Job Opportunities in Canada

1. Introduce yourself

Let me introduce myself first. I am an Android programmer who has been in Canada for two years. He worked in Tmall and netease in China for several years, but now he has moved overseas. In the past two years in Canada, I still have a lot of feelings. Compared with China, I have mixed feelings and some interesting feelings. So I wanted to write this series about how western programmers live and work under “rotten capitalism”.

This is the first in a series on job opportunities.

2. Job hunting experience

If there is a job opening, the person with more experience has a better chance than the person with less experience. So job opportunities depend on your personal growth. As far as I am concerned, I have done app development on Tmall in China. Worked in development + team management in netease. In short, it is also a senior programmer with some experience.

Explained this foreshadowing, the following is to tell my actual experience. After I came to Canada, I spent the first few months looking for an apartment to rent (Canadian apartments are super expensive!!). Buying furniture yes renting a house here without any furniture except for the kitchen utensils. You have to buy your own desk and bed. I can’t compare my English with my wife’s. My wife’s hearing is much better than mine), didn’t start looking for a job until July 2016.

Let’s start by comparing the job opportunities for Android programmers. It turns out that vancouver and Toronto are the only big cities with more job opportunities, and vancouver probably has only a third as many Android development jobs as Toronto. Plus I moved to Toronto because I was afraid there would be a tsunami or an earthquake or something in Vancouver. The good thing about Toronto is that it is more financially developed and housing prices are not as crazy as Vancouver’s (of course there are a lot of them). If you are interested in this, I can open a special topic about the house here later), and I have done the development and management related to electronic finance before, I am afraid it will be more suitable for Toronto. Haha, besides, Google has a subsidiary in Toronto, I want to see if there is a chance to go to Google in the future.

When I got here, I found there were really few jobs. I searched for Android Leader and I searched for Android Developer and there were at least 30 or 40, so I started sending out my resume.

Sure enough, after I sent my resume, several companies came to me. One is C Company, which does project outsourcing. They need to find a leader, who is mainly responsible for managing the team and communicating with customers. I went for an interview and felt good about it. But then I didn’t hear anything. Two other companies also met, not bad. The supervisor of one of them told my colleague in the elevator to my face, “This guy is much better than the guy I interviewed yesterday. He is awesome.” As soon as I heard that, I knew the interview was guaranteed. Yes, I ended up working there as a senior developer.

In my heart, I want to be a leader. “Stand up meeting” means “stand up meeting” means “stand up meeting” means “stand up meeting” means “stand up meeting” means “stand up meeting. Especially when some Indian colleagues with a strong accent introduced what they had done yesterday, I was almost dumbstruck. Later, with more listening and speaking, English became much better (also shows that in fact, many people look down on themselves in English, at least it should not be a big problem to communicate with foreigners). But I just started out in Senior Developer, and I think it’s a very solid strategy. I read on the forum that some advanced skilled workers emigrate to the West, and some of them still work as forklift drivers or temporary waiters, which makes me feel sad. So I want to start low and work my way up.

3. Job type

When I first came to Canada, headhunters and HR often told me that THIS is a Contractor job or not a Contractor job. I don’t know what kind of company I work for in China without a contract. !

I’m just here. I’m not afraid to ask headhunters. Later I know that the Contractor is a temporary worker or an outsourced worker. The Contractor has a salary, but no welfare. The person who corresponds to the Contractor is a full-time employee, or Permanent employee. So Permanent sounded like a “Permanent” employee, which seemed to be true. My last job contract didn’t say when it was due to expire, so the default was Permanent.

Someone on the Internet says that 70K permanent is equivalent to 90K permanent. Because the latter has no vacation and no benefit(dentists here, eye care is extremely expensive and not included in the government’s health spending. The other doctors are paid for by the government. We don’t have to pay a cent. In Canada, doctors don’t get paid for their medicine.

There are all kinds of benefits from good companies (critical illness, dentist, accident, etc.) It can even include family members. You can buy it yourself, but not as cheaply as a company can buy it for you. Because the company can give how many percent, you want to give only how many percent, general company than you individual give want much much.

4. Some other hiccups

Here’s another tip for me: I always send out my resume half an hour before 9 a.m. So HR can see it as soon as they get to work. — It turns out how naive I am. It said we had an interview with C company in early July, but it was August before they called me and informed me of the second interview. Then T and R companies also applied for nearly a week before I was informed of the interview. HR in Canada has no sense of urgency like ours in China. When I was in China, the management wanted to recruit people, and THE HR gave me my resume almost every day and urged me to find some suitable ones. This is social recruitment. When I was screening for telephone interviews, I used to call more than 20 times a day, making me want to throw up. In short, domestic recruitment is very fast, once there is a suitable resume will be pushed to the technical team; In Canada, it was slow. I even met a large company in Canada who emailed me for a call two weeks after I submitted my resume. But I already had a job, so I had to say sorry to them.

In fact, AFTER I started working, I received two unexpected interview invitations from Facebook. Some students have also received interviews from Facebook, as if facebook focuses on those who are active on Github. I have submitted 1500+ times in 2017, mainly some of my own learning experience, recorded. That’s probably how Facebook found me. Let me interview in Singapore or NY. And the second time, “I know you’ve been in touch with some of my colleagues in the past, but I wanted to check and see if you’d be interested in an informal chat about opportunities at our NYC office. Your experience with Android Development makes me think you’d be a great fit for our engineering team in New York.” But for some personal reasons, I still want to stay in Canada, not the United States. So if you’re interested in Facebook, update Your Github as much as you can, open source as much as you can, and learn English as much as you can so that you’re not unprepared when the opportunity does arise.

5. To summarize

In short, when it comes to mobile Internet, or the Internet industry as a whole, there must be China and the United States in the world’s top3. Canada is more like a younger brother, and many things are influenced by the United States, but the overall atmosphere of the industry is worse. In addition, without giants like BAT, Google and Apple, there are naturally fewer job opportunities than in China and the United States. If the new immigrants to Canada, Australia’s mobile development students, afraid is to be able to bear the industry to go oh.

Well, that’s the job description. In the next installment of this series, we’ll focus on that most important topic of concern: money. Haha, many people should be interested. I’ll probably write another one in a week or two, if you like the series.

This series of portals

Interesting Canadian Programmer Stories series 1/N: Job opportunities

Canadian Programmer Anecdote Series 2/N: Compensation and Benefits

Interesting Canadian Programmer Series 3/N: Life

Interesting Canadian Programmer Series 4/N: Teams