According to The Canadian Press, the collapse has outpaced the overall job market, and things went truly pear-shaped after ChatGPT, blew up in 2022, triggering yet another round of headless chicken behaviour from firms chasing artificial intelligence.

Senior economist Brendon Bernard said, “The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze.” While the wider job scene has taken a hit, Bernard noted the tech cool-down has been “much sharper in tech.”

Bernard reckons this nosedive is down to the post-pandemic hiring comedown and a corporate herd panic triggered by AI hype.

“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.

Despite the carnage, there’s still life in AI-adjacent roles. While software engineer jobs have taken a battering, postings for machine learning engineers, data centre technicians and data engineers are still comfortably above early 2020 levels. Apparently, someone still needs to build and babysit the servers.

At the same time, Indeed found that the most brutal cuts were at the junior end. Entry-level tech jobs have dropped 25 per cent, while roles for senior staff and managers fell after 2022 but remain five per cent higher than pre-Covid numbers.

Compared with the rest of the world, Canada has gotten off lightly. Indeed’s data shows the US saw a 34 per cent drop, the UK 41 per cent, France 38 per cent and Germany 29 per cent.

“All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze,” Bernard said.