"People thought it was crazy when Google decided to connect all the world’s information"
I'd love to see a citation for this. I sort of doubt, at the moment, that anyone seriously said "Google is crazy for trying to connect the world's information." The implication is that I find the comparison to be a bit silly.
The self driving car comparison is more accurate but much less informative: we still don't know how it will turn out.
I can't help but notice right now that Toronto's name has been increasingly pushed as some sort of "next tech centre" (well, many cities in the world want to be something like that). Can someone who's actually there fill me in on what's happening there? How does Toronto's scene compare to say, New York or Seattle?
I know of more than a few companies that are growing tech teams here in Toronto (while primarily having US-based clients) because average salaries are lower than in the US tech centers.
My impression is that the tech workforce here is healthy for a few reasons:
1) the presence of tech giants such as IBM in Markham (plus Toronto's fame for multiculturalism and for having high quality of life) means it attracts a lot of Indian, Chinese and eastern Europe talent. There's also a fair amount of ex-IBMers etc spilling over into growing mid-sized companies that need senior level tech workers with large corp experience.
2) there's a relatively healthy startup scene, but investment here is fairly conservative. Startups without profit strategies tend to die quickly, so as a result, startups here tend to be less pie-in-the-sky than SF unicorn wannabes. Because companies grow steadily and conservatively, they often provide high job security environments that encourage long single-company careers. This creates an incentive for experienced tech workers to stay in Toronto, rather than chase higher salaries elsewhere. I know many tech people that have been in a single company for 7+ years (some even 16+ years!)
3) there are some strong tech education options like Waterloo, which often collaborates with big name organizations like Mozilla. Internships to help get new grads get their foot in the door of the industry are also fairly common
I would definitely say U of Toronto and Waterloo are strong competitive advantages. Working in Silicon Valley I'm surrounded by Canadian engineers, many from one of those two schools.
I would trace it back to the early 2010s when Professors at University of Toronto (Geoffrey E. Hinton in particular) came up with many of the advances in training deep neural networks. That, along with the hype of deep learning, began a snowball of activity that put Toronto on the radar in a significant way.
The University of Toronto is home to Geoffrey Hinton and his research lab. Hinton was the first to use backpropagation for machine learning and a lot of the techniques used today were pioneered by his lab. He is also manages the Google Brain team in Toronto.
Yann LeCun, the director of AI at Facebook, also did a postdoc at Toronto.
"Toronto is like New York, but without all the 'stuff'" - Steve Martin, SNL.
Toronto has grown up a lot in the pst few years. The canadian dollar is about 20% less than USD, so VC dollars go further - and while competitive, hiring engineers is nothing like the bay. That said, there is a shallow pool of senior SaaS startup folks in Toronto compared to SF or New York.
Yes, this fallacy always bothers me. The Canadian Toonie trades strongly against the US dollar; using the half-Toonie as a benchmark is an arbitrary choice.
There are 1000's of underemployed CS Grads earning a pittance compared to their American counterparts. You get access to a large talent pool that makes less than what you would pay an H1B person.
ATM there is about a 37% difference in CAD-USD. So that is just a bonus.
It is also Canada's biggest city and business capital. The only real cons is the price of real estate and high taxes but Google has all kinds of money so that shouldn't be an obstacle. There is also the an issue of poor transportation infra but since this will be developed downtown that shouldn't be an issue either.
I am sure the Provincial/Federal Gov will throw in quite a few enticements since there is an election coming up and they are desperate for some kind of meaningful employment gains.
It's a nice city to visit but you have to be wealthy to live there. It's Canada's version of NYC (a much, much, much smaller version).
I had to try and explain this to my girlfriend and her visiting sister last night. They're from Victoria and Vancouver and want us to move there.
I can barely afford to live in Toronto on my salary, never mind Vancouver and the cost of moving across the country. To my knowledge -- in spite of the higher cost of living -- Vancouver-based software professionals don't make any more than they do here.
That and most people here still equate software = computers = IT department = "Can you fix my laptop?"/"Why doesn't the projector work?"
It's not that they cannot, it is that they do not want to. Seriously, any software dev saying they "cannot live" on their salary is simply out of touch with the rest of the world. Not to say they should take a below market salary, but comparing a hyper-crazy salary of SF to Toronto is unreasonable.
My immediate reaction was to want to say this is a little harsh, but it's actually fair.
I don't suffer. I share a 1 bed apartment with my girlfriend. Between the two of us I'd say we pull in ~$100k. Our rent is $1650 and we rent our parking space for $150. These days, it looks like a steal. I make rent, eat healthy, can afford transit and clothing and the odd night out, but doing all of that and saving any money is a good stretch right now.
But there are complications. We paid even less for a 2 bed condo we rented and were happy as hell, but condos have owners and I've experienced them visiting to have a look at the place they bought but never visited and decide to move in and kindly ask us to leave (with notice). Because of the housing market here, rents increase year-over-year by a not insignificant margin. To find a new 1bed downtown that isn't in a basement we're looking at $2k now. Next year it may be more if the bubble can't be curbed.
My salary doesn't go up at that margin. I'm also wearing a heap of student loans that are held by a bank, with a small share in OSAP (Ontario-Canada Student Loans). The bank treats student loans differently than the government, where there is no amity or relief on offer. Had to take this on to get into school because during the Harper years belts tightened and I fell into the narrow margin of my father made enough money to not warrant OSAP considering me at-need, but nowhere near enough to help me through any of the expense of higher education. I'm from a very rural area, so there were no local options.
TL;DR: much of my background of circumstance will better explain what I said, and might make me seem a little less crass and out of touch as you put it. In a vacuum, I agree. I have never lived in a vacuum, it's been a long road to where I am and longer to get where I want to go.
For reference, the average salary for a software engineer, in Toronto, is close to $71,000 CAD/year. Taking into account the current CAD/USD exchange rate, brings it to approximately $52,000 USD/year.
Each country has different costs, taxes and otherwise, for both employees and employers. The effects of those costs have not been included with those figures.
For reference on the cost side, the median home in San Francisco is $1.16M[1] (USD). The mean home in Toronto is $921K[2] (CAD; about $674K USD). Median figures are, unfortunately, not publicly provided in Canada, but given the nature of home valuations (especially in Toronto where you can find multi-million dollar mansions), a comparable amount is presumably quite a bit lower than that.
Most my friends in SF pay between $2.5-4k USD (3.4k-5.46k CAD) per month for their apartments [tell me if i'm wrong?]. I personally rent out two 1BR upper-scale apartments in downtown Toronto [one loft space for $1.9k CAD ($1.39k USD) and the other a 1BR+Den for $2.275k CAD ($1.66k USD)].
When it comes to lifestyle, money generally goes way further in Toronto than it does in SF; you're getting paid less for a reason.
Oh also...enjoy your free healthcare [PS i'm Australian, so don't go thinking I'm a crazy maple syrup drinking Canadian who just loves this place because i was born here]
As a Torontonian transplant living in NYC: the rent is higher, but the same or smaller % of a much larger figure can still get you ahead by _quite_ a bit. You are simply wrong about the cost of living explaining the salary difference. It is very, very, very good to be working here and not in Toronto.
New York certainly Trumps (thought this needed some comic relief) Toronto in many ways, but I am guessing you're probably making a claim based on a salary that I suspect isn't as common as you would like it to be. People I previously worked with who did the exact same thing regularly talk about how expensive it is and that they are struggling to get by. I've had the same option on the table and despite my disinterest living in the US right now, I've never been able to make the math work. Taxes are not that low, especially when you add back healthcare, and it's so expensive to live the same quality of life that I might be able to short term improve my cash flow, but if I sacrifice I can also do that here?!
I'm from Toronto, good senior engineers that aren't working in a sweat shop make $100k CAD or more, you can rent a nice apartment downtown for $2k per month.
I would say, maybe it's because I'm working in a sweatshop then, but I make barely over half of that in a mid-level/senior dev position in operations in a rather large digital media company. I've heard stories of positions that offer more but I don't think they're as plentiful as its made out to be... (frankly they outsource a lot of dev work and in spite of the larger trend in digital media, want to stay far away from much in-house dev).
maybe I should just be looking for new work.
There's also the emotional expense involved, but that's everywhere. Can't say I'd be willing to go in for $100k CAD doing DB or web work at say X-Syngery Unicorp Inc who might supply toilet paper dispensers to all junior-level and public restrooms in Suchacorp's east tower.
It's basically a matter of who got there first. NIMBYism blocks new construction. But rent control keeps things cheap for long term residents. And if you bought a house 20 years ago you're in a good spot.
Toronto has had a pretty good high-tech scene since the mid 90's. The area around the old carpet factory and Front street as well as a good part of King street going into town have housed and are housing many high tech companies.
Front 151 was a major hub for North America and allowed co-location and cheap fiber so a lot of DC activity sprang up around it and that in turn led to many start-ups choosing Toronto. The fact that there are two excellent universities nearby (Waterloo and UFT) helped a lot in that it sourced a stream of very capable programmers.
The only thing that stopped Toronto from developing further as a high tech city is the brain drain to the valley were engineers could easily make double of what they could make in Toronto.
- It's generally easier to bring in immigrants if there's a tech job waiting than in the US.
- The border is a barrier to moving to NYC or SF for a higher paying job. So salaries are lower.
- There are more agencies than product companies. Toronto has always had a lot of ad agencies, but the CAD has been trending down since 2013 without a major bump in salaries. So there are many ad agencies and contract app shops that take advantage of the spread.
So in general the Toronto tech scene is smaller and lower paying than either of those cities. But it's the best in Canada, so it attracts a lot of the local talent.
Toronto is the finance & arguably tech centre of Canada. Great universities & access to VC cash, lots of startups. It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US, due to the weaker dollar, lower wages, cheaper medical insurance, and SR&ED credits that let you write off developer salary costs.
> It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US
Should add that this works both ways. Most Canadians who can, do end up leaving for the US since they can easily make 2 - 4X the income, even after CoL and insurance. There is a non-trivial amount of brain drain happening in Canada.
A lot of us come back though. Five years ago I loaded up a truck and moved from Seattle to Toronto.
My wife and I didn't want to settle down in America, even if the money would have been that much better. Seattle is a great city, but it's still very American and that overall American culture never felt like home to us.
My wife and I did the exact same thing, except it was SF. We're very happy that we moved back to Toronto and Canada in general. It's our home (friends and family are here) and we didn't want to have kids in SF.
I was an expat in the US for many years, the story was the same in the mid-90s. Many try it, some stay, some come back. I still work for a US company but moved back.
The current political climate has a big impact on encouraging people to stay in Canada, especially with NAFTA and the H1B programs hanging by a thread. Imagine thousands of Canadians with TN status getting told they need to move back immediately (More likely 30-60 days after a status change application) upon withdrawal from NAFTA. It will be a chaotic brain drain in reverse.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google all have large Canadian outposts lately for a reason.
I know Google Waterloo has some actual permanent engineering teams but Microsoft and Amazon Canada seem to be strictly L-1 visa farms.
The political climate is much talked about but if anything the rate of brain drain has increased as more and more SV companies make an effort to recruit in Toronto. In the early 2000s the subset of US companies that recruited at all in Canada did it strictly at UW. Now all the majors have a campus presence at even mid-tier Canadian schools like UVic.
Amazon must have nearly 400 R&D people in Toronto now. Probably 300 when I left. I was always involved in recruiting and Amazon hires the best from all over the world and probably over 70% of the engineers were from Waterloo and the new comers are mostly from Europe, plus we got a few returning from US Amazon as well. There is always some who wanted to move to Seattle after 3-4 years but the number is like 1 in 15..
L-1 farm is entirely too cynical, most hires I know at AWS or Google Toronto have zero interest in leaving Canada. At Pivotal we have a number of US people doing transfers INTO Canada lately.
This is not to say transfers south are not done... but it's not the primary purpose of having a Canadian presence.
Absolutely. The talent in the US is certainly higher than it is in Canada, due in no small part to the brain drain which has been happening for decades.
Toronto and Waterloo have long been tech centres, though not as large as New York or Seattle. Probably it has been most similar to Chicago's tech scene evolution, just smaller scale. A big factor are the quality of schools here and increased (though not universal) desire for Canadians to stay in Canada since 2001.
I think this is it, and it does nothing to help the tech companies' reputations to move these jobs. The "immigration bullshit" was in response to outsourcing, immigration, and exploitation of visa programs to exploit cheap labor and keep wages down. By shipping these jobs overseas at the first sign of a worker/employer leverage shift, it shows us that these companies don't care about providing for its employees, they just care about their corporate profits and nothing else. Why should we allow employers in our country that don't provide growth for its employees?
It's because people don't understand that if you make it difficult to pay software developers who may be citizens of a different country $80000 to work in the US, companies can just as easily outsource to those same software developers, in their own countries, but instead pay them $20/hr instead.
Essentially, America was able to use its mythology as a land of opportunity and equality to convert $20/hr being sent elsewhere to getting 20 somethings to move to the US after their home country took up all the burden of paying for them being raised through their childhood and subsidizing their education and pay them to stay in the US and spend money there (and get a good chance of creating a billion dollar startup in the US instead of their home country as well).
Much like most decisions Americans have been making lately, the push to de emphasize immigration is pretty much all downsides for the US, for little to no return, other than "we stuck it to them!"
> the push to de emphasize immigration is pretty much all downsides for the US, for little to no return, other than "we stuck it to them!"
I disagree with you there. This push is really showing people how little these multinational corporations care for them. The economy has been growing, but instead of passing that growth down to its employees, it's keeping wages down or shipping jobs overseas. If we shift gears as a country and limit outsourcing and immigration, there will be a period of time when large companies leave ship, but chances are good that the lower and middle classes would finally start seeing their wages go up.
Unless you have strong unions who can wrestle with the tech strong-arms, tech companies, or any company, don't have to pander to your basic necessity for a decent working life.
The unions in the US are pathetic, and corrupted by the mafia, and workers are suffering humiliations because of that.
Here's a tragicomic anecdote that illustrates my point:
Recently in Germany, Tesla has been struggling with the German unions because Tesla has been paying below union wages to a German company they bought. So far, Tesla offered each employee a one-off €1,000 ($1,090) bonus, an extra €150 a month, and €10,000 of Tesla shares distributed over four years to calm the situation, but the negotiations are still on-going.
In the US, where they're facing worker revolt for the low wages and bad working conditions but currently aren't unionized, they promised free frozen yoghurt and, Musk claimed this is his favorite, a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster.
It is in the news. That's where I found out about it.
You can find many takes on it with a quick google on Tesla's unionization suppression efforts in their Fremont factory and Tesla's battles with the United Auto Workers US union.
The German dispute is also in the news, in English and German, and can be found with a quick google as well.
Throwaway for anonymity, but the quickly growing startup that I work for is opening a Toronto office because it will help us retain existing talent, and recruit talent on an ongoing basis, particularly if immigration to the US becomes more challenging.
I'm really excited for all the great stuff finally getting done on the waterfront in Toronto. Even before I left a few years ago you could comfortably walk from around the airport up to Sherbourne almost entirely along the water edge. This will push that to Parliament and link up the Distillery district. I don't imagine the storage lot next to Cherry st will last long after that.
A far cry from my younger years where it was basically mud parking lots and heavy equipment east of redpath.
Out of curiousity and so we can all concretely imagine how Sidewalk Labs plans to transform cities, can someone explain what are the speicific changes and associated benefits in this new kind of city? It mentions, autonomous transit, ride sharing, cheaper housing (how?). Can someone paint a fuller picture of what will be new and how it will be beneficial.
I'm not skeptical at all, in fact I'm very hopeful. I just want to be able to picture the new kind of city more concretely.
Personally I'm interested in seeing the privacy impact assessment if there is an actual proposal. This isn't Google doing it out of some utopian goodness of their heart. Everything in those 12 blocks will be logged, analyzed, and sold to advertisers.
If an artificial town could be self sustaining, a lot of the benefits you want explained might just happen just by not having legacy stuff. E.g. the roads, and road rules could designed with new forms of transport in mind. Housing might (initially!) be cheaper because zoning requirements don't force prices up.
There's wishful thinking in all of the above, but I think that is concentrated in the wish that such a town could get off the ground at all. But about the only kind of artificial town that I find plausible is when a state wants to build a new capital -- and that will immediately be a gravy train for parasites who want to crank up the costs.
That's certainly more than enough land to build something interesting in. Otherwise, that area would just go to another boring condominium development. But the only autonomous transit is going to be elevators and the inflamed fantasies of journalists who don't check all the primary sources.
Now, if there was a bid for doing something interesting with Ontario Place, that would be a discussion.
The easiest way of making those things happen is a company town. The problem is that it's not financially sustainable, which becomes a problem if the company cuts spending or goes under (which has happened to a number of other company towns).
The land will be much cheaper, we've got a huge problem with students fleeing for greener pastures, and we have one of the best connected cities in the country.
Internet services. We had one of the first ADSL deployments in North America, and while we are still stuck with two real providers, speeds and prices are pretty good, and they have mostly given up on caps.
Toronto is certainly booming today, hiring is hard, houses are getting expensive and everyone is talking about joining in on the fun...meanwhile I live here and love it, please take your shoes off at the door.
I'm a touch worried this will end up like the World Fair and we'll end up with a collection of derelict and unwanted "high tech" artefacts left for the original inhabitants to cleanup. I just don't trust Alphabet to act in a responsible way when it comes to respecting cities that real people live in.
> He’s also hinted at tech’s ability to overhaul zoning rules and control housing costs, a particular interest of Alphabet’s Page.
Yeah, right. Toronto is one of the most retrograde cities on housing intensification (it still hasn't intensified around the Bloor-Danforth subway that was built a generation ago)[1]. In fact many neighbourhoods are losing population as the region grows due to extremely restrictive zoning rules.[2] A bit of Google money isn't going to change the electoral calculus of the local politicians that control that stuff.
The most likely scenario is Google convinces the government to sell/give them land in Toronto's Port Lands at below market value, and they make a killing on developing it with some technological window-dressing like free ad-supported wi-fi which AFAIK is the only thing Sidewalk has launched to date.
And how would they control housing costs? Not going to stop speculators from China and Russia desperately trying to move money out of their home countries to stop the government getting its hands on it
I assume this high tech city will be covered in cameras, microphones, and sensors of various types constantly reporting back to Alphabet (in order to "improve your user experience")?
"Good morning, Steve. Our 'smart sidewalk' noticed that you've gained several pounds and reduced the pace of your daily run over the past month" (insert personal trainer ad)
When that student wants property in the most prime space in the region probably not. Toronto already allows tons of new units(like this project) what more are you expecting from the city?
The GP didn't specify U of T St. George campus specifically, but if we're assuming they were, students have a wide variety of residence options available to them at great rates[1] provided by the university. In cases where students don't wish to remain in the residences, they can move out and share apartments or condo units.
Also, there aren't any U of T buildings[2] close to the Quayside cordon[3], hence I find it hard to believe that this particular project (or any) will raise rents all that much for students attending U of T on the St. George campus.
So the uni should relocate or build more extensive student housing? Not sure how that is a problem for the city itself. Not everyone gets to live in prime areas.
Toronto is building everywhere around there. That's why every conversation about development in Toronto goes back and forth between 'too many condos!' and 'too expensive housing'.
I don't have a source but I remember a panel discussion when Page came up with the idea to build a floating city in international waters. This way they could overcome the governmental regulations that slow down innovation, taxes etc.
I can't help but think about Toronto as a testing ground for that. Add facebooks flying internet drones plus some space X space infrastructure. Sounds pretty cool to me.
How do taxes slow down innovation–considering all R&D costs can be deducted, and taxes only apply to profits?
And which regulations, specifically, are holding back innovation at Google? Would their floating city allow me (to use one of your examples) to conduct rocket launches in my backyard?
I'm not from the US and the discussion was mostly about regulations from the states but what I got from it was:
- foreign skilled workforce is from their perspective still to hard to employ (and the Muslim Ban could be an good example for that)
- think about the massive amount of money that Apple has offshore because it's to expensive to bring it back to the US! Put that investment into R&D and the effect would be tremendous.
- I don't know how high the cost for using the public infrastructure is in the US but building it from ground up and managing it by yourself might be cheaper (I assume thats what the Toronto project is all about).
- do some research on costs for positions like "Governmental Relations Manager". google made some bad experiences in China with that
this is not software though, when its up and running you can't just go there and shut it down, so somebody else would probably take Googles place IF that happens. This is an independent company financed by Google and this would probably be their most important project, so it's not like Google shutting down Wave/Reader/whatever.
They can't just flip a switch and make it happen. If I were Toronto I'd make them put a decent amount of money in an escrow account so the project is finished no matter what.
But then this is Google's tech, so if they leave not sure how it works.
So your concern isn't the ongoing operation but that they start working with waterfront TO on these 12 blocks and leave before their ideas are implemented?
Why would the city require more of them than any other developer? Any development has a chance of falling before completion.
I don't have a "concern," I merely stated what most people think of anything Google. I don't know enough about this project (the article didn't either) and I don't have a dog in this race. However, I do remember my grandma saying to never put any eggs in Google's baskets. She always said that she heard that from her grandma.
Google will look after it's own interests, all the time. That's every quarter.
Artificially planned mixed use "downtowns" (for lack of a better term) require some sort of anchoring force: location, food and shopping, employment, etc. If that force here is based on google doing something--and they fail or just stop--then the development will fail.
America is littered with these kind of developments. In growing markets with strong demand, worst case, you just turn the retail/office space into lofts and rent them. But in areas where demand isn't high, you get empty strip malls.
And if all google is doing is building apartment/condo buildings in a hot real estate market, this isn't some digital moonshot vision of the future. They are just building apartments in a can't lose environment. Anyone can do that.
In this case the anchoring force is provided by WaterfrontTO and it is close enough(walkable) to the financial district and the new south core district that even if it was just apartments it would fill out quickly. I think the Google stuff is just a bonus.
I don't even think they are building the apartments from how I read it they are just providing a layer of services on top for the new project.
In this case we are not really talking about a free consumer product, though.
I would be surprised if Toronto's municipality would grant this development without having some guarantees of it being carried out, save for paying severe penalties.
Google Wi-Fi mesh network in Mountain View hasn't worked in a long time. Toronto may well get similar service decline.
Also, Starbucks Google Wi-Fi rarely uses Google Fibre, IME, and instead uses commercial providers like AT&T and Comcast. Plus, Starbucks hasn't deployed much SGWF in Silicon Valley so it's still basically vaporware. (There's a Starbucks in Santa Clara with non-Google Wi-Fi as slow as dial-up.) They'd be wise to cancel the Google partnership and go with an outsourcer whom has access to a couple of big providers to maximize cheapest/fastest/coverage and handles all the deployment, support and security.
Maybe. AT&T started deploying FTTN to major cities like Houston and Chicago in 2005-2006 (four years before Fiber). Their gigabit buildout was based on that original plan (which dates to SBC). Comcast has been on the DOCSIS upgrade treadmill for years. In the 7 years before Fiber they went from 8 to 100 upgrading to DOCSIS 2.0 then DOCSIS 3.0. Gigabit is another 10x jump over a similar time frame, based on DOCSIS 3.1.
There was also Verizon FIOS, which started in 2005, expanded to 5 million customers, then stopped expanding much after 2010. It apparently cost Verizon more than they'd expected.
Actually, I hope not. Nearly every building in this neighbourhood has fibre to the home, there are three different carriers with fibre into my condo. Most of the rest of the city has copper. While it gets a bunch of press, I hope this is more focused on applications and IoT than pipe.
80% sounds quite high but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is around there. Google are big enough to take risks and try things that don't work out. There are 95 official Google products in the Wikipedia 'discontinued products' listing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon..., but that's not very accurate in that it doesn't mention things have failed but are limping along, and it includes things that were discontinued but live on in other products (eg Wave merged with Docs).
It's not entirely unreasonable to suggest Google have 20 successful products for their ~95 discontinued ones though.. which would work out as 80% 'failed'.
Why is that significant? How many projects has GE or IBM discontinued? Google is at the peak of its profitability today, so whatever is being done to products seems to be working out.
I'd love to see a citation for this. I sort of doubt, at the moment, that anyone seriously said "Google is crazy for trying to connect the world's information." The implication is that I find the comparison to be a bit silly.
The self driving car comparison is more accurate but much less informative: we still don't know how it will turn out.