Toronto Downtown, An Emerging Tech Talent Hub
Over the years, I’ve built engineering teams in Denver, Romania, Berlin, New York and San Francisco, and each location has its own strengths and weaknesses. Technology hubs in New York and San Francisco have world-class concentrations of tech talent, but they are also fiercely competitive markets where top engineers can call their own shots.
I’ve been really pleased with WorkMarket’s Toronto engineering expansion initiative we began there three years ago. The Toronto-Waterloo Corridor has always been on my radar over the years, through Blackberry and the University of Waterloo, and we are seeing an ever-growing ecosystem of successful technology startups emerging there. Thomson Reuters made a large expansion of its Canadian operations with the creation of a new technology center in downtown Toronto and began a trend.
Google has their presence near Waterloo, and the University of Waterloo provides a sizable pipeline of students. Last Oct, Google announced their “Sidewalk Toronto” initiative where they are building a city of the future near Quayside waterfront. There is now massive office building throughout downtown Toronto, including the East Harbour project by First Gulf with space for up to 50,000 workers, a potential Amazon HQ candidate. At this moment, Amazon is already building up near Union Station on Bremner Blvd.
Why downtown Toronto? There are several reasons why it makes sense to expand your software development there:
- Increased engineering talent: Canada has a growing world class engineering talent pool. The University of Waterloo has one of the largest co-op programs, and the University of Toronto has a top engineering program. They are on the same eastern time zone as New York. In recent years, many former Blackberry engineers have transitioned into other sectors and seeded startups. The startup community and ecosystem in Toronto and the Corridor is now vibrant and diverse. Shopify, a leading e-commerce site with offices in Toronto, is pushing the envelope on multiple fronts, making startups in Canada bigger and badder. For example, on its engineering website, the company is sharing its work through open source and blogs on best practices. We’ve also seen a major push in Toronto around startups focused on data science and AI/machine learning. All in all, the number of tech savvy engineers to draw from is growing rapidly. More importantly, there are no language or cultural barriers.
- Easy travel: Travel from the Newark airport to the Billy Bishop airport (downtown Toronto) is 45 minutes, which accommodates frequent face-to-face meetings. Last time I checked, airfare is often under $400 round trip. In our situation where our office is located off Spadina Avenue which is an 8 minute ride from the airport.
- Competitive costs: The Canadian government has long offered a research credit for firms that create intellectual property, and these credits can help offset development costs.
- Modern technology stacks are similar: There is a broad base of common technology knowledge across the U.S. and Canada on using such core capabilities as AWS, Azure, open source stacks, iOS, and Android.
Toronto’s tech scene is rapidly approaching that of San Francisco and New York. If you’re looking to staff or augment a software development project, you’ll want to give it a look. There’s a lot of talent, opportunity, and innovation right across our northern border.
Article is also published at https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/16/look-to-toronto-not-india-for-tech-talent/
James C. Chou is CTO at WorkMarket. He was previously CTO of Shutterstock.
