How's the Canadian Tech Job Market?

June 4, 2024

People talk all the time about how poor the job market is. It's generally accepted wisdom that 2022 was a great market, 2023 was terrible (layoffs everywhere), and 2024 is slightly better. I want to find signs of those theories in the data. I'll do it by comparing the top offers over time, because FANG companies are known to update their bands and offers based on the other FANGS, so hopefully they will show the general market trends. I'll only compare new offers, and for engineers with 3-7 years of experience.

The data is available on Levels.fyi, and we can get it off their API. They do encrypt the response, but the decryption is all in the client so we can reverse engineer it.

April 2022 to March 2023 is definitely a freefall. It's probably impacted hugely by the FANGs freezing their hiring, I could look into that another day. Since then, so in the past 15 months, it's pretty flat with a slight incline.

Anecdotally, the job ads themselves seem to be unaffected - they still include relatively large ranges. Perhaps companies have left the ranges where they were in 2022, but are hiring exclusively at the lower end.

Overall, it seems still like a rough market. I'd like to overlay this hiring data with a broader economic indicator, like GDP. To be continued..