Low wages hampering Kelowna tech sector

Ask almost any recent tech-industry grad from Kelowna about their first few years in the job market and they will tell you the same thing: they left the city in search of more money.

Most went to Vancouver, others to different large cities or further afield where jobs and money were better. According to many of them, wages in Kelowna’s tech sector just couldn’t compete.

Josh Hoggan was one of those grads. He‘s been in the tech industry for more than a decade, and still remembers being laughed out of his first job interview when he told them how much he expected to make.

Hoggan says the problem still exists for grads today. He pointed out that most of the tech jobs in Kelowna are with small start-ups that usually can’t pay wages to compete with bigger industry players.

Salaries for entry-level positions “don’t get you anywhere near the cost of living” in the city, he says, which is especially difficult for new graduates with heaps of student debt.

Living and working in Kelowna means “you’re scraping by on next to nothing,” he adds.

Many tech industry workers expressed similar sentiments to KelownaNow, but were reluctant to publish their names for fears of jeopardizing their jobs.

Chris Onyett is a co-founder of Roketto, a Kelowna web design company. Although he is more optimistic about the state of the industry in Kelowna today, he admitted that he didn’t want to work here when he first graduated, either.

Onyett cut his teeth in Vancouver, and said he would probably return if he ever gave up running his own company.

“If I decided tomorrow that I didn’t want my own business anymore, I would probably move back to a big city,” he says.

Hoggan believes there is a solution. He says Kelowna needs some big industry players to set up shop here, creating steady, good-paying jobs for skilled workers.

Start-ups are fantastic, he says, but since they can come and go over short periods of time they tend to keep wages low and create more instability in the job market.

“We need a couple of big players in Kelowna to create the groundwork for all the other companies to have a chance,” he said.

Bigger companies generally pay well, and give young grads an opportunity for steady employment while they establish themselves in the industry.

“Bigger companies coming here is a huge thing,” Onyett said. “A lot of people just want a good, safe job.

Dr. Raymon Lawrence, an associate computer science professor of the University of British Columbia in the Okanagan, says that every year the program’s top grads are immediately snapped up by international tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

So although the university’s programs are jam packed, many grads just aren’t staying.

Despite this, things might be starting to get better. Onyett is excited about the future of Kelowna’s tech industry, which he said has started to change in the last two years.

He said he is seeing more skilled workers choosing to stay here, more good work for them, better salaries and excitement among small tech companies for the city’s future.