>... and got turned down for thousands of developer jobs.
Over what period of time? No offense, but I'm hoping that's an innocent exaggeration. I'm not very familiar with the market for developers in Canada, though based on that it sounds particularly brutal.
Either way, good on you for moving forward despite all that.
Canada is nothing like the US in terms of the developer market. I read all kinds of blog posts about people who learned to code, built stuff and found a job, but it took me a bit of time to realize that Canada is a totally different beast. The amount of junior dev job openings in this country is cute next to New York's. So I started applying there and all over the US, and to Europe, and to Australia, and to South America, etc.. None of those worked out. Those add up to thousands.
I still apply for dev jobs to this day, but only when I have a new project to add to my CV. The way I see it, with every project I complete, I get closer to landing that job. And who knows, maybe one of my projects will eventually be able to support me by itself.
If it's "thousands" as in 1002 rejections, that's almost 3 years of doing one interview every day, from Monday to Sunday. Even if you assume two interviews per day, that's still more than a year.
Edit: Assuming you only do one interview per rejection.
I wouldn't take it as an indicator of the job market in Canada.
I would think maybe he refers to having a lot of rejections but still I would hope it's in the order of 100 or so at most
Over what period of time? No offense, but I'm hoping that's an innocent exaggeration. I'm not very familiar with the market for developers in Canada, though based on that it sounds particularly brutal.
Either way, good on you for moving forward despite all that.