Hi, I lived in Regina for four years so stopping by to say hello! I have an engineering degree, went to Facebook in the US out of school in 2009. I know a lot about American bootcamps, not so much about Canadian bootcamps, but I can try to help.
Since you have an CS masters you should be able to get a TN visa status and work anywhere in the US as an individual contributor engineer.
Another route could be working for "FAANG" in Canada first and transferring.
It's a bit of a wonky time to only target FAANG but it's certainly possible to get a FAANG job in the USA with a CS masters if you can get interviews and then pass the interviews (which are hard)
I wouldn't do a bootcamp at this point unless you basically forgot everything from school, I would look at more career accelerators (disclosure: I'm co-founder of Formation.dev which is one such thing) like Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar. You might get more out of these if you already have the fundamentals.
If you are comfortable sharing, why have you been unemployed? Is it by choice? and if not, what has been stopping you from getting a job?
u/Cyber_Encephalon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hey, unrelated to the post, but could you explain what is an "individual contributor engineer"? is that corporate speak for an employee or is there some hidden meaning in there that's not in "software engineer"?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Ah sorry good question. So it basically means just software engineer as opposed to a manager or data scientist or project manager or other roles. For TN status you have to have a specific role that is aligned to your degree to qualify.
u/Cyber_Encephalon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
OK, so if you get a TN visa with one status and the company wants to promote you into a different role, they would not be able to?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Correct. There’s some wiggle room and a good lawyer and explain the options but possibly yes, you may or may not be able to have certain other roles.
You can get promoted along the engineering track totally fine as an “individual contributor” and you can often be a manager too if you are primarily applying your software engineering skills day to day.
u/LankyAccountant8122 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Michael did you choose to be non anonymous, is that an option on blind? Just curious and excuse me for the out of context question 😀
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I choose to be non anonymous on Reddit yeah and I do that on purpose. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw a lot of problems that can happen with fake news and people surrounding themselves with self-reinforcing points of view, so I choose to be transparent and authentic here since Reddit is an anonymous place where this can happen very easily.
u/Medium_Woodpecker_81 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):