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The technology sector was supposed to supply Vancouver’s jobs of the future. But fresh graduates and laid-off workers say job searches now take months, even years, forcing some to walk dogs or stock shelves to pay the bills
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Throngs of 20-somethings dressed in blazer-jean combos and armed with paper résumes were asking senior tech leaders about how to break into the industry during a brunch networking meeting in October at the KPMG LLC office in downtown Vancouver.
It was yet another technology-focused event — from networking brunches to mentorship walks to artificial intelligence (AI) workshops — in the city that has attracted sold-out crowds of fresh graduates and young tech workers pursuing their first jobs in the age of AI.
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Databricks Inc., a San Francisco-based data analytics company valued at US$100 billion, hosted a sold-out launch party in August that was attended by clients, users and eager job seekers, some of whom were waitlisted.
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Since August, the “local response has exceeded expectations,” a company spokesperson said, referring to the number of job applications it received. Last November, Microsoft Corp. held a sold-out AI job fair in the city. During the keynote, attendees jostled backpack-to-backpack for space and spilled out of the crammed meeting room.
For years, Vancouver has marketed itself as a tech hub of the future in an attempt to shed its historical reputation as a port-and-resources town and a playground for the rich, but workers say it has become increasingly difficult to snag a decently paid tech job in a city that has high living costs and difficulties accessing capital.
Even though technology has long been billed as the wave of the future, fresh graduates and workers, from coders to software developers and IT professionals, say that job searches in the industry now take months, even years, forcing some to apply for service jobs to pay the bills and compelling others to leave the sector altogether.
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“There’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s not a lot of roles out there right now,” said Bibiana Souza, a software developer who leads the Vancouver chapter of Women in Tech, a global non-profit.
Lead times have grown between applying for and landing a job, she said, while lower- and entry-level jobs have “disappeared since AI started taking over. The bar to entry is a lot higher.”
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Some numbers paint a rosy snapshot of Vancouver’s technology job market. In 2024, the city employed 125,100 highly skilled tech workers, a 5.2 per cent jump from 2021, according to CBRE Group Inc.’s Scoring Tech Talent 2025 report. Average annual salaries jumped 21 per cent over the same period to $114,192, while the total number of tech roles in the city grew 31 per cent from 2018 to 2023, the report said.
Yet, tech hiring across Canada has been mired in a deep freeze since 2023, with tech job postings plunging 19 per cent country-wide since 2020, according to job search platform Indeed Inc.
It’s an employer’s market right now. There’s no question about that
Lucas Drury-Godden, vice-president, Procom Consultants Group Ltd.
The decline has been especially steep in Vancouver, which experienced a pandemic tech job boom that was “well beyond the national average,” Indeed senior economist Brendon Bernard said. As of early 2025, tech job postings are down 43 per cent in the city compared to 21 per cent in Montreal and 10 per cent in Toronto, he said.
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“It’s definitely not the strong market it was before,” he said, adding that British Columbia’s tech industry has been more volatile compared to the rest of Canada. “It’s grown more and had a bigger boom, but its cooldown has been much sharper. People … previously in tech have left the field because there are fewer opportunities now.”
Nevertheless, the city’s proponents say it’s the ideal place to grow Canada’s tech ecosystem since it holds myriad advantages, including mild weather, proximity to Silicon Valley and a diverse pipeline of local talent willing to accept lower salaries than their peers down south.
Post-pandemic carnage
Ece Eskikurt, a 29-year-old Simon Fraser University graduate who attended the October brunch at KPMG Canada’s office, has been searching for a tech-related role for about a year. Her process involves attending anywhere from five to 10 tech events every month and painstakingly tailoring each job application she submits, an approach she likens to a full-time job.
While attending school and completing her cybersecurity internship, she worked as a restaurant hostess, an administrative assistant at a local college and a sales associate at clothing shop Mavi to help pay the bills — gigs she calls “survival jobs.” She quit those jobs to focus on landing a tech job and now walks dogs part time instead through pet-sitting platform Rover Group Inc.
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Eskikurt has applied for at least 60 jobs since January.
“For each job, I reached out to the recruiters and the companies. They weren’t cold applications,” she said. “I took all the steps that I could.”
Eskikurt has asked hiring managers for feedback on where her application fell short, but her messages are mostly left unanswered.
“That’s the part that hurts the most,” she said.
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Technology job recruiters say her experience has become increasingly common. Broad macroeconomic trends, from rising interest rates to the AI boom, have battered Vancouver’s tech job marketplace in recent years.
“It’s an employer’s market right now. There’s no question about that,” said Lucas Drury-Godden, vice-president, Western Canada, at Procom Consultants Group Ltd., a tech recruiter.
Since mid-2022, companies have continued to “correct” the overhiring that occurred during the early pandemic years, with the rise of AI contributing to that trend, said Rachel Shen, founder and managing director of Vancouver-based technology recruiter SIGnature Recruiting Inc.
“Around May 2022, we saw a very noticeable shift,” she said. “The Big Tech companies started mass layoffs and other tech companies followed suit.”
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Many of Silicon Valley’s major players have carved out a Vancouver presence over the past two decades, jumping on the chance to hire Silicon Valley-quality talent at lower prices in the same time zone to build out their engineering, gaming, cloud and AI hubs.
But Big Tech has continued to cull jobs that have affected Vancouver’s workforce to varying degrees.
It’s a bloodbath out there. Companies are replacing us left and right with AI
Software developer
Amazon.com Inc. has slashed 41,000 jobs since 2022, announcing its latest layoff round in late October. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has said the use of AI will reduce its corporate workforce. The company, as of December 2024, employed 4,500 and 3,500 staff at its Vancouver and Toronto tech hubs, respectively.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), which has one Vancouver office, this month said it will lay off “thousands” before year-end. Microsoft has laid off more than 15,000 employees, or four per cent of its global workforce, this year.
AI now writes 20 per cent to 30 per cent of Microsoft’s code, with that percentage steadily rising, according to chief executive Satya Nadella. The company has three Vancouver offices whose staff build key products such as Teams and Copilot.
Amazon, IBM and Microsoft all declined to comment on their layoffs. But several of Amazon’s software developers and newer hires in Vancouver and Toronto say they have been fired. Multiple IBM employees in both cities say they have been served termination letters.
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But employees at startups and non-tech companies haven’t been spared.
Vancouver startups Klue Labs Inc., ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. and General Fusion Inc. have all laid off staff this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a platform that tracks tech layoffs.
For example, Klue, which makes AI-powered software for sales professionals, fired 85 staff, or 40 per cent of its workforce, in June. Company co-founder and chief executive Jason Smith attributed the decision to AI, saying the technology has increased the company’s competition and has also replaced some roles.
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Vancouver-based Hootsuite Inc., which makes social media management software, cut 20 per cent of its headcount last month.
Frederick Wynne, a partner at Tevlin Gleadle Curtis, a Vancouver-based employment law firm, said he has seen “a greater than usual amount of tech employees reaching out for help with terminations” coming from Big Tech and smaller local firms since spring 2024.
Tech roles in the public sector have been “drastically impacted” as the provincial government continues to cut jobs and upholds its hiring freeze implemented last December, said a director at a Vancouver-based tech recruiter who declined to be named due to fears of professional repercussions.
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Public-sector tech jobs account for four per cent of Vancouver’s tech-sector employment, according to a CBRE Group Inc. analysis based on Statistics Canada data. But the recruiter said the B.C. government is the “single largest contingent labour hirer in technology in the province,” meaning that government cuts have affected tech workers’ prospects significantly.
The recruiter also said “stealth layoffs” are occurring under the radar. The federal government requires companies to publicly announce if they are firing more than 50 people in a four-week period, but Big Tech and other companies are still making layoffs that don’t meet that criteria, she said.
“If you rewind the clock to 2023, 2022, and 2021, there were more job openings than there were job seekers. Now it’s completely flipped the other way,” Nathan Wawruck, director for technology in Vancouver at recruiter Robert Half Inc., said. “When we advertise a job now, there are often a few hundred applicants for a single role.”
In the early days of the pandemic, he said a job posting could receive “zero applications because everyone’s already working and has multiple offers on the table already.”
A foot in the door
Not all tech roles have been equally impacted. The corporate shift toward AI has reduced entry- and junior-level functions and certain jobs that are more exposed to that technology. Recruiters say fresh graduates, early career professionals and workers with less AI-related experience have been disproportionately affected.
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Big Tech’s new grad hires have plummeted 50 per cent since 2019 and by 23 per cent since 2023 and now account for just seven per cent of its overall hires, according to a May report by venture-capital firm SignalFire LLC.
One software developer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of jeopardizing his job search, said he was laid off last year with little warning.
Even with bachelor’s and master’s degrees at top Canadian universities, a couple of years of experience under his belt and shining references from former professors and managers, his job search, now nearing one year, has been “brutal,” he said.
“It’s a bloodbath out there,” he said. “Companies are replacing us left and right with AI.”
He has applied for service jobs at retailers such as Home Depot and local casinos to help pay the bills, but said businesses either “ghost” him or tell him that he’s overqualified.
“I worked all my life for this career (in tech),” he said. “But I’m thinking if I should leave the industry altogether now.”
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On the flip side, workers with specialized and AI-related skill sets in areas such as machine learning and cloud computing are being quickly snapped up and have lifted average salaries in the city.
“Vancouver employers are all fighting over the same very small pool of highly skilled workers for specialized roles,” Wawruck said.
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“If you’re a software developer focused on developing machine learning algorithms using Python, that would be considered a hot skill set, and you’d be able to find work pretty quickly. But if you’re fluent in several programming languages, but not really specialized in any one of them, you might get passed over because the specialization isn’t there.”
Across Canada, AI-related tech roles have remained resilient and have even climbed in recent years, Indeed economist Bernard said. Job postings for machine learning engineers have dropped 49 per cent since their peak in early 2022, but that’s “far less” than other tech roles and they are still up 38 per cent from early 2020, according to Indeed data.
Vancouver employers are all fighting over the same very small pool of highly skilled workers for specialized roles
Nathan Wawruck, director for technology at Robert Half Inc.
Postings for AI architects and developers, meanwhile, have more than doubled from their 2020 levels. These jobs also typically pay more. In 2024, the median posted annual salary for machine learning engineers in Canada was $213,000, one of the highest-paid common tech jobs, according to Indeed.
Bibiana Souza, who has worked as a software developer and engineer in Vancouver’s tech sector for a decade, said she has been laid off twice “because of AI. It was tough knowing that I was being replaced with tools and robots.”
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But after each layoff, she found a job within one to two months, a faster-than-average turnaround time that she credits to a swift pivot to reskill in AI, an extensive network of industry contacts, and a willingness to accept double-digit pay cuts.
“If you don’t adapt to the times, you don’t get a job, so that’s what I did,” she said.
Tech hub future
There are silver linings. Vancouver still ranks high when it comes to tech talent, coming in at No. 10 worldwide in CBRE’s latest report. The city has North America’s 12th-largest tech talent pool, with more than half of its tech workers working in the tech sector, which can “enhance innovation” and attract tech employers, the report said.
Vancouver, which has a bit less than 10,000 AI workers, also ranks second in Canada and No. 13 in North America when it comes to the sheer number of AI tech talent on hand.
That pool of talent has led some companies, both big and small, to open offices or local hubs in Vancouver in recent months.
AgentHub Inc. (doing business as Gumloop), a Vancouver-founded AI automation startup, opened a new Vancouver office in September after moving its headquarters to San Francisco last year. Databricks said it expects “continued expansion” in the city in 2026 and Royal Bank of Canada in October launched a Vancouver innovation hub focused on AI.
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The Mark Carney government’s plan to attract highly skilled tech workers to Canada could also be a “net positive” for Vancouver, according to Drury-Godden, who said it’s plausible that Big Tech could increase its local headcount to accommodate the movement of H-1B holders in the United States to Canada.
Still, industry leaders and workers say structural changes are needed for Vancouver to boost its standing among global tech hubs and guarantee jobs for its tech workforce.
Vancouver’s high cost of living is “hands down, the number one challenge for employers and employees,” Wawruck said, echoing the sentiments of other recruiters, as well as tech industry workers and leaders.
The city’s rent-to-tech salary ratio clocks in at nearly 20 per cent, with annualized apartment rent at US$16,497 and average annual tech wages around US$83,360, according to CBRE. This makes it the most expensive Canadian city for tech workers and the ninth-most unaffordable in North America. Businesses have an “extremely difficult” time convincing workers to move to the city, he said.
Others say the government needs to offer better incentives for businesses to set up shop in the city that could kindle a startup boom and anchor major tech companies in the city.
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The B.C. Tech Association, a non-profit advocating for startups, has pushed for policies to help spur investment in tech and build up the right pipeline of talent, such as the creation of a provincial tech procurement task force, improved tax credits for small-to-medium-sized tech companies, alongside greater investments in tech reskilling and programs to help founders scale up.
The Vancouver-based recruitment director said business taxes have ballooned in recent years, particularly in the employee space, such as the two per cent Employee Health Tax (EHT) that added a “huge burden” to local companies.
“There are much less startups launching in B.C. now,” she said.
Camden Hutchison, director of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Business Law, who has studied Vancouver’s innovation ecosystem, said provincial tax laws aren’t the key pain points holding back entrepreneurship, pointing out that B.C. and California’s tax rates are approximately the same.
“There’s no real tax advantage of being in the U.S.,” he said.
Rather, businesses have been unable to scale in Vancouver due to a lack of access to financing, a dearth of established tech networks akin to Silicon Valley’s and the ongoing brain drain to the U.S., he said.
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“These are very serious problems and more important than specific legal policies in Vancouver,” he said. “I don’t disagree with … targeted tax incentive programs for entrepreneurs. I just don’t think that those things are what drive the creation of entrepreneurial hubs.”
Up ahead, tech job hiring in Vancouver is likely to experience more pain until the Canadian economy regains steam, Bernard said.
“Layoffs generate headlines, but the major issue is the Canadian labour market,” he said. “Unemployment is up because it’s been a tougher environment for job seekers overall.”
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