Looking For a Tech Job? Good Luck.

Before I discovered coding, I was lost. When I graduated high school in 2006, my parents urged me to follow the formula that had worked for their generation: get a job with a pension, settle down, retire early. So almost at random, I enrolled in a police foundations program in Ontario, even though I had no interest in that line of work.

After I graduated, I bounced around various customer service gigs for nine years. Soon, I was nearing 30, and felt like the pressure was on to commit to a meaningful career. Then one day in 2019, a friend of mine who works in tech asked if I’d ever considered coding. She told me that companies were handing out high-wage positions to coders with only a few months of bootcamp training. As a teenager, I had borrowed a coding manual from my sister’s boyfriend and built fan sites for bands I liked. But I’d always thought that to code professionally, I’d need a computer science degree, which was out of reach for me financially. 

That conversation convinced me that coding could be a great path for me. At the time, there was no shortage of evidence that it was a surefire path to a profitable future. The number of tech jobs had ballooned by more than one-fifth since 2016, outpacing growth in nearly every other industry. Venture capital fundraising for Canada’s tech sector had hit a record high of over $7.5 billion—a figure that, by 2021, was closing in on $11 billion. From 2018 to 2023, Toronto alone added over 95,000 tech jobs, making it North America’s fourth-biggest tech market behind San Francisco, Seattle and New York City. It felt like everyone and their pet rock knew tech was exploding. 

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Soon after, I found a coding bootcamp offering a deal: students could enrol for one dollar, then pay tuition if and when they landed a job in the field. It sounded too good to be true, but after reading independent reviews from thriving alumni I thought, what have I got to lose? So I wrote the enrolment exam and got started straight away. 

The two-month program was intense—marked by eight-hour days, five days a week in a classroom on Queen Street West. But my classmates and I shared a sense of optimism. We were in the trenches together, crawling through complex JavaScript assignments and building an app every week. For one assignment, I built a Caesar cipher, which is the same encryption technique Julius Caesar reportedly used to send secret military correspondence. I was fascinated with how coding interacts with so many realms—in this case history, conceptual math and language. When I was coding, I was in the zone. It felt like something I could do forever. At the end of the program, the other students and I sat in a circle and shared our thoughts on our experience. Nearly everyone cried. We felt like our lives were about to change. 

In January 2020, I started as a junior developer at a niche investor relations tech company with an office in Hamilton. I was primarily responsible for basic coding and refactoring, which involves rewriting lengthy code to make it more efficient. I’d make minor adjustments to websites and work out small logistical problems, like fixing glitchy interfaces. That job lived up to everything I’d heard about working at a modern tech company. We could take unlimited paid vacation with little to no notice so long as we got our assigned work done. We were encouraged to stop working at 5 p.m. and we were constantly validated for our efforts. I was making $55,000 a year, which was more than I’d ever made in my life. And it was hard not to get a promotion. Within a year I became a team lead and my salary nearly doubled.

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But soon, I started hearing rumblings that the company wanted to go public. At a town hall around spring of 2021, the president announced we’d be launching an IPO. With dollar signs in his eyes, he told us it was his dream to ring the bell at the stock exchange. After that, my colleagues and I felt pressured to work faster through bigger workloads, and we were often reminded that we were a for-profit company with shareholders to please. 

Then came the reckoning. In 2022, inflation reached a 40-year high and the Bank of Canada responded by raising interest rates. Suddenly the market wasn’t so keen on overleveraged, overstaffed tech companies with bloated valuations. The free-flowing venture money that had fuelled hyper-growth dried up. The hiring that had ballooned during the peak of the pandemic turned an aboutface, constricting as fast as it had expanded. 

I was anxious, but not because of the incoming crash or the early rumblings around AI. Even with advancements in the last three years, AI can’t completely replace coders. It’s incapable of the human creativity needed for clever code, and often the code it does write is riddled with problems that a real person needs to fix. My anxiety was more internal: I felt like an imposter. After being with the company for over two years, I still hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of being the new person painfully eager to do well and stay on. As tech shrunk, I worried I had limited my prospects by specializing in the company’s proprietary system, which was quickly losing relevance.

The first real red flag came when three people in sales were let go. But my managers assured me that the company would sink without me. They were happy with my soft skills as a team lead. I was a good mentor to newbies—I had been one so recently, after all—and I was quick to put out fires when complex coding issues arose. But more than that, my team’s work was critical because we had the keys to tons of client information. We engineered the heart of the business’s profit. So I felt secure, momentarily. Then came another round of layoffs. Shortly afterwards, I received a glowing performance review where, once again, my managers doubled down on how crucial my work was. I was on edge, but I trusted them.

About a month later, on a Thursday, I woke up to an early-morning message asking if I could hop on a quick Zoom call. I didn’t think much of it and turned on my camera. In the bottom right of the window, I could see myself in a hoodie, steam rising from the cup of coffee in my hand. My manager, gazing down, and our HR representative were in the other two boxes. My manager started robotically reading a prepared statement and my stomach dropped. I knew I was being fired. I wasn’t told why, just that it had nothing to do with my performance. That day, the company laid off 25 other people from my office.

My severance was generous: three months’ salary with full benefits. It felt like a good time to step back and assess my next move. I applied to jobs casually, but never heard back. That fall, OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public, and its promise to reduce labour costs offered a solution to higher borrowing costs and dwindling venture capital. Tech began mass layoffs and by 2023, over 240,000 tech workers worldwide would be out of a job. It wasn’t just the small startups. Giants like Shopify, Amazon and Meta all slashed staff, admitting they’d grown too fast and had assumed the higher level of demand from the pandemic would be endless. With that layoff news pouring in, it made sense to spend my energy on upskilling and learning more relevant coding programs, like React, a tool that many big companies rely on to build scalable apps. I spent half of each day poking around online, learning what I could. But the other half of the day I spent idling. 

Then those three months evaporated and I filed for employment insurance. Four months turned into five, then turned into six. The longer I was out of the industry, the less capable I felt. My confidence was so low I could barely look at job boards peripherally, let alone send in an application. Not only did finding satisfying work again feel futile, but with my short time in the industry, I felt like I didn’t even deserve to get back in. I didn’t recognize it then, but I had sunk to a dark place. The friends I’d made at bootcamp were struggling, too. We’d see a company hire what seemed like hundreds of employees, only to dump a thousand staff members a few weeks later. It confounded us all. 

A year after being let go, I applied to work in customer service at a small Italian grocer in Toronto. They hired me, and I’ve been there since. I’m grateful to have work, and interacting with customers has helped lift my depression. But I also feel stuck, punted back to the same financial and professional place I was in six years ago.

In the food retail industry, working full-time can mean being on your feet for nine hours a day, from noon to 9 p.m. with just one 30-minute break. Afterwards, there’s next to no time left for recreation, errands or side projects. Not to mention that when you work in hospitality, you give up your weekends. I’ve moved up to supervisor at the grocer, a promotion that came with a small pay raise, but it’s a challenging cycle because making more money means giving up more life—which makes it harder to get back into the industry I trained for.

When the tech company let me go, I had just signed a lease on an apartment in Toronto. Suddenly, I couldn’t afford it on my own, so now I have a roommate. If I were in my early 20s that arrangement might not bother me as much, but I’m getting into my late 30s and it’s hard to have a great dating life without the money to travel or go on expensive date nights. I’m also self-conscious that my day-to-day is uninteresting because many people view food retail as less serious than other professions. I was burned by the false promise of a steady career with sky-high pay, and now when I serve affluent people my age who seem to have it all, it’s hard not to feel like a failure. 

I’d inadvertently picked a brutal time to be starting out in tech. I caught the wave, but then it crashed—and spat me out. I miss the creative satisfaction of coding, the flexibility to work remotely in a comfortable environment and the autonomy I had over my own projects. For people like me, who broke into the industry only a few years ago, the whiplash has been hard to manage. Today, job postings in tech are down about 19 per cent from early 2020. Entry-level titles have taken the brunt of the blow, with openings for junior positions plunging by 25 per cent according to Indeed. And just last month, Amazon announced that it plans to replace as many as 30,000 jobs with AI—the company’s biggest chop yet.

Yet recently I’ve finally found the energy to try again—though this time with a grain of salt, or maybe even the whole shaker. At the advice of a trusted friend in tech, I’m putting together a portfolio to code freelance, in hopes that it will eventually lead to a full-time position. I’m also exploring the possibility of getting into cybersecurity and what’s called “white hat hacking,” a line of work that reduces user vulnerability using the same techniques as malicious hackers. I’m not looking for a lovebombing company culture—rife with emoji-laden Slack messages about how I’m “crushing it.” I’m just hoping that despite the bleak landscape, there’s a second act for people like me.