I can vouch for the 2x from Canada->California, I'm making more than 2x what I did in Canada (Toronto) now. I don't know about the 3x or 4x, maybe sillysaurus was making like $30k in Canada before, or maybe he's just some kind of superstar that gets paid $250k/year.
Health care is generally included on top of salary in the US, so Canadian health care wouldn't be a consideration for engineers working at established companies.
Even significant health costs per month are ignored in a corporate environment in the US, though small startups may be different. For entrepreneurs, health care costs would matter before the company was large enough to have figured out benefits.
Any startup employees\founders willing to comment on how health insurance is generally handled at US startups?
You're probably right at the lower-end of the income spectrum, but any non-joke, non-freelance software development job in the US will include health insurance on top of the quoted salary at little or no cost to the employee.
I have a chronic health condition that needs some fairly expensive drugs and relatively frequent doctor visits and procedures. My total out of pocket healthcare expenses are less than $500 per year.
Except, before the ACA they could refuse to take you on because of "pre-existing conditions". I know several people who did not switch away from jobs they hated because they risked losing health care. And freelancers, even if they commanded high salaries, also had problems getting reasonable insurance.
I'm up-to-date as of 2011, I'm sure things have (and still are) radically changing - but the health insurance situation in the US was a horrible mess until recently - Everything worked fine until the day it didn't, and then you were possibly shut out of healthcare.
HIPAA in 1996 limited the ability of insurance plans to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions. As long as you didn't have a gap of more than 63 days with no insurance coverage, they couldn't deny you coverage.
Silicon Valley companies tend to downgrade you in position for the simple reason of not being from there. That person would get a salary bump, but it'd be to another junior role around $100-120k. The money improves, but the job position degrades.
I found it obnoxious and annoying, and it's one of the reasons I'll probably never move to that cesspool. The idea that I should have 5 years knocked off my career because I came up in New York (which is a far better city than San Francisco, and far less expensive relative to opportunity and urban amenity) is one I just can't accept.
