Software Companies in Canada are Now Easier to Find!
October 12th 2009
The merit of a traditional computer science degree at a university is often debated on programming forums and it is generally agreed that experience is extremely important. While that is true, many companies now explicitly choose to hire those with degrees. This presents a conundrum, if I spend all my time studying and mastering my classes, how do I build experience? Schools like Waterloo offer a Co-op program, while U of T offers a one year "Professional Experience Year". However, I'm in my 9th year of school and prospect of stretching it further seems a bit much. This leaves me with the option of acquiring experience on my own. This search for experience has lead me to many jobs sites to peruse what hiring companies are looking for. What technologies are these companies expecting their candidates to possess, how many years of experience with that technology are they looking for? I quickly found that many large job sites only have a subset of the actual jobs open jobs in Canada. On popular job boards in the states only 1 or 2 for every 40 are based in Canada. This lead me to start searching for software companies in Canada. On finding a software company, with offices in Canada I quickly found that many were looking to hire.
Given the hurtles I had to jump through to find these companies I figure a perfect opportunity presented itself: create a directy of software companies with office(s) in canada. After a few weeks of toiling away I created AppMakers.ca. The goal of AppMakers.ca is to highlight software companies with offices in Canada and make it really easy to filter companies by province, city and even the technologies they use. The site is still beta and we're hoping to add more features over the next few months, in the mean time I need to get back to studying!