Is Vancouver a Legitimate Tech Hub?

[SpongeG]

Global did a report last week or the week before and said Vancouver has the most supercars in North America per capita.

[SpongeG]

Originally Posted by jlousa

Really I seem to recall more then our fair share of Rolls, Bentleys and Jaguars back in the day before the "hot Asian money" I also clearly remember all the penny stock peddlers in the VSE days with their Ferrari's, Lambos, Porsches during the 80s. But heck lets pretend it's a new phenomenon, we all know those dealerships along Burrard are recent additions to the city.

yeah, there were quite a visible amount in the 80's. I remember driving past a party on SW marine drive at one of the big mansions there and it was having some party an dthe cheapest looking car was a porsche. It was all jags, bentleys, rolls, land rovers. It was quite the collection parked outside along the road. They even had a valet at the gate.

[LeftCoaster]

Typically a Porsche costs more than a Jag or Land Rover. Especially back in the day before they diluted their brand with the Boxer, Cayman and Panamera.

[Genauso]

Buzzfeed: Zenefits Is Laying Off Almost Half Its Employees

In part, the layoffs reflect recent improvements in Zenefits’ software that have made the administration of benefits more automated, the person briefed on the matter said. Before a software overhaul led by Sacks last year, core Zenefits functions were heavily reliant on manual work by staff, leading to seemingly careless errors, BuzzFeed News has reported.

In the wake of Conrad’s departure last year, Zenefits shed hundreds of employees, including many on the sales team, through a combination of layoffs and an offer to take severance pay and quit. The latest layoffs fall more heavily on the operations department and other areas outside of sales, though they touch every department.

Fulcher said in the memo that Zenefits would consolidate its operations group in its Arizona office, while expanding its product and engineering groups in Vancouver and Bangalore to supplement its San Francisco team.

“The Bay Area is an expensive place to do business,” Hoffman said in the statement.

[christmas]

Canadian startups getting higher investments

[LeftCoaster]

Word is Google is touring the market looking for a decent chunk of space for a Vancouver office...

[LeftCoaster]

Some good results for Vancouver's (and Canada's) tech scene:

Canada has a new startup champion according to a report released Tuesday. Vancouver ranks 15th on the planet, ahead of the 16th place scene in Toronto and tech-heavy Waterloo, Ontario while Montreal dropped out of the top 20 index. That is according to the 2017 Startup Genome report ranking the world’s strongest startup ecosystems, its first such index in two years. Silicon Valley predictably ranks in the top spot, followed closely by New York, Boston, Tel Aviv, and China’s big cities. But there were changes in the rankings for Canada’s major cities.

http://www.geektime.com/2017/03/14/v...global-report/

Give the report a read, it's a good analysis.

[SFUVancouver]

^ Thanks for posting the article. Something that jumped out to me is the aerial photo that was used for Toronto, which is a future skyline rendering I remember seeing on SSP years ago.

[LeftCoaster]

Haha yep I noticed that too, Maldive's work. At least he got properly credited.

[giallo]

Thanks, Leftcoaster. Vancouver and Toronto are doing quite well.

[Klazu]

Originally Posted by LeftCoaster

Word is Google is touring the market looking for a decent chunk of space for a Vancouver office...

Great news, although this is very likely only in anticipation of the looming H1B changes in the US. Still, we will benefit from this even though we would only end up being a immigration pen.

Did Facebook ever set up an office in here like they were planning?

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by Klazu

Great news, although this is very likely only in anticipation of the looming H1B changes in the US. Still, we will benefit from this even though we would only end up being a immigration pen.

Did Facebook ever set up an office in here like they were planning?

There was a temporary office that has since been closed. Around Shaw tower I think(?). I don't know about anything further.

[LeftCoaster]

Facebook was very open with their intentions here, and fair enough to them.

Google's office will be a local programming office taking advantage of lower salaries, exchange rates and immigration advantages available in Vancouver.

[whatnext]

A new study says Vancouver tech sector hamstrung by combination of low salaries and high housing prices:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-...ticle34573229/

Since we're getting people who can't get into the States, it stands to reason they're not being paid much, even the ones accepted to the USA are routinely used to merely as a way to lower labour costs. A pretty damning indictment here:

...as was documented in testimony by immigration experts Ron Hira of Howard University and Hal Salzman of Rutgers, most of the H-1B visas aren't being used to hire people with specialized skills. "The vast majority of H-1Bs who are coming in have no more than ordinary IT skills," Hira testified.

About half of all H-1B visas end up in the hands of outsourcing firms that use them to import workers, mostly from India, to replace Americans in middle-level IT jobs. The firms include Tata and Infosys, both of which helped Southern California Edison in its program to shed 500 domestic IT workers and replace them with foreign labor....

http://www.latimes.com/business/hilt...26-column.html

[SpongeG]

this is probably the same story...

Seattle beats Vancouver for software engineers: study


Seattle is a more attractive option than Vancouver, financially, for software engineers


Six-digit salaries and cheaper housing make Seattle a better choice than Vancouver for software engineers with the option of working on either side of the border, according to a new study from Point2 Homes.

The average salary for these workers was found to be around US$55,000 in Vancouver, which is just over half of the average of US$108,000 they could earn, on average, in Seattle. Not only do they earn much less in Vancouver, according to the study, the high cost of housing here means much more bang for their buck in Seattle, with an average detached house in Washington state’s largest city of US$675,000, compared with well over US$1 million here. Even when comparing condo prices, Seattle wins again, with a median of US$475,000 to purchase a home of this type, compared with US$492,000 in Vancouver.

...

https://www.biv.com/article/2017/4/s...gineers-study/

[LeftCoaster]

It's definitely a difficult scenario, and one that is going to haev to change over the years, but hamstrung is a huge exaggeration. The sector is BCs fastest growing and is adding jobs in the magnitude of tens of thousands per year...

[a very long weekend]

it should continue to grow too, as the trump faction makes it much more difficult for talented foreigners to move to the US. it's not just all the canadian engineers who won't be getting down here, it's also indian and european engineers who'll be landing in places like vancouver rather than stay in their home countries. canada's express entry system is the closest a western country currently has to open immigration of skilled professionals which is a huge draw.

in vancouver's case, it's golden days ahead if you can stop the self-inflicted harm. once someone finally gets wise to the fact that your housing costs are high because you insist on keeping your city 70% zoned single family homes, maybe at the provincial level it'll be upzoned then, with time, builders can bring housing costs down to reflect wages. once that happens, it'll be a boomtown like they had in calgary for oil back in the day.

[cornholio]

Originally Posted by a very long weekend

it should continue to grow too, as the trump faction makes it much more difficult for talented foreigners to move to the US. it's not just all the canadian engineers who won't be getting down here, it's also indian and european engineers who'll be landing in places like vancouver rather than stay in their home countries. canada's express entry system is the closest a western country currently has to open immigration of skilled professionals which is a huge draw.

in vancouver's case, it's golden days ahead if you can stop the self-inflicted harm. once someone finally gets wise to the fact that your housing costs are high because you insist on keeping your city 70% zoned single family homes, maybe at the provincial level it'll be upzoned then, with time, builders can bring housing costs down to reflect wages. once that happens, it'll be a boomtown like they had in calgary for oil back in the day.

Why would European software engineers come here? I mean there a few that do while young just to check out another part of the world but they all head back again. Tech wages in Europe are higher and quality of life is higher. Even wages compared to cost of living in the eastern European countries are higher. Hell my brother as a senior software engineer in Prague makes significantly more then the average senior software engineer in Vancouver with a cost of living being a fraction of what it is here, and they have a unemployment rate of sub 2.5% in that city. What we get here is software engineers from the developing world undercutting wages, there is a plethora of qualified graduates in Vancouver that cant get a decent job because we are flooding the market with cheap immigrant labor from the developing world willing to undercut. Its not about talent. Talent can still go where ever and it does. There is no problem for any company in the US to assemble the top talent on this planet and there never will be.

If Canada and Vancouver want to have a thriving tech industry they need to do the opposite and make it harder for developing world tech labor to come in. Then they will begin harness the power of valuable Canadian labor and stop the brain drain and improve the industry. The limited global top talent you need you can always get a hold of if you pay them. As in 200 300k + CAD for those that are gifted and bring unique experience and qualifications.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by a very long weekend

it should continue to grow too, as the trump faction makes it much more difficult for talented foreigners to move to the US. it's not just all the canadian engineers who won't be getting down here, it's also indian and european engineers who'll be landing in places like vancouver rather than stay in their home countries. canada's express entry system is the closest a western country currently has to open immigration of skilled professionals which is a huge draw.

in vancouver's case, it's golden days ahead if you can stop the self-inflicted harm. once someone finally gets wise to the fact that your housing costs are high because you insist on keeping your city 70% zoned single family homes, maybe at the provincial level it'll be upzoned then, with time, builders can bring housing costs down to reflect wages. once that happens, it'll be a boomtown like they had in calgary for oil back in the day.

As the article on the American H1B problem pointed out, most tech employees being admitted ended up displacing existing, higher-paid, workers. If you can't offshore the job, then bring the offshore to you!

[SpongeG]

I didn't think microsoft was hip enough to have a ping pong and a foosball table oh my

Vancouver named 'Large City of the Future' in Americas by Financial Times


Image: Inside Microsoft's new office above Nordstrom at Pacific Centre in downtown Vancouver. (Microsoft Vancouver)

Vancouver’s buoyant tech industry and allure as a place for foreign direct investment (FDI) in business is getting a major international nod from the Financial Times’ fDi Intelligence latest rankings of North and South American cities.

The biennial ranking based on foreign direct investment named Vancouver as the ‘Large American City of the Future’, raised Vancouver’s overall ranking from 6th place to 8th place, and named it the top large city for the categories of Business Friendliness and Economic Potential, which are two of the five categories used to assess each level of city size. The other three categories are Human Capital and Lifestyle, Cost Effectiveness, and Productivity.

...

http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vanco...i-intelligence