I am a software developer for 3 years with experience with .NET development. I got laid off 3 months ago from my small company of 30 people after my company losing the big tech contract and reducing workforce to focus on financial side of fintech industry. I am applying to jobs ever since with the hopes of getting higher pay since my company used to pay me 60k which is very low in Montreal, and whenever I go to interview I would get small inefficient companies trying to lowball me lower than what I used to get as dev it is so underwhelming. I also have an ethnic asian name which I think makes everything worse for applying to jobs. I see people here claiming they get 85k as 2 yoe developer and I get overwhelmed and feel like I picked wrong industry in Montreal. Do people lie in Reddit about their salaries or am I getting screwed by some circumstances uncontrollable by me. I am a fine developer if you check my resume too.
Have you looked on linkedin? I seem to see a lot of .NET posting for higher than 60k.
I did they repost the same jobs or ghost jobs that goes nowhere. I don’t get callback unless I apply to every job.
I’m having the opposite problem, my background is with Oracle (pl/sql,forms,reports, APEX) and most job offers I get are for junior/intermediate, but I’m a senior dev. And being in Quebec City, most jobs are government contracts, so lowest bidders. So getting a decent pay is rough, but I did get lucky.
More like they want senior devs at junior prices.
Pretty much, yeah
I don’t know how things are in Montreal but here in the GTA, we let go of a couple of people in Q4 of last year and they were rehired within a couple of months. They were embedded developers, working with C++ and Java/Android. One went into a full stack web development role. On one hand it could be a matter of skill set. .NET isn’t exactly the most popular platform at the moment. On the other, “tech” really did feel quite bubbly over the last decade. Whenever a huge chunk of students decide to go to this one field (used to be business administration/management) you know job prospects will get tough eventually. Employers become more picky towards exact skill set, degree, experience, etc.
You mention small companies, have you tried large ones? The Big Five for example take a lot of developers.
Perhaps your resume is a bit thin. If for example it’s got a degree and one section of .NET in it.
In any case, the standard fields of web/full-stack, Android, iOS, DevOps should have the most openings.
Speaking of your title question, whether software development is no longer a viable career in Canada? Almost certainly not. There’s little reason for that to be the case. We’re still significantly cheaper for US corpos so if anything, I’d expect those to lose US workers and hire Canadians. I expect the Canadian tech labor market to be affected by global events. Overall expansion/contraction. Displacement from AI in the future. Personally I hope the field can get organized in order to make such labor shocks less sharp and less frequent and have some say in how AI is deployed in the industry.
No offense but I have 3 years of C# knowledge which should be transferable to C++ since they are from same framework. I don’t know why I don’t get calls from them either.
Uh oh
No offense but if you think that C# transfers to C++ that could explain part of your problem. If you came to me for a C++ role I’m hiring and you said this, that would be enough for me to know you don’t know C++ and I wouldn’t want to let you anywhere near my codebase.
I don’t know why I don’t get calls from them either.
If they’re anything like the company I worked for, they’ll be getting hundreds of applications for any opening they post.
It becomes a numbers game, you probably need to apply to a ton of places to beat the HR filter odds and get your resume to someone who can evaluate your technical ability.
C# and C++ are very different languages, as C++ expects you to handle memory management while C# has a garbage collector. Just because Microsoft has their own version (Visual C++) does not mean that much of that knowledge is transferrable.
I think your biggest challenge is that you only have 3 years of experience. When tech was encroaching into people’s lives (desktop computers, smartphones, social media, video games) more demand for tech jobs was created than could be filled. Thus you’d hear stories of new graduates getting jobs easily with high salaries. Tech growth has stagnatrd though - there aren’t enough hours left for tech to create new business. With so many new people getting into tech there aren’t enough jobs for all the new entrants, that it’s created almost two job markets. People who are seniors with loads of experience are still in high demand as there’s just few of them relative to the current size of the industry, but there aren’t enough junior jobs for those who are new.
C# and C++ are not “from same framework”… They are as different as two fairly modern programming languages can be.
