Ten years ago I moved from Canada to the US.

I was 2 years out of college, and the tiny local software consultancy I worked for went out of business after our clients refused to pay their invoices. (My hometown is notoriously stingy). My two friends/coworkers both took that opportunity to move away, one to Ottawa and one to NYC.

At the same time, I had a friend on IRC who worked for Mozilla and she sold me on moving to the Bay Area. I have since come to believe that she sold me a bill of goods, but at the time she made it sound like an amazing place to live.

I didn't have very many social ties back home, and I was too naieve to have any understanding of the costs and difficulty of going to a different country (even one so similar to my home). So moving seemed like not a big deal. Worst case, I can just move back. If I knew how stressful it would be, I probably wouldn't have done it. But I'm glad I did.

As for how I did it? Well, I came on a TN visa, which is a NAFTA thing that is very easy to get and entitles you to work at a specific employer for a period of up to 3 years. So before I could move, I needed to find a job. I started cold-applying to Rails jobs posted here on HN as well as on a bunch of other job boards. I interviewed at three or four other places (each time getting flown out to SF for the process) before finding a job that wanted me, and that I wanted. As for timelines, I started applying to job postings in mid February, and I moved at the start of May

Finding a new job was very easy, all things considered. Based on what I hear from junior programmer friends, it's much harder now. I'm not sure why it is. I'm not sure if things have changed, or if I had some kind of special situation that made people notice me.

Overall, I absolutely hated living in the Bay Area, for reasons I'm sure have been discussed by a billion people on HN already. I moved to Texas in 2018 and it's much more my speed here. But as for the US vs Canada as a whole? If I never set foot in Canada ever again (and that's looking more and more like a reality every day), I'm fine with that. As far as countries go, Canada is pretty good. There are certainly worse places you could go. But here's a scattershot list of some things that stick out to me when I think about my different experiences

* I make way, way more money in the US, and pay way, way less in taxes. The money goes farther (everything in Canada is expensive compared to here). Economically, I am so much better off. For every conceivable consumer good, there are 3x as many choices here vs there. And the one that surprises people: my healthcare is actually cheaper in the US (if you compare the premiums that I _and my employer_ pay, vs the extra taxes I would pay back home).

* I appreciate American culture more. I like that people aren't afraid to take risks here. I like shooting guns. I like that so much of the cutting edge of science and technology is here. One thing I noticed in Canada (maybe it has since changed) is that, since they don't have nearly the talent pool that the US does, everything in tech just felt like a constant game of catch-up.

* There's so much more to see and do here. Canada is like a string of cities, each surrounded by five hundred miles of nothing. It's incredibly beautiful nothing, and I'd like to see it again some day, but it is what it is. In the US, I can hop on a plane and go to any kind of geography within 3 or 4 hours (at ~1/3 the cost of a Canadian flight). I can see artists who would never come to where I grew up. I can see cities that are meaningfully different from each other and explore all kinds of historical places.

* The obvious contentious current cultural and political things. Leaving this one vague because I am not trying to start an argument and don't want this to devolve into a flame thread