In Canada, there's a lot that feels very positive at the moment. - Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years ba

In Canada, there's a lot that feels very positive at the moment. - Recruiters being very open about the salary range. This is a change from even a few years back, where there would be endless back and forth of "who calls the number" first. Now out of maybe 30 early conversations only 1 recruiter absolutely refused to state the range. The top end is extremely consistent, the bottom end (as typical for Canada) can be laughably low. - US companies and remote work coming in in a big way. Some of them position themselves at the high end of the local market (which I define to be around C$200k base for non-MANGA companies). Others decide to offer the US range (US$180-200k), which is of course better but in some cases has the drawback of being a contractor. - Demand in my field (DevOps/SRE/cloud infra) hasn't changed much. Still multiple pings a week from recruiters, down from multiple a day. Not a problem getting interviews, at all. Had multiple offers already but looking for a better fit. - Few attempts at take-home exercises. I generally refuse these outright unless they are paid; some companies react to that by simply waiving the take-home. Some things that did change... - the remarkable extent to which US salaries are outliers worldwide is beginning to have an effect. Every single company I worked at for the last decade had non-NA dev teams, usually at the periphery (support, integrations, follow-the-sun ops). Now core teams are distributed and dev work is shifting away from high-cost centers. One example I saw is in Gergely's "which companies are still hiring" spreadsheet -- how many of these companies are not looking in US at all, or are Europe-/Asia-centric? - startup non-base comp is becoming a really bad deal, even for Series A. I was offered some shares, even with the founder's own rosy projections an exit for me would be a nice bonus at most. Why deal with the stress if there's no meaningful payback at the end? - some smaller companies asking LC Hards all of a sudden. To me that just feels like someone out of Google founding a startup and having no idea how to hire non-developers. - people having less filter in general. One of the best things I really started doing in my interviews is shutting up and listening instead of working to sell myself / ask questions. People will admit amazing things about the company or about the level of fit / misfit for a role when they try to fill in the silence. - as a corollary, how do interviewers behave if they sense it's likely not a fit? Do they start trash talking your experience / chances of success / achievable salary, or just let it go? I've had a recruiter try to convince me there aren't offers at 175 base + in Canada. I've had a founder tell me no one will offer me a manager role (after a 30 minute interview wherein they talked most of the time and barely asked me anything). Just take a bit of time to listen and the trash will sort itself out.