we compete with Big Tech? I don’t think it’s fair to say that we’d ever be able to get up to the numbers they’re throwing around,” he said. “So we’re doing everything we can in terms of flexibility and benefits, and the type of projects we’re working on.”For an industry worried about a worker shortage, tech companies have never employed so many people.
With few exceptions, Canadian companies don’t carry as much global cultural cachet as industry giants. Many skilled workers are looking to U.S.-based giants, resulting in what concerned executives and pundits call a 'brain drain' of Canadian talent.For workers with the right skills, the amount of choice in today’s Canadian tech-job market is astonishing.
Now he works remotely from Toronto, and his team members are as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and London. He is, however, paid less than his colleagues in San Francisco. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has embraced telework, but insisted that compensation is curbed in lower-cost areas. And those figures don’t account for the hiring bonuses, performance-based compensation and stock options the industry frequently uses to attract or retain highly-skilled employees – and which are adding to prohibitive labour costs for tech firms. And the longer this situation persists, the more pressure there’ll be to keep boosting compensation.
On the call, Mr. Lutke revealed his company more than doubled its R&D hiring rate last year over 2020. He insisted Shopify is one of the world’s best-paying, too, and the company said the company’s stock-based compensation and payroll expenses would double to US$800-million this year. Executives across the country are doing the same, openly discussing raises of between 10 per cent and 30 per cent – in some cases, mulling boosts of 75 per cent. “There’s almost no ceiling,” said
Cory Janssen normally spends his days selling his vision for harnessing artificial intelligence to make life easier for customers and partners such as Suncor Energy Inc. and Alberta Heath Services. Lately, though, Mr. Janssen finds himself spending more time scouring LinkedIn. To deal with the talent crunch, the co-CEO of 125-employee AltaML has got deeply involved in recruitment, even showing up in job interviews to make a personal pitch. “I feel like I’m the closer,” Mr. Janssen said.
Pay in New York is a “significant multiple” of what B.C. companies would offer, the person said. In other words, in order to buy a house in the Canadian city they want to call home, they had to leave it: “If this is my internal calculus, this is certainly happening at scale.” Mr. Le Bouthillier, its CEO, said despite his company’s pay bumps, he’s struggling to find specialized talent – including experts in development, security and operations – and the language law may make the hunt even harder.
Tech companies are certainly drawing interest. In January, nearly 19 per cent of clicks on Canadian tech job postings on Indeed were made by job seekers abroad, compared with 16.3 per cent two years ago. But minting new Canadians also means adding more pressure to the housing market. Without a significant uptick in new builds, soaring housing costs might make the country less attractive to job seekers.
joshokane Exodus continues out of Canada.
Wage problem*
globebusiness This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a large & ongoing exodus of talent & flight of capital out of Canada. I know quite a few families leaving or who have already left. The consequences are becoming visible.. overall standard of living is in free fall because of it.
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