BC Tech Workers Facing Grim Job Market

Isaac Phan Nay,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

For software engineer Amy Tang, landing a job was no small feat. She remembers on several occasions progressing through four or five rounds of rigorous interviews for a single position.

“I get invested in these companies I apply for, they seem really cool, and then you can see yourself working there,” she said. “Then you don’t get the job, and then you just crash down. It’s so sad.”

Still, she persevered. Tang made sure her skills were up to date using online practice problems, built her personal portfolio and kept on applying.

“It’s so draining,” Tang said. “It’s like an emotional roller-coaster… but you do it over and over and over again until you get offers that you’re happy with.”

Tang is one of thousands of Canadian tech workers riding the roller-coaster. Reddit is littered with first-hand accounts of software engineers tracking hundreds of applications in flow charts to land a single job and memes highlighting coders’ despair.

But according to Tang, the high barrier to entry has an important purpose.

“[Employers] have to make it hard,” Tang said. “They don’t just accept anyone — they can’t, because they have thousands of applicants.”

In the tech industry, it’s tough to get a job application noticed, and gruelling interview processes are the standard. Some applicants and industry experts say the rigorous process is a necessary evil for a highly competitive and innovative industry.

Meanwhile, data shows that a flood of early-career tech workers are competing for jobs in a market where the pace of new openings has slowed.

The Canadian tech industry has boomed over the past decade. Statistics Canada employment data obtained by The Tyee shows employment in software engineering has risen since 2013 with a steep jump in 2020.

Stephanie Hollingshead, CEO of Canadian tech human resources group Tech and People Network, said that when interest rates were low at the turn of the decade, companies rushed to hire people.

“It was pretty crazy,” she said. “There was so much capital flowing in and companies were growing, growing, growing.”

But in 2022, the Bank of Canada and other world financial institutions started to hike interest rates.

The hiring rush petered out. While Statistics Canada’s employment data ends in 2023, numbers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that year, fewer software development job postings in Canada appeared on Indeed, a global job search/recruitment website.

At the same time, tech companies started downsizing — especially in North America. According to the tech layoff tracking website Layoffs.fyi, at least 264,220 workers were laid off from tech companies globally in 2023. Of those, 4,656 were laid off from Canadian companies and 180,001 were from U.S. companies.

The market was flooded with out-of-work developers and engineers looking for a slowing number of jobs in tech.

“There’s more supply of talent now, particularly at a more junior level,” Hollingshead said, adding that senior staff with more specialized skills are still in demand. “But for more common jobs, the demand eased off a bit.”

But Hollingshead said tech companies will continue to grow and hire.

“I still think it’s a good job market,” she said. “It’s just not a phenomenal job market at the moment, unless you have key specific skills for certain sectors, like clean tech.”

Girish Chandra Ananthanarayana, a computer science co-op co-ordinator at the University of British Columbia, helps students and early-career applicants break into the job market.

He said developers at the start of their careers can expect, on average, to apply for about 50 jobs to secure one interview.

But the effort doesn’t end there. He said anyone looking to work in tech should expect to perform unpaid assessments that test their skills.

Automated tests are often sent to applicants when they submit a resumé, said Ananthanarayana. He added applicants who are selected to continue can usually expect a one-hour technical interview, in which an evaluator watches them solve a coding problem.

“The intention of the programming question is to see your problem-solving skills, your communication skills and your ability to work in a team,” he said.

While the rest of the process differs from company to company, Ananthanarayana said it could include further assessments or more traditional interviews.

As innovation continues, tech industry standards are constantly changing — and employers need to know new hires have kept their skills up to date, he said.

“The frame or the boundaries of the skill set keep shifting,” he said. “You need to continuously upgrade yourself.”

Ananthanarayana said four years ago coders could get hired by demonstrating they could code with React or TypeScript, which expand the use of the JavaScript language.

Now, developers often need to demonstrate capability with machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Developers often use online platforms like LeetCode to keep their skills sharp and prepare for technical assessments, he said.

Back at the Tech and People Network, Holllingshead said tech interviews are often intensive because the stakes are high for employers. She said salaries are the largest operating cost for many tech companies, which in turn need to innovate quickly to turn a profit.

“It’s what these people are producing from their brains and how they’re working together that’s impacting company success,” she said. “Innovation is critical; getting the right people is often seen as incredibly important. So we tend to see very rigorous processes.”

She added not all tech companies have multiple-round intensive interviews.

Still, the intense process is taking its toll on early-career developers. Since graduating from UBC last year, Ken Johnson has been on the hunt for a job.

Johnson has experience from internships and is building a portfolio of personal projects. So far, he estimates he’s applied to about 100 jobs and landed seven interviews — but he’s still searching.

“I go through periods where I feel really motivated and I get a lot of work done,” he said. “It’s hard to keep that motivation up when you’re just constantly receiving rejections, but then eventually you get back to applying.”

He recalls making it to the first round of interviews for a commercial software company and being asked to complete an unpaid coding project.

“It was pretty much like a full day’s worth of work,” he said. “It definitely didn’t feel great putting in all that effort and then not even hearing back from them.”

Still, Johnson said he knows the whole process is just industry standard.

“Everyone is going through this, and only a fraction of them do move on, so there’s a lot of people that have put in this time and work and didn’t really get anything for it,” he said.

He’s resolved to keep up the search.

Meanwhile, software engineer Tang said the gruelling job hunt has paid off. She said she enjoys her job in tech and the compensation that comes with it.

“I would rather put in so much work during the interview process to get a job that pays me so well and offers so much flexibility,” she said. “It is worth it.”

Isaac Phan Nay,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Tyee