Canada

Old people: best I can do is preserve the character of the neighbourhood.

Also old people: but I'll need an exemption for the really cheap immigrants I have working at my company.

I'm sorry, this shit really sucks. I'm in a similar position with the CS degree, but even going through unpaid work in internships and university research projects to fill my resume during college, I still haven't gotten anything but silence, scams, and fake interviews in the 2.5 years after graduation. It honestly might be easier to try pivoting to a non-tech field at this point and get away from the dumpster fire that is this industry. Thinking about going into a trade like welding or HVAC, but who knows what's a good decision anymore.

Hoping the best for you, gen 1 glitch person

you need to start focusing on Code Review and QA. That is where the need is heading purely because most companies decided to leverage LLM's and now they're all finding that it's "not working".

I myself am a consultant/freelance developer and a year or so ago I decided to transition from dev work to code review for my clients. Most of my clients now have utilized AI for end to end builds and it simply didn't work. Now they're all collectively scrambling to fix what slop was produced. The issue is the vast majority simply don't know how OR they axed a good chunk of their devs and are left with juniors/vibe coders who can't fix it.

So now there's a market for individuals that can code review and potentially fix/refactor/whatever the slop that was churned out. Since transitioning to being, essentially, a digital janitor I've had more work/clients than ever before.

My advice is to get back on Linkedin but instead of shooting our resume after resume start (and I know this sucks, trust me) interacting with posts on there. Call out the tech bros for their AI bullshit BUT state that fact that you're in a position and qualified to fix the garbage. Companies, many start ups, will reach out to you without posting positions because their afraid to admit their fuck ups publicly.

You could try for software QA jobs. The older degree and non-related work experience might matter less, and there's a good chance you can over time transition into a dev role.

I'm sorry to say that the industry has changed even since you graduated. You're going to need to jump on whatever hype is going on now.

Have they even considered printing out 5 resumes with their limited work history, putting on formal clothes and making eye contact? They'd have to pick between family-supporting wage offers there would be such demand.

A term for that is underemployment

Statistics Canada collects data about this under the category of "Supplementary unemployment rate": https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410007801

Their categories of underemployment include:

• discouraged searchers
• waiting group (recall, replies, long-term future starts)
• involuntary part-timers
• discouraged searchers, waiting group, portion of involuntary part-timers

That same person would be lost of they were out of work because, surprise, the world has changed since they got into their career.

Then there is this old lady https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVI6SCtVu4c

It's that nobody retires anymore. There's no space for people to move into. Companies already have their needed roles filled and are not expanding. Basically the population has saturated the market and here we are.