Soon to be new CS grad (Laurier) this August. No internships- applied for alot of them in third year, got some OAs which never went anywhere. Fourth year came and got busy with school so I eventually stopped applying.
Since the SWE job market is cooked, especially for people in my situation, I have been looking for the least saturated pivot, that still uses a CS degree so I get a ROI on it.
I have considered a Master's degree but it seems more expensive, consumes more time that could instead be spent on accumulating more valuable job exp, and from a lot of posts and general sentiment, not a real advantage unless you pair it with an internship.
I also need to get a job relatively quick after graduation (ideally around Oct-Nov) due to some personal circumstances.
This is the list of criteria I used for evaluation:
- Work-Life Balance: Ideally hybrid or remote, ideally 35–40 hours/week (flexible on this if the pay is good enough or overtime is infrequent). I want to avoid high-pressure environments with frequent on-call or overtime.
- Location (Preffered Canada): Prefer LCOL/MCOL areas, but open to HCOL if the salary scales. I’m avoiding the US/Europe/Asia for various political and WLB reasons.
- Competition and Saturation: I’m looking for roles with the least competition (fewer applicants per opening) but plenty of actual listings.
- Stability & Future-Proofing: No dead-end tech. Skills must be transferable so I’m not stranded if a layoff happens. I want to be "hard to replace" once I'm in.
- Social Battery: High focus, low social interaction. I’m perfectly fine with "boring tech" if it means I can work independently.
- Resistance to AI: Focus on high level design and infra, extrapolating buisness requirements to feed to LLMs- basically any job that needs some sort of human approval or understanding, that AI does't have.
After brainstorming with Claude and scouring endless forums, these are the options I have narrowed down to, that is relevant to 2026 data:
- Cloud/Infrastructure (AWS) + DevOps: has moderate competition but the most amount of transferrable skills and job openings. Will have to take certs and start from a lower position like Helpdesk or some Junior Cloud and work up from there. Potential drawbacks with this path is higher competition than the other two options, initial lower salary(helpdesk is 40-60k which is not survivable in the GTA), and having to learn outside the job in personal time to upskill unless it can be done on the job through working.
- SAP: Fits into "boring tech", but has a steep learning curve which means expensive courses. Seems stable career wise (know an uncle who has worked this for 10+ years and makes stable income enough to buy a house in the GTA), but getting in would be tough. Furthermore if it becomes obsolete, the skills aren't too transferrable. Biggest selling point is that most hardcore CS students will target Big Tech and unicorns over this.
- Mainframe Systems (Z/OS): Similar to SAP, but even more legacy tech with a bonus of experinced devs retiring. However I haven't seen much job postings on this, and there are limited companies that hire ie if you don't get into these companies program, there are less alternatives to choose from. If you can get in however this seems like the best option out of all of them, since its stable (more irreplacable), decently high paying, and less work.
- Other options considered: Database Administrator, System administrator
I did consider govt roles but Claudes research says that the govt is actively slashing federal workers across the board to downsize and reduce government costs.
So what would you recommend? Are there any better options that better fit the requirements listed above or not?