Victoria is one of those scenes that is very bimodal. You have almost two entirely different communities that don't often interact. If you can make the jump out of the larger group of companies that are playing at lower stakes you can do pretty well.
That being said, the opportunities are limited, and I'm not surprised that you found more success elsewhere.
I live in Victoria which is one of the tech hubs in Canada, although definitely one of the smaller ones. The cost to living vs salary is not in a great spot right now but it's definitely doable.
If you are single or don't have any kids I think it is a lot more reasonable -- it's quite difficult to find housing for larger families. Even so, if you are capable of getting a good job working remote for a company it is possible to make it work.
I will say that Canada is in a bit of a flux right now. We are having an affordability crisis, and the cost of everything is going up.
It's not impossible to make a good life in Canada, but I think it's becoming increasing difficult and definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
With all the stats available I wonder if it would be possible to show which zone the ball went into.
I did a little bit of work on pitch prediction and we were able to get a pretty good result predicting which zone the ball would go into. I think we were around 36% accurate with a specific pitcher. I built a realtime predictor on live games which was pretty fun. Wish I had know about this.
I think the surprising thing is that you can learn how to do it.
As for that, it depends on your what your social circle looks like. I learned how to cook a couple great meals and how to make a couple fancy cocktails. I invited a few friends over that told my other friends. I slowly integrated different people from different areas of my life and now I'm that guy that throws fun cocktail parties.
It's not the same sort of social status as driving a fancy care, but it has increase my social status amongst people I actually care about.
If my friends have more friends than me, do their friends have more friends than them? And if I'm my friend's friend, am I not included in their friends that have more friends?
As someone that struggled with envy as a kid, this story spoke to me. It made me think twice about trying to tear people down that I thought were hogging the spotlight.
Although, I'm sure there were people in my class that identified with Harrison and thought that everyone else was holding them back.
> I work on a product which just clones other similar products with a slightly better price point, so it’s hard to really care about the goal, but it would be nice to shift that mentality slightly.
Building something that has already been built at a better price point can be an interesting challenge. Obviously there's only so much control you have over the project, but learning how to deliver solid software on a budget is a super valuable skill. If you want to shift your mentality I would suggest that you approach it as it's own learning process.