Although I agree somewhat, you're doing something wrong. I live there too, my starting salary right out of school with almost no "professional" programming experience was around 70k and it was with languages I had never touched - so don't over emphasis the language. I know plenty of people making close to 100k, those jobs may be limited but they are there for good programmers. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of shitty programming jobs in Ontario, mostly because programmers are hired by non tech firms that have some tech side to be code monkeys. I basically rejected a handful of lower salary jobs right out of schools or jobs where interviewers where asking extremely language specific questions (I had an interview where a guy kept asking me syntax based questions in JS, when I made it abundantly clear I did not know JS, and this went on for 45 mins of me guessing syntax...) until I found a job that had decent pay (a little under 70k - this was still depressing as most my friends had 95k+ salary in SF) and interesting work; but left a year later because the salary wasn't competitive with the rest of the world, bonuses were crap and there was little room for growth. The best advice I can give you is work on personal projects and don't use your co workers salary as bases of average range, because you will run into the situation where dev x whose been at the company for 30 years is only making 30k more and they use that as a basis to justify your salary. I know people that were working at my first job with almost 10 years more experience then me making 10-15k more then me, and there is a reason why they would have had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere; A lot of Canadian companies will have you sign contracts that anything you invent(which includes any personal projects) in your own time will belong to the company unless you get explicit permission from their over paranoid lawyers, this process takes about 2-3 weeks and most good hackers stop hacking and fall for daily routine work, 9-5. Although it protects the company for minor legalities it completely destroys the hacking culture (why do you think RIM failed to innovate?). So although they have thousands of hours worth of experience its in closed system, and redundant. Finally, be open to moving, 95% of my friends have taken jobs in SF or NY, because they got tired of bs like this.tl;dr hack on your free time, be open to moving, be so good they can't ignore you.
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