Supply and demand. If you're going to compare salaries, look at the number/density of tech companies in the area and the value generation. SV corporations setup offices here in Toronto, but the pay doesn't match up because it doesn't have to. Competition for talent is not as fierce.
There are single buildings in SV that host more "elite" software engineers than other entire cities (how many thousand engineers at a single location like Google/Apple's HQ? What native equivalents does Canada have? It used to be RIM/Blackberry, but now its what, Shopify? The scale matters.)
You're misattributing quality of wages to people being ignorant of their own value, but what you should be attributing it to is plain labour economics.
Supply and demand. If you're going to compare salaries, look at the number/density of tech companies in the area and the value generation. SV corporations setup offices here in Toronto, but the pay doesn't match up because it doesn't have to. Competition for talent is not as fierce.
There are single buildings in SV that host more "elite" software engineers than other entire cities (how many thousand engineers at a single location like Google/Apple's HQ? What native equivalents does Canada have? It used to be RIM/Blackberry, but now its what, Shopify? The scale matters.)
You're misattributing quality of wages to people being ignorant of their own value, but what you should be attributing it to is plain labour economics.