Medium post about this person who moved from Silicon Valley to Canada to work on startups.
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Many people think Canadian tech companies pay lower wages than US companies, it may just be a perception issue:
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Nice article thanks for sharing!
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Keeping Silicon Valley out of the numbers (it’s an massive outlier) tech salaries in Canada have been a little lower than the US but things have been changing for the last few years. If you come with experience you can get a pretty good salary in cities like Toronto. Also since the tech ecosystem is younger here it’s a chance to rise up the ranks faster. Finally if you look at Canada it’s less expensive than the US in some ways you’re not saving for things like medical care and kids colleges the same way you do in the states.
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One of the main drivers that fuels innovation and job growth is government support (funding) for STEM fields. It opens up the doors for new technology, new industries in the form of spinoffs and creates jobs. The US did an amazing job owing to the cold war in these fields, had a massive brain-gain and has reaped the rewards for decades. This was one of the main reasons US attracted so much talent all over the world. Before the cold war, German scientists fled to the US in 1930-1940; before that Germany was the center of innovation. Sadly, research funding has not grown proportionally to the number of scientists in the US, especially since the cold war is now over. China has watched and learnt and these days China is pouring billions into research funding and attracting scientists from all over the world, even from the US, citizens or otherwise - mainly due to US visa issues as well as guaranteed research funding by Chinese government. It may soon become the next superpower in 3 decades or so. Good to see Canada also following suit: https://gizmodo.com/canadian-budget-pledges-billions-to-fund-basic-science-1823405476
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I know a few people (from India) who joined U. of Montreal and U. of Toronto specifically to study AI. Both these colleges are the top brands when it comes to Deep Learning. Both these school are instrumental in creating the field of Deep Learning as we know it today. One of them went from his MS there to the Google Brain office which is also in Montreal.
University of Alberta is the where Deep Reinforcement Learning was invented this is considered the most exciting area of research if we are ever to get to general AI. Here’s a great video by Bloomberg which digs deep into Canada’s place is creating AI.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-05-23/hello-world-canada-the-rise-of-ai-video
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That was an interesting watch. I knew that Canada was into AI but I did not know that AI was so big in Canada and that it has been developing there for decades.
One of my colleagues during his PhD went to Montreal to study under Dr. Yoshua Bengio himself as a visitor student for a year. He’s now finishing his PhD in Deep learning at my university.
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Canada is at the very top when it comes to AI (may be just second to the valley?), the great thing is that Canadian government promotes AI/tech/startups in a great away; Prime minister Justin Trudeau himself replied to this Quora post about his view on AI (I thought it was really cool):
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To see whats going on in Canadas startup ecosystem, BetaKit is a great source, I have been following them for sometime and their podcasts are pretty good too. For anyone interested:
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NVIDIA opens AI lab in Toronto
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This is actually pretty cool. Nvidia is one of the companies that I have immense respect for especially coming from web tech the stuff they do requires some deep skills.
Attending CVPR at the moment. Almost all of the companies in attendance (and researchers) are doing and looking for DL talent. Barely any submissions without any NN component.
CVPR is happening in Salt Lake City right? So are they recruiting for Canadian jobs?
Chinese, US and Canadian companies are here (in that order of strength!) hiring for CV/AI.
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That’s good news. Next Silicon valley, anyone? 
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