This has changed quite a bit. There are a strangely large number of companies (both startups and a-bit-older-than-startups) doing various large data analytics type things. Also plenty of adtech related startups.
I quite enjoyed Simon Morden's Metrozone trilogy - which has a lot of similarities to Snow Crash and Daemon (main character is essentially a hacker, run-amok AI, cyberpunkish dystopian future...)
Actually, that's another good point. There are a lot of people working remotely here, as it's relatively quick to get to both Seattle and Vancouver (under an hour by float plane, and float planes don't have bullshit security lines). You can even give a little bit of a discount vs NYC or SV wages and come out ahead of what you'd do locally. I did that for a while, and I have a couple of friends doing it now for whom it's working out well. Once again, it's a matter of waiting for the good opportunities - unlike bigger hubs, there isn't the same sophistication in knowing who and how to hire in employers, nor the same raw demand for talent that lets someone walk out the door and be hired before they hit the street.
I'd definitely be interested in some sort of meetup, if such a thing were going to happen...
Also, don't get me started on local angels (both Victoria and Vancouver)... :-(
I agree, there's definitely a problem with salary, and I don't dispute your characterization of it. However, my observation is that you need to be able to wait for the well paid senior positions to come available. If you need the work, you're in the unfortunate position of having to look in the places that can't tell the difference between fresh grads and senior devs. It gets better if you mostly get work via word of mouth or recruiters. There are a few developers that have ended up following me when I've moved jobs because they know I only work for places that pay and have interesting work. Likewise, I recommend them, because I've worked with them before, and I know they're good senior developers who are worth the money.
I've been making noises about organizing some other developer focused thing to make up for how crap viatec is... need to find sufficiently round tuits first.
As for health startups, it has at least one that I know about (and I'm not talking about genologics).
The retirement community aspect has shifted somewhat; downtown is now younger and a bit more vibrant with all the condos that have gone up (and continue to be built). $300k will get you a tiny condo - $500k will get you something you actually like. Houses within walking distance of downtown (north park, which isn't the best neighborhood, but isn't the worst either) go for around $600k. Most young families are buying in Langford or further out where money goes further than that.
Victoria is definitely doing more tech-wise that Campbell River or Courtenay, in that there are more tech companies, more startups, and more tech jobs. As with anywhere outside of a major hub, you're going to have to do a lot of leg work to find those jobs - and to find ones that pay well.
While it's true that salaries are by default depressed, anyone who's a pretty good hustler should be able to at least get within 5% of Vancouver. The real problem is that you're competing with all the kids who get out of UVic, don't want to leave the island, and are willing to work for peanuts.
On the other hand, if you're a high level/senior marketing, sales, or developer, there are opportunities at more reasonable pay levels - assuming you can find a position (it is after all, a relatively small community, and senior spots don't crop up all that often). One of the primary annoyances is that http://www.viatec.ca/ (the local tech community group) is kinda worthless for finding work - or for that matter, for finding talent when you're hiring. My experience is that hiring tends to be by word of mouth or via recruiter. Two of my last three Victoria jobs have been through recruiters, one was through word of mouth, all were reasonably well paid (at least as well as I did in Vancouver).
There are strangely a fair number of startups, mostly in the mobile advertising and sem/seo space - and all the regular caveats about working for startups and startup wages apply as they do anywhere else.
Since I'm a developer, I mostly keep an eye on who's hiring in that space. Amongst non-startups, you might try perforce (I know they were looking for a front end guy, they might not be any more), neverblue (definitely looking to hire a couple of intermediate devs, probably a front end person too if the right one came along), and abe books.
I live and work in Victoria, and have for the past 5 years. I currently work for a company that is hiring, and know of several others that are as well. Booming is, of course, relative, and probably refers to the difficulty everyone has finding talented devs (and wages are starting to rise due to that), rather than a direct comparison to the number of companies or size of the market. It's definitely not comparable to Seattle, or even Vancouver (and certainly not SV).
Wages aren't exactly the greatest, expenses aren't exactly the lowest - and there's a real lack of depth in both talent and places to work. On the other hand, there are plenty of people doing start ups because they don't want to leave - you just have to know where to look.
I wonder how easy it would be to hook this up to dns tunneling software such as http://code.kryo.se/iodine/ in such a way that after the the initial ssh auth step, you would have a useful terminal that would be accessible even behind captive portals and the like?
We are a full-service advertising brokerage that specializes in online customer acquisition and lead generation. We deliver millions of profitable customers to clients from all over the world, including members of the Fortune 1000™.
We’re looking for developers (We have a fulltime position as well as contract work) and a QA person to work on-site in our Victoria office on our advertising, mobile, and tracking platforms. We use a fairly heterogeneous stack: Mostly PHP and Python on the server and the usual suspects on mobile - with zeromq, rabbitmq, postgres, couchdb, and whatever-gets-the-job-done. We expect you to have a solid background with at least one dynamic language (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby) and some experience with the usual grab bag of web/database technologies.
What's the right perl module to use for queue based worker stuff these days? I like rabbitmq, but unless there's something I'm missing, AMQP support in perl seems a little sketchy. Is STOMP the way to go? Or should I just build 0mq workers off mongrel2 and roll my own solution with POE or something? I kinda feel like Perl is falling a little behind in this space, but maybe I'm just not seeing what everyone else is doing.
There are limo services advertised, and a courtesy phone that will reach them in the SFO airport right after the baggage pickup. I used one 3 weeks ago, and it took 5 minutes for my limo to arrive.
If someone has interesting work, and wants to pay me to learn COBOL, then absolutely I will. Actually, I have another startup in the works that probably will require learning COBOL at some point anyway...
Bad legacy code is certainly unpleasant. I'm currently working with a large code base that was mostly written about 10 years ago. It's not even particularly bad code, it's just big, and old, and crufty. But we can refactor that code a bit at a time into something clean and new, using modern perl. And we can do that without having to rewrite the entire thing in one shot. And that's one of the many advantages that being a good perl developer gives you. Another one is that that giant legacy code base still runs on a modern perl binary, because perl is (with a few well documented exceptions) a very very stable language. Most of the big modern perl changes are just modules. And they're backwards compatible with the old stuff too.
I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-)
I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a strength - if you're programming in perl these days, odds are you've stuck with it because you actually like the language, so you're probably pretty good at it. On the other hand, it's not taught in school, so unless folks learn it on their own or on the job, there might be a real lack of new talent coming up the ranks.
As a programmer for hire, I can't complain about the wages. As an entrepreneur, I know where to find the good people, so it's not really a problem for me.
(I would also point out that any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language).
You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right echo chambers, which is probably why my experience differs.