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"Toronto also ranked as one of the best-value markets for tech firms to operate their business when it comes to cost and quality of talent, second only to Vancouver."


I suppose the above quote means Toronto still has lower than average tech salaries.

"Toronto ranks as North America’s fourth largest tech talent market, with over 212,000 tech workers, representing an increase of 32% over the past five years. Tech talent comprises 8.0% of all workers in 2016, up from 6.9% in 2015. Toronto also ranked third among large markets in millennial population growth, an important source of tech talent, increasing its millennial pool 9.5 per cent from 2010 to 2015."

I wonder how they're defining tech talent. People in the industry generally wouldn't consider software developers and IT staff to be in the same category. Silicon Valley is the largest tech Centre in North America, and that's not because they have hundreds of thousands of IT staff. I suspect most of Toronto's tech workers are in support positions, rather than engineering.
 
Toronto seems to be in about the middle of the pack when you look at salary adjusted for cost of living: https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017

Though the Canadian dollar complicates that a bit.

img4@2x-e90baa4e2f615392e256401491ea6fd9554b2b07601566c4781badc52cdc3755.png
 
I'm in the tech industry, and I don't think our average salary is 149K that's for sure. I think we are great value (especially for US based corporations) because of weaker dollar, lower salaries. Although Montreal is even cheaper (but maybe too far away/cold?). My Toronto office bumps some of our work to Montreal because they offer a cheaper rate.
 
I'm in the tech industry, and I don't think our average salary is 149K that's for sure.
The 149k was adjusted relative to cost of living in the Bay Area (i.e., you could expect to have the same purchasing power in Toronto as you would have earning $149k in the Bay Area). Actual salary in Toronto is $74k USD according to the analysis above.
 
As a soon-to-be tech worker, I'm waiting for this tech boom to translate into higher salaries. The rapidly increasing amount of tech firms in Toronto is undoubtedly a good thing. Hopefully this encourages more people to build startups here at home, increasing VC interest in the city.
 
I remember seeing this CBRE chart floating around social media a few weeks ago:

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And a few other charts in the link below- interesting seeing the huge pool of tech talent in Toronto, behind only San Francisco, NY and DC.

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2017/07/...ampa-and-4-other-florida-cities-show-promise/

So we have a "very high" quality of engineer, but the lowest salaries on the continent. This could indicate that Toronto has an oversupply of software engineers
 
Or just that Canada pays lower than the US on average, I suppose.

Exchange rate + generally higher wages + cheaper cost of living (if you work in a smaller city) are huge draws for Canadians going to the US.
 
So we have a "very high" quality of engineer, but the lowest salaries on the continent. This could indicate that Toronto has an oversupply of software engineers
That's possible, but it may also be a factor of differences in the cost of doing business, availability of investment capital, or that salaries are lower in comparable industries or across the board in Canada. Another possibility is that companies can get away with paying less in Canada because the shortage of available US visas means that many in the industry in Canada don't even have the option of crossing the border for higher wages.
 
Still, if true the report does make some strong statements in the summary. The high rate of office space absorption and the comparative volume of tech jobs created ( claim of more than NYC and San Francisco Bay Area combined ) are impressive. People here raised questions about the quality of the jobs or their compensation; however, so long as they pay middle class wages I feel that is more socially constructive than for instance fewer jobs but paying 1 percenter wages.
 
The quality of the jobs here are a lot lower. The banks and insurance companies in Toronto have very large IT teams but pay them very low salaries in exchange for good benefits and work life balance. The high paying jobs in IT go to contractors who make $80+/hr. These are good middle class jobs. The more we have of these the better. The higher paid jobs here are not in IT but on the business side in senior management and higher like AVP/VP and higher.
 
Or just that Canada pays lower than the US on average, I suppose.

Exchange rate + generally higher wages + cheaper cost of living (if you work in a smaller city) are huge draws for Canadians going to the US.

A lot of the friends I went to school with moved to the States after getting low balled in Canada. A big draw here was despite lower income we had reasonable home prices but that has now gone to the moon. So expect more talent to move to the US.
 

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