RIM is not a technology sector. There are plenty of Canadian technology companies working in areas that aren't considered sexy in Silicon Valley. Modern resource industries are highly technical. For example, most of the R&D required to extract crude oil from tar sands was carried out in Canada.
This is most certainly splitting hairs - by technology they clearly meant software. There is a lot of technology involved in just about every other sector, but we don't classify SynCrude as a high-tech company for a lot of reasons.
Canada's software industry is anemic at best, arguably non-existent at worst. You have a few shops working on cool stuff, but the bulk of the code being written in the country is for institutionalized non-software companies. What is made worse are the apologists who will point to the tiny, struggling, barely surviving "cool" shops and insist that everything is fine.
Not to mention even if said cool shops were thriving - and few are -, there aren't nearly enough of them to hire, say, the 5000 workers that RIM is about to let go. As of this writing, StackOverflow lists:
- 31 jobs in Toronto;
- 4 jobs in Montreal;
- 2 jobs in Ottawa;
- 2 jobs in Vancouver.
These cities account for probably more than 60% of the Canadian IT workforce.
Contrast that with:
- 28 jobs in Austin;
- 91 jobs in Seattle;
- 55 jobs in Boston;
- 143 jobs in SF;
- 170 jobs in NYC.
There is something very wrong with this picture, especially when you consider that Canadian universities produce a huge number of CS/CE/SE graduates every year.
Many Vancouver software companies do not post jobs on SO. Most of them do it via recruiters (let's leave the discussion about the positive and negative dealing with recruiters for some other time).
Repeat the same exercise on Monster (for example), where recruiters, Canada or US, do post jobs, and you will find that the disparity is even more pronounced.
I see your point there but I think the situation is a little bit different when compare to Monster.
I was reluctant to go to recruiters at first but once I got to know one or two recruiters with better networks, I definitely see more opportunities that may not advertised front-and-center out there.
Vancouver is in the middle of hiring spike this year and I can assure you that there are quite a few interesting jobs on the market right now.
I know that in your comments below you mention that SO is only one of the places that you're using a data point, but given that the US has roughly 10x the population of Canada, a job offer ratio of approximately 1:12 isn't so bad on per capita basis.
But you are still right in the underlying sense that the US is a big allure for new grads and for many of the RIM workers that will be let go.
The only problem is that now there's going to be a bit more competition down south because thus far this year 50K+ planned global tech sector job cuts were announced (30K HP, 10K Sony, 10K Nokia)[1]. Of the global total (most announced over a 3-year period), it's hard to say how many of those jobs will impact US employees, but it's a fair bet that there will be some expansion in the tech sector talent pool soon if you're looking for applicants.
Most tech companies in Kanata, for example, do not list on SO. If you can write C for embedded devices there's a large number of jobs in Ottawa. I recently left a job doing that in Kanata and turned down 2 job offers before getting hired at Shopify.
"Most tech companies in Kanata, for example, do not list on SO"
I think that is true of most tech companies anywhere. SO was just one point of comparison. The point is there seems to be a lot more jobs in the US in quantity and variety, and I think this disparity paints an unpleasant picture given the number of tech workers that are trained in Canada.
True, but enterprise and edu account for roughly 90% of total R&D in 2011 [1]. One look at the list will show you how much of 'high-tech' R&D was attributed to RIM alone[2].
But what of the Tar Sands though? Looks like the total R&D for Imperial was only 7% of what RIM spent.
