[brailsafe]

It doesn't really seem like you failed, it just seems like it didn't have a positive result. You appear to have completed what you set out to do, but with nobody hiring, a stagnating economy, and a terrible source of data, it's just confirmation that it's time to pick up a job at McDonald's or something, because things don't look so great out there.

Edit: To clarify, the Job Bank is a deeply unfortunate source of useful leads, as the author concluded, and is what I meant by "terrible source of data". My overall comment is regarding the state of what can vaguely be described as the market for software devs in Canada, but even now trying to get a job in a warehouse or whatever isn't proving fruitful.

[chinchilla2020]

> with nobody hiring, a stagnating economy, and a terrible source of data, it's just confirmation that it's time to pick up a job at McDonald's or something, because things don't look so great out there.

The jobs market is burning hot https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/job-growth-totaled-303000-in....

Tech is oversaturated, but tech is just one industry in the whole economy. People having trouble getting a tech job need to stop acting like their experience reflects that of other industries. Right now, manufacturing will hire pretty much anyone with a pulse.

[brailsafe]

That's a different job market. Canada's unemployment rate just tipped over 6%.

I'd argue that manufacturing is also too broad of a category to be useful as something to mention, and every similar statement of "X industry is basically hiring anyone" rarely ends up being true in a practical way. It always needs to be qualified somehow, and usually by a lack of competition in the physical region of the facilities. That's my impression anyway, I'm sure everyone's experience varies, but people are getting ghosted for all kinds of jobs. Within tech, people often suggest going to work for government or some big corp that's not FAANG as the backup path, but you still need to go through similar hiring gauntlets or live down the street from the office, or in the capital, or meet a lot more of the silly list of requirements up front, or have specific certs, and they still need to be hiring

[pcthrowaway]

Very few job markets in Canada are burning hot right now.

Canada's GDP is like 50% housing (real estate and renting)

[__loam]

It turns out that automating both sides of a fundamentally human interaction didn't work, who knew?

I think the real answer here is that just cold applying for positions is a losing game. Working with recruiters or talking to people internally at the company you want to work for feels like a way better approach right now. Everything I've heard about cold applying right now makes it sounds like it's a million idiots applying to everything with chatgpt and the companies using AI on their end to screen that firehose of bad applications. I get like 5 recruiting emails a week at least and when I was looking near the end of last year I could be pretty picky, so I disagree that the market is completely terrible. It's worse than before but for experienced devs there's still a lot of opportunities.

[brailsafe]

> for experienced devs there's still a lot of opportunities

Meh, maybe, but that's a pretty big and abstract qualification. I'd agree that if there are opportunities, the way to get them is not by cold applying at this point, but whether any of the other options are viable or not depends pretty much on a bunch of stars already having aligned many years earlier, or lying, which I wouldn't fault anyone for atm.

But anecdotally, if a company is hiring, they'll at most have one posted. Recruitment emails have entirely dried up—even the shit jobs, even the in-site jobs, even the really shit jobs at companies that obviously abuse employees—but they're laughably far from an offer anyway, most of them just being a funnel for a HackerRank test as the first step if it even gets that far. To be fair, I guess at this point I should be spending all my time grinding leet code on the off chance I encounter that, but that's not really experience more than it is trivia reps, but probably worth grinding anyway because that's the system.