I&#x27;m in iOS dev.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;I could go to some hellish place like NY and live in a cardboard box and up my wage 50% (and work longer hours, with less holidays so less time with my kids).&quot;</i><p>I hear this a lot from Canadian colleagues who stay in Canada, and I dunno, it always irks me a little bit.<p>Increasing your wage doesn&#x27;t necessarily entail longer hours or fewer holidays. It seems like it&#x27;s a popular perception in Canada to imagine all US jobs as some kind of hellish sweatshop where you&#x27;re chained to your desk all day in exchange for more money - but in reality the spread of job quality is the same here as it is in some place like Toronto or Vancouver. You will find the same shitty sweatshop jobs and you will find great jobs - the pay increase seems entirely orthogonal to that. The market rate is simply higher - <i>much</i> higher, across the board.