“Double-edged sword.” That’s the common phrase I heard from people in the Vancouver tech community when we talked about how U.S. tech firms are increasingly setting up engineering outposts in the city. As I reported in this week’s magazine, U.S. tech firms that include Amazon and Microsoft are turning to Vancouver as a workaround for the stateside talent wars. The city is close to Seattle and San Francisco, has several universities with strong tech programs, and benefits from Canada’s less-stringent immigration policies.
The pluses for Vancouver is obvious: This flattering recognition of the city’s tech talent has already raised wages for developers and could potentially attract both venture funding (which has been light so far) and programmers from across Canada and around the world. The risk is that the foreign interest could be fleeting—vulnerable to economic reversals or capable of vacuuming talent for relocation in the Bay Area, once engineers get U.S. visas. “Unless their headquarters are here, it doesn’t count,” Boris Mann, founder of the Vancouver-based angel investment firm Full Stack, bluntly puts it.
