As some companies are (finally) starting to realize, there are incredibly talented people all over the world, who are not within 1.5 hours of your office. Allowing them to work remotely opens your company up to a much higher caliber of talent for the same, if not lower, cost. The tools are out there now and they work well. I have a distributed team of developers for my small consulting company, and I feel no pressure to open an office any time soon.
EDIT: Why was this post flagged? Comments now disabled?
To me, it seems pretty obvious that the move to SF is more about image than about whom they can hire.
Expanding into the US is a great move, and creating a US office to support that makes perfect sense. Moving the actual HQ to the US seems more questionable. And getting rid of two thirds of their employees when they are still ramping up sounds just plain crazy.
I think the smarter move would have been to create a US office and locate it close to either customers (What is the main US center for the construction business, anyway?) or capital (meaning the Bay Area). But retain the office in Toronto and the current staff. They could then choose to hire additional staff in either the US or Canada, whichever made more sense. For ordinary talent hiring in Canada, even in Toronto, would be significantly cheaper.
No, it isn't
But they're probably looking for "the perfect candidate" and the one that thinks and does things exactly as they expect
They won't find it in SF as well
The person they want already exists in SF, because their perfect candidate hits the bullet point 'exists in San Francisco or Silicon Valley.'
As long as everyone continues to believe California is some sort of special, magical place, this will happen. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Everyone goes to California to work at the 'best' places, the 'best' places go to California to get the 'best' people.
It's amazing how many of these 'best' places are run by micromanagers who can not deal with remote workers. So to work at the 'best' places, the 'best' people all have to cram into one physical place to make web apps.
I think you're running into the comment-cooldown feature. The reply button doesn't appear until a comment has been live for a couple of minutes. I'm not a big fan of the feature, it leads a lot of people to think they're being messed with by the moderators.
But please don't take HN threads even further off-topic by editing your comment to complain about this kind of thing. The way to get an answer, as the guidelines explicitly say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is to email hn@ycombinator.com.
It is when it comes to the enforcement of non-competes. True for the US in general, and a few minutes with Google makes it look like they're not well favored by Canadian courts, which prefer non-solicitation provisions, but non-competes still can be enforceable, and I can speak from harsh experience outside of California that they have a chilling effect without you ever stepping into a courtroom. Killed two neat pieces of/concepts of technology as well.
Non-solicitation can also get nasty, when it includes your former co-workers, and I've gotten the impression that they're also not very enforceable in California, I recall a court case where a salesman was able to take a customer list, which is considered to be a gold standard of enforceability in e.g. Virginia.
Massachusetts has finally started to realize this is crippling them, but the last time I checked wasn't able to muster the political will to make the change. Other locations that say they want to be the next Silicon Valley ... nope, they're not willing to give this up at all.
(also, hey Keith :))
The saving grace is this: I imagine the counterintuitive first step of continuing to bolster Toronto's tech scene is actually efflux of talent towards the Bay Area. The few who do "strike oil" in SV are more likely to direct some of that capital back home, make bigger bets, and mentor entrepreneurs there.
Though you're right - the cold did drive me away.
Weather preferences aside, an entry-level SV salary could buy a pretty great quality of life in Toronto vs. comfortably scraping by in the valley.
By the way by my count it was closer to 90 people laid off, so they are depressing these numbers.
I posted below, but the company I work for is hiring in Toronto and the pay is pretty good for this city.
What do you think the company should do? It's a company not a person who left their spouse when they got cancer. They are doing what they feel they should do in order to thrive and survive.
Now you can argue that you think they are wrong, that is that they don't need to move. But then again you won't suffer the downside of the wrong decision. They will. Companies do what companies have to do in order to grow the business based on how they interpret the facts. That is what joist has done.
Take all their red staplers.
However, I find it particularly reprehensible when companies make the move. For them, it's counter-intuitive: they have access to a huge pool of talent, both experienced devs and the vast armies of grads from UofT, UW and others. Furthermore, they're getting this talent at dirt cheap rates, since the Canadian peso is awful at the moment and salaries are significantly lower here than those in SV and the wider US.
Their expenses go up because they have to pay in USD (instant 25% hit in purchasing power), and they get thrown into the rat race of competing for talent in SV. I really wonder what goes through the mind of some of these moronic execs when they make moves like this.
All of this to say it typically doesn't end well for the company unless this is what they're planning on.
They will have a hard time to find new people. Especially seniors. They wont leave their good, stable jobs for an employer like that.
My username, but at my company's name, dot-com. Happy to chat by email, but I'll link you to our jobs site: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?location%5B%5D=toronto-can...
On-call can be good or bad, but if you're a manager and your team's on-call is awful then soon all the developers move to other teams (it's pretty easy to transfer around in this company). Upper managers know this fact, and push their managers to improve this. My current team, I have never been paged outside of work hours since I joined 6 months ago.
In terms of working hours, when I first joined I'd let myself work crazy hours and my work-life balance was unhealthy. I soon realized that A: I didn't need to do this to get my job done and B: this was killing me. I work 9-5 now, plus delta (get in at 10, work to 6, get in at 8:30, maybe leave at 4:30). On occasion, I'll put in a crazy night or something to get a big project done but I take the hours back on another day to make up the difference.
If I was in Seattle, I'd be doing the same thing. I'd make a little bit more money and I'd have better beer available.
I feel sorry for the guy literally working there less then a day and getting the boot.
Shows some really serious problems in management. Who the hell hires people when they know very well they won't stay and make the whole staff redundant. Well, except for friends and family of course. Either it was a lack of communication between management and HR, or they just really didn't give a flying f*ck.
Another grim story about startup life. Not everything that has four legs is a unicorn apparently.
When I was hired by Google, I lived in Chicago. They wanted me to relocate to NYC because there weren't any open positions in Chicago at the time. Within a week of joining I got an email sent to all engineers in NYC asking if anyone wanted to move to Chicago. SIGH.
Oh well, it's good to see the world.
I don't think HR was given any heads up. I imagine management wanted to keep everything business as usual until the last moment.
In what bizarro world is the head of HR not a part of management?
What's always interesting is that every startup is building a world class team with some of the best developers in the world. Surely every startup can't hire the best because the best is finite, otherwise they'd be hiring the average.
If a company which does something in the diy space wants the best of the best then who is actually developing the languages and tooling? If the best developers are helping my tiler to invoice me then who is working machine learning, software to cure cancer, language design, software to control space travel, etc?
We can't all be the best, and sometimes you've gotta think. I help people in the construction industry, I'm not Google, and in fact it's irresponsible of me to try and hire the best people because they're going to do so much more for society working somewhere else.
Here I get a sense of the same story. There is no way it's difficult to hire talent in Toronto, which consistently ranks as one of the most desirable cities in the world. A simple Google search also will produce hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about how the Canadian immigration system is a breeze compared to the US's. Thus I believe this executive team is the same as my own - determined to be 'San Francisco startup CEO', and damned the cost.
By the way, my company's technology fell behind its competitors' (perhaps because of the loss of talent?) and was sold off to a conglomerate ~5 years later, at the same valuation as it had pre-relocation. The CEO had departed the company by then.
Half the team were employees in every legal definition of what makes an employee (they deducted and punished "independent contractors" which you can only do with employees" - as the case was with Uber and they settled) but were categorized as "Independent Contractors" until April, they were forced to sign new contracts saying they employees but were under "probation" for another 3 months, so until the end of June. They planned this from the beginning, so they didn't have to have a lawsuit when they did this and say "hey you signed a contract" .... forced signed, they changed the pay structure in May without a change in contract either. These employees only got 2 weeks, despite being a week and a half away from passing probation.
Does anyone know if this is true, because this is really poor behavior.
This is a standard mantra of startup lore, but if I put on my nitpicking hat, is it strictly true?
I mean we're not talking about the Manhattan Project here.
Plus it's not as though there isn't intensely fierce competition for talent in the valley. Just because a lot of talented people are there, doesn't mean you'll get to hire them. The "best talent in the world" is already bid up to high levels by those few companies in the Bay Area who are straddling rivers of gold.
Where I work, we have offices all over the world, including one here in NYC and another in Toronto. Because of the timezone alignment and relatively short travel times, we're now experimenting with more and more remote pairing to share projects between the two offices.
In Joist's position I might have considered opening an NYC office instead. It's not as though this city lacks for talent either and if they feel like paying a lot for it, the finance folks have kindly bid up top performers for them. They can get all the difficulties of hiring in the valley, but much closer to home.
They should have an answer, and it needs to be a good one.
I used to detest it. I left no shortage of smartarse remarks about infinite limits in a finite world.
In fact nobody really liked that question and it was eventually removed in favour of variations on the core question: do you want to work with this person?
If they were willing to pay silicon-valley level salaries in Toronto, they would have no trouble getting senior talent.
But they will be forced to pay silicon-valley level salaries in San Francisco anyways.
A 2-site center with good right people and good workflows (and established, in this case) brings compounded gains. A 90 people company is well above the border-line in establishing dual-site offices.
So why didn't they allow people to remote from Toronto?
It seems like they are a company you can't trust (from what I read in the comment section in that link)
It's either this, or a person hasn't had enough experience yet to know this, and so they still have bright-eyed optimism that this one company is the one that's going to elevate their career, treat them in a minimally acceptable manner, etc., and you can bet the recruiting staff is banking on finding these people. It's very depressing.
http://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/waterloo/
https://www.google.com/about/careers/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=f...
(Search above includes both Tornoto and Waterloo, but Waterloo is the main engineering office in the area.)
Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business.
OK...
It may be that the decision to hire new people a week earlier was out of optimism that moving to the bay area was not going to be necessary.
Clearly he doesn't, otherwise he wouldn't be doing shady stuff like having the company continue to hire people who have to relocate, only to lay them off a week later.
"Bottom line, we need freer trade to make international boundaries irrelevant to business."
That isn't the problem here.
Also, it's a bit of a cliche that you need the best people to be successful. Organisation is far more important. That other cliche that the team is more than the sum of its parts is far more true.
I moved abroad with a very small team a few years ago. It totally broke the culture. People went on intellectual holiday, and haven't recovered. We also became insanely insular, not getting any real inputs from other financial industry insiders.
If you are a company that NEEDS high growth to be sustainable in the long term (Uber, Google's ML products for example), then SF is your place. Capital to fund your growth flows like the Niagara. If you are a company that is serving other startups, SF is also great for that.
However, if your company is solving an interesting technical/scientific problem or is a niche industry product or if you are not affected by high/low growth or easy capital, then the "value" engineering talent in Toronto/Waterloo is perfect (see: Geoffrey Hinton's NN group at UToronto). Keep grinding, you'll win in the long run.
Joist probably should've made this call earlier on. No idea why they waited this long.
P.S: Most smart advice in Waterloo and Toronto will tell you this exact same thing.
Regardless, I don't believe these moves are rational. If you're the CEO, you're giving up close proximity to a lot of cheap talent, cheaper offices, cheaper cost of living etc. Sure, you can hire new engineers but you're gonna be paying a whole lot more money + 25% for the exchange rate to make them do so. Joist was paying engineers up to 130k CAD in Toronto[1], which ends up being around 100k USD. You're not gonna be attracting the best and brightest talent with 100k USD when Google is around the corner giving them 130k USD + 25k signing bonus and stock options. You're gonna have to pay at least 130k USD (=165k CAD) plus the signing bonuses and equity that are necessary to attract talent in SV. We're still not talking about how much more an office costs in SV, how much more of your employee's salary is going towards comically overpriced housing etc.
Let's dispense with the idea that moving to SV is some sort of rational or genius executive decision: does it really make sense to fire 2/3 of your staff, move everything to SV, and rehire 60 people in an expensive city for far higher rates?
[0] - http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/EIU_BestCities.pdf [1] - https://angel.co/joist/jobs/112984-data-warehouse-engineer?u...
It's still a shitty way to treat people, but I can see why companies still want to be in the valley. I just wish we could attract more investors to Toronto. There are a lot of super-psyched tech and design folk in this city.
On the flip side, the SF VCs don't like investing outside their local sandbox.
This is the fault of both nations. The frictions are imposed by elected officials that limit the freedom of people to cross the border to work, dictate how taxes are paid, etc.
This also applies to investors, as investors must deal with the regulatory regime in the company's location.
I'd say things like this reflect a big failure of both the US and Canadian governments to make the borders transparent for business. All the moving expenses, severance packages, wasted training, visa fees, etc. etc. is all a total economic loss.
The people who suffer are those on the margin who get laid off or who can't afford lawyers to do immigration paperwork, or who don't quite meet the standards that bureaucrats outlined for a work visa.
Economic freedom is just as important, just as relevant to people's lives and futures as the other freedoms we value.
That might have something to do with it. If none of the good people are willing to stay for reasonable rates, companies may have trouble finding people regardless. That can reduce the costs of moving to SV.
For example: if the people you'd want to hire are comparing your offer against a SV salary, you may need to pay SV salaries anyway. But you'll still lose out on people who also like the job density of SV, or the weather, or that their friends have moved.
You interview, you get the offer, and the lawyers at the company apply for the visa for you.
There are some exception cases where an open-ended visa is possible, but this is uncommon - but if you're famous in the industry you may qualify.
In other cases, the work status conversation is an important part of hiring and negotiation.
Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them.
Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
Disclosure: UW Comp Eng '98 grad, still in Canada.
Maybe your business should give reason for why it should exist, and why anyone should care about it first.
This particular news about Joist is just confusing - it looks like they've laid off a huge portion of their staff, with no replacements on the immediate horizon. Doesn't this mean that the business has effectively ground to a halt while they re-hire in SV?
It sounds less like a move and more like a reboot.
It's not hard to hire talent in Toronto if you're willing to pay full price.
In my experience, a lot of startups will try to use the lure of risky options/equity/bonus promises with the occasional signing bonus in exchange for a "startup discount" on the base salary.
Combine high living expenses of Toronto with the fact that there are so many large companies in Toronto offering stable jobs, your talent pool shrinks to those people who can or are willing to take on the risk of working for a startup.
> "Usually those that struggled were just weak engineers to begin with"
just seems like an awful thing to say that is almost certainly untrue.
Full disclosure: I spent 2 years at Amazon and knew many extremely strong engineers who struggled, as well as some who had great experiences.
"Do half of you think you're dumber than this guy?"
It's a great question.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Even foreign students who have no intention of remaining in Canada after university are still adding value.
Why? Because when they go abroad and do good work, they maintain and improve the image of UW. There's a reason it became a world class school, and you can think of former students doing work abroad as sort of like advertising.
Besides, foreign students pay more. Their tuition is not nearly as cheap as that of domestic students.
> Interestingly, some also come back later in life to enjoy subsidized health care to which they've also never contributed.
This is the case in many countries on earth which engage in socialism.
> I wonder if there's a way to structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt that you can pay off by either remaining employed in Canada, or in cash if you decide to leave.
That would suck, quite frankly. I'm a Canadian who moved abroad after university because I wanted to gain some perspective and see more of the world.
I'm not a resident of Canada currently, so you're saying I should be saddled with additional debt because I left Canada without contributing to the economy?
Why shouldn't education be a right? I had to pay for my education, as I assume you did. Yes, it was subsidized by tax payer money, but in the end I spent ~$35,000 CAD (total) on tuition for my B.Eng.
I had to work summers and internships to pay for my tuition, and housing expenses when I was in university.
Will I return to Canada? I don't know, maybe. I'm still having a blast working abroad, and I'm still in my 20s, so who knows what will happen.
What I can say though, is I'm really glad that Canada didn't charge me an additional tax for going abroad after my education. If I had any kind of significant debt, I wouldn't have been able to afford to move to Europe and look for work.
(I am not a UW grad)
Disclosure: UW Tron Eng 2010, still in Waterloo.
This sort of agreement definitely does exist, though. My sister in law went to med school under one requiring her to work a number of years in rural parts of the state after residency.
> structure post-secondary education subsidies as a sort of debt
That's called a student loan.
The US government does exactly this in the form of "scholarships" where you're essentially indentured to the government for X years after graduating.
However, hiring people and relocating them 1 week before said move was decided would just be incompetent.
A decision like this isn't sudden. It's the difference between trying to work things out with your wife, talking through your differences and eventually deciding it won't work, vs leaving her without warning and taking the dog and bank account.
I agree with you that it's a business and they are always doing what's in their best interest which they have every right to do. I think even with that in mind, this could have been handled a bit differently to avoid really sticking it to some people.