Are you an American or a Canadian? As an American, every time I talk to a Canadian company they assume there must be something wrong with me. They don't understand why anybody would choose the cold and less pay over someplace like SF.
I'm Canadian, so obviously there's some inherent bias. Part of it is the annoyance of visa, permanent resident, and citizenship shenanigans necessary to get into the US (TN visas are non-residency track).
Part of it is cultural -- I feel like people are friendlier here in general (although the difference isn't so great in the bay area), even in the bigger cities.
Part of it is really hard to describe -- there's just something that feels grimy about American cities in general. By comparison virtually every Canadian city I've been in feels much cleaner than every american city I've been in. San Francisco and New York can feel particularly bad -- I never smell human urine walking down the street in Toronto, but it's a regular occurrence for me in San Francisco.
Then there's the homeless situation. Toronto is by no means free of homeless people, but the problem seems to exist on a completely different scale than it does in San Francisco or New York. It really makes a big difference in how you experience a city, for me at least.
The company I’m a development manager at wouldn’t look at you funny, partially because I’m an immigrant from America and completely agree with you (I do not want to work in America, and would leave any company that decided to move all of its jobs there).
