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Canada's Tech Job Market Has Gone From Boom To Bust In Last Five Years (msn.com) 85

Posted by BeauHD from the rise-and-fall dept.
Canada's tech job market has collapsed from its pandemic-era boom, with postings down 19% from 2020 levels. Analysts say the decline was sharper than the overall job market and worsened after ChatGPT's debut in 2022 fueled AI-driven shifts in workforce demand. The Canadian Press reports: "The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze," said Brendon Bernard, Indeed's senior economist. "While both the tech job market and the overall job market have definitely cooled off from their 2022 peaks, the cool off has been much sharper in tech." He thinks the fall was likely caused by the market adjusting after a pandemic boom in hiring along with recent artificial intelligence advances that have reduced tech firms' interest in expanding their workforces.

"We went from this really hot job market with job postings through the roof to one where job postings really crashed, falling well below their pre-pandemic levels," Bernard said. However, he sees AI's recent boom as a "watershed moment." While much of the decline in tech job postings has been in software engineer roles, Indeed found hiring for AI-related jobs was still up compared to early 2020. In fact, machine learning engineers and roles that support AI infrastructure, such as data engineers and data centre technicians, were among the job titles with postings still above early-2020 levels.

At the same time, Indeed saw postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs drop sharply from their 2022 peak, but as of early 2025, they were still up five per cent from their pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, basic and junior tech titles were down 25 per cent. When it compared Canada's overall decline in tech job postings, Indeed found the country's decrease from pre-pandemic levels was somewhat milder than the retrenchment it has observed in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. The U.S. fall amounted to 34 per cent, while in the U.K. it was 41 per cent. France saw a 38 per cent drop and Germany experienced a 29 per cent decrease. "All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze," Bernard said.

Canada's Tech Job Market Has Gone From Boom To Bust In Last Five Years More | Reply

Canada's Tech Job Market Has Gone From Boom To Bust In Last Five Years

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  • What they won't tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sauce Tin ( 1884020 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @08:44PM (#65618026)
    Canada is experiencing record high migration. Put two and two together.

  • Probably doesn't help (Score:4, Interesting)

    by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @08:46PM (#65618028)

    The US sowing economic uncertainty around the globe with its constantly shifting tariff levels and its general threats to Canadian sovereignty likely dont help either.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 )

      Canada makes bad economic and foreign policy decisions decisions.

      Trump's fault!

      I'm sure that tariff uncertainty had nothing to do with making a lot of dumb public "I'm gunna stick it to Trump!" statements and then trying to stand up to their major trading partner they share a giant border with and an economy 10x bigger while not negotiating in good faith and then finally backing down completely with tail between their legs.

      Tl:dr: Canada is run by tow morons who fucked their own people because they hate Trum

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 )
        I can't stand our Liberal government more than most people, but to be fair we just did this 8 years ago during Trump's first term. First thing he does when he is elected to his second term is break all the agreements he himself proudly negotiated last time around. We just assume the dotard can't remember that far back, but there is still the fundamental problem (and not just Canada but everywhere) of how to effectively negotiate with someone whose word is worth absolutely nothing. Yes, America's word is

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Right, the best thing to do is to cave in to a bully. They'd never come back around again with more demands later.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They did cut a deal with Trump last time he was in office, NAFTA as usual he broke it, why deal with someone who never keeps up his end?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Oh I see. So we should just give up now and let Trump take us over since it's inevitable. With friends like that who needs enemies.

    • Re:Probably doesn't help (Score:4, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @09:47PM (#65618108)

      Half the world has stopped sending mail to the USA because of the tariff shit show. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/... [nbcnews.com]

      Have you heard the elderly dementia patient speak lately? Christ if Biden said anything even close to this they'd have admitted him to the hospital and sworn in Kamala. https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

      “You know, China intelligently went and they sort of took a monopoly of the world’s magnets, and nobody needed magnets until they convinced everybody 20 years ago, ‘Let’s all do magnets,’” Trump went on. “There were many other ways that the world could have gone.”

      “I sent them all of the parts so their planes can fly,” Trump said of China. “200 of their planes were unable to fly because we were not giving them Boeing parts purposely because they weren’t giving us magnets.”

      “But we have a much more powerful thing, and that’s tariffs,” he said, adding: “We’re going to have a lot of magnets in a pretty short period of time.”

    • That sounds like an argument for becoming the 51st state

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Baron_Yam ( 643147 )

        "Hey, you know that giant economy that is deliberately being run into the ground by a government stripping everyone's rights and tearing apart the social safety net? Yeah, you should want to join that dumpster fire!"

        Your post has to be among the dumbest takes I've ever read on anything.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dohzer ( 867770 )

        Why are you dragging Puerto Rico into the conversation?

  • Education has failed (Score:3)

    by alternative_right ( 4678499 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @09:09PM (#65618058) Homepage Journal

    Training idiots to follow procedure does not produce the critical, analytical, and logical thinking we need. Instead we have lots of people doing what their textbooks said was right. You can't build an empire on that!

  • Misleading and inconclusive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @09:20PM (#65618080)

    It focuses on Canada because it's written by a Canadian news media. However, it says Canada experiences a very mild effect compared to several other countries, USA/UK/France/Germany which are all worse.

    Therefore for all folks here who try to explain the "bad" results with immigrants or something like that, it's more the contrary, how to explain the GOOD results of CANADA while other countries performed worse.

    Then the paper tries to explain the results by the recent AI. But it finally cites different countries (Australia, Singapore, Spain) which experienced POSITIVE job change, and says it's because the overall job market in those countries remained high. Which, if we accept this interpretation, means all of the previous is wrong, nothing is due to AI, only to the "overall job market" in each of the countries.

    • Fewer tech jobs isn't necessarily a bad result. Maybe they solved all their tech problems and can now get back to collecting maple syrup and jacking lumber?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      AI is mostly ignored in many countries. There is no investment in it because there is no giant software industry ... and therefore no rush to embrace it by potential customers. You get a few specialist customers and some experimenting and that's about it.

      I see this as the reason why some countries are not showing the same job market effects. Therefore the explanation of AI being the reason for changing job prospects in USA/Canada is entirely likely.

    • Re:Misleading and inconclusive (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @08:00AM (#65618734) Homepage
      You're exactly right. This also has to do with tech in general. Since the late 90's it has relied on cheap capital. Think Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. These companies funded growth by borrowing money with very low (nearly zero) interest rates for decades. Around the time of the pandemic the interest rates started to rise. There was a temporary bump in demand for tech during the first couple years of the pandemic, but then demand fell back down. Tech companies were left with bloated staff counts and increasingly expensive borrowing costs. Every tech company realized it needed to switch from a growth mindset into a profitable mindset. Monetization tactics increased, and staff counts were cut. A major component of the reason Twitter got sold to Musk was because of these very facts. The owners knew Twitter had to start being profitable, but they didn't have the stomach to do it themselves, so they sold it and let Musk do it. But it had to happen either way. That cheap capital isn't returning. It was a demographic blip caused by such a large generation (the boomers) in the peak of their retirement savings years flooding the capital market with money and hunting for any reasonable return. That reality is gone now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by toddz ( 697874 )
      Exactly. I guess it's too much to ask people to read the summary much less the article. I like how all these other posters attacked Canada's policies when in fact Canada seems to be doing better than most of comparable countries.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deKernel ( 65640 )

      So sucking less is now considered a success story...good to know....*sigh*

    • I wish I had Karma points to upvote you. It's crazy how every post just seems to bring out more crazies . It's not just the death of social discourse; it's like the entire world has been taken over by sugar overdosed ADHD kids :-(

  • Once again another nail in the coffin of this civilisation.
    Theres a 5% chance of us diverting to a trajectory that does not
    lead to extinction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Once again another nail in the coffin of this civilisation.

      i guess you mean "western civilization". no argument here but that's not "global". in globalland, most of the rest of the world is doing relatively well.

      Theres a 5% chance of us diverting to a trajectory that does not
      lead to extinction.

      no argument on that either. maybe the world will be better off when this civilization led by hypocritical, supremacist and exploitative gutmenschen is finally put in its place, but it may get so desperate as to wanting to spoil the fun for everyone first. in the long run, however, i sadly wouldn't bet on our species being a success story anyway. one has to

      • If the western civilisation collapses, it will take the rest of the world with it, simply because losing a gigantic chunk of the world's economy, tech source and food supply will have disastrous consequences.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by znrt ( 2424692 )

          it will be felt but imo that's a bit of an exaggeration. as long as we go down peacefully all that will be manageable, we might even enjoy some help and cooperation to meet ends and stay afloat. all we have to do is to stop acting like overlords. we aren't anymore. we should just ... be normal. the rest of the world just wants to be normal, mind its business.

          • It won't be fine at all. Middle East and many other things countries in Africa are unable to feed themselves. There were huge problems with wheat supply there when Russia started the invasion of Ukraine. It would be several orders of magnitude worse if the EU, for example, goes under.

  • I'm running a garage side-business on the side targeted at entertainment accessories, you can feel that there is a lot less disposable spending there too. People just don't spent on extras. On the main job point of view, we have copilot subscriptions... barely used. All in all, this is a propaganda piece...
  • Canadian kids aren't quite the same drooling bitches over that next pair of sneakers and generally having a better job doesnt mean you get better healthcare here either. These companies have set their expectations on other factors bridging the gap between the salaries they pay and the hours they demand. Those things ran out in Canada first because we are more socialist, so their numbers are showing its not worth it to hire any more because they won't find anyone at what they are structured to pay.
  • Specific numbers are great, but itâ(TM)s happening everywhere
  • I work at a major Canadian University. We had an intermediate web developer position that we were recruiting for since the beginning of the year. Nothing fancy, not really AI, just straightforward web development (python/ruby/javascript on front end, databases in behind). We finally found someone in late August, after multiple recruitment attempts. The main problem was that anyone good who applied was being snapped up, either before we could get them an offer, or because they preferred another offer to ours

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