Happy to break it down
If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants
Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.
~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta
Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).
and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California
Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.
(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)
To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.
Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.
Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.
But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.
Happy to break it down
If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants
Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.
~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta
Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).
and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California
Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.
(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)
To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.
Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.
Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.
But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.
Happy to break it down
If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants
Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.
~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta
Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).
and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California
Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.
(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)
To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.
Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.
Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.
But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.
Canadians just need to learn to negotiate better.
If a remote us company is looking for engineering talent, then their geographic pay bands are negotiable and in most cases removable.
For example if they just spent $500k sourcing 1000 potential candidates from across the US/Canada, and youre the 1 to receive the offer. Then they have the budget and incentive to pay you a US salary.
Speaking from plenty of experience.
BMO is absolutely terrible. My biggest business regret in the last 6 years.
I finally transferred everything to @venncanada and a local credit union (for cashing cheques).
Been exponentially happier since.
But @Wealthsimple just added business chequing (with cheque cashing) and credit cards. Looking at it now. Likely will move over since they offer corp investing on top.
Super excited to be speaking at Replay 2026, @temporalio conference.
I'll be talking about our experience extracting Output[.]ai — our open source framework that helps developers new to AI ship reliable, scalable agents.
#Replay2026#TemporalIO#DurableExecution
the "agent harness" is the reason we built https://t.co/DLreTw8sP8 enabling teams to build workflows to production together with code agents. filesystem-first memory, reusable skills, swap any model, no saas fragmentation. everything easy to access to you and your agent.
After over a year of work we're open-sourcing our AI infra:
It's called Output [dot] ai.
- How do you work with proj. packed with prompts?
- How do you track cost?
- How do you test non-deterministic code?
- How do you create datasets from prod data?
👇
Best I’ve found is dangerously skip.
I started by running it on a fresh laptop with little credentials.
Got comfortable. Started risking it on a personal laptop.
Sometimes if I’m forking an unfamiliar project I’ll isolate it in a docker container.
Currently moving my workflow to cloud vms so I can hopefully continue this behaviour unscathed.
At 1703 we migrated a production SaaS from Python/React microservices to Elixir Phoenix monolith
3 apps → 1.
4 languages → 1.
5 frameworks → 1.
Thread with quick numbers breakdown: