Interesting, it's not the first time I've heard this. There an Ottawa office that hosts a few examples of this for an American company I know of.

You might be surprised how inefficient banks can be when it comes to tech. As years go by I see an increase of tech workers but a decrease of experienced or competent ones. My view is those competent tech workers tend to be more expensive than Canadian companies are willing to pay, thus end up hiring 10x the staff. The banks simply have more money to waste that way and thus are doing so by hiring a lot of tech workers.

If they're like most places, they're going to front-line support and/or front-line development.

Banks and other institutions with a massive legacy codebase and/or infrastructure are keenly aware of how much it costs them to maintain, COBOL code on zSeries. They'd very much like to replace the currently-irreplaceable mainframe wizards with interchangeable "full stack developers" that they can outsource or subcontract to.

There's a lot of Gen-X and Millenial managers that really struggle with having whole chunks of their infrastructure that they can't commodify (source: am a Gen-X IT manager). Part of this is a legit concern: COBOL+zSeries or RPG+iSeries devs are not exactly common, and they take a long time to train up. Senior architects are even rarer, and most of them are a heartbeat away from their, ahem, last promotion, so it makes sense to try and move that you can to something that you can more easily support.

The other part of this is that there is a type of insecure douchebag manager that hates having indispensable employees, and there's nothing as indispensable as the greybeard who knows the COBOL code that your billion-dollar company runs on.

Also interesting would be knowing what those "tech" roles are.

Sometimes first line call center is labelled as tech.

Which is a much different role than engineering, or installing, or maintenance or coding - which are the types of roles I typically think of as "tech".

The report says the current average annual compensation for Canadian tech occupations in this study is $100,400 CAD, with a salary range of $50,200-$167,700. Comparable jobs in the US could earn an average of $175,600 CAD, ranging from $72,600 to $313,000.

Working as intended!

The environment for startups is harsh all over. The reason 99% of startups die isn't because of environment: it's because pies in the sky are VERY often unattainable.

You'll be happy to know that Universal Basic Income will allow more startups to flourish, but I really don't expect we'll get there under a Red government, let alone a Blue populist hellscape.

30 of them work for my company. They are all very senior, making good money, and paying Canadian taxes. Paying a lot of taxes that pay for social programs that all Candians enjoy.

Your psychic skills are impressive, but they rest of us may want sources for these confidently-created conclusions.

I wouldn't just assume that. There are a lot of university grads that go to the US. It's a lot easier to immigrate when you don't have to worry about kids or family.