Oddly enough yesterday I figured out how to get around that problem, more on that later. But earlier today, at 3:09am, I got a github message about it. It seems that someone did in fact look at my article, probably from seeing it posted on LinkedIn, and at least tried it out. Now this brings up the interesting question as to whether the Canadian federal government is outsourcing its IT work to India, because 3am is not considered “working hours” anywhere in Canada, but that’s a question for another day.

Here’s a screenshot of the message I got:

First of all, thanks for confirming it’s a bug. But it’s disappointingly lazy to say “well, it’s not my job” in response. It’s a bug that affects the usability of the site, it shouldn’t just get closed (which it did), and if it’s “not your job” it really should be passed along to the people whose job it is to fix it.

Secondly, it’s not even a difficult bug to figure out, and I know that because I figured it out by myself yesterday. And I’m not even getting paid to do this. Which is even more annoying, speaking as someone who’s been looking for a job in the IT field for 8 months now and will probably have to go work on the shop floor at Costco because the tech job market is absolute shite at the moment in Montreal (mind you, if you do have to work in a retail establishment, Costco is the gold standard there).

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand.

It’s the “candidate registration” page that’s broken. It simply will not work if you didn’t sign in to the CRA careers site before you get to it. If you go to the CRA Careers site you will see this near the top of the page:

Click on the “Sign in or register” link, sign in through your authentication partner (or CRA ID), and THEN click on the “candidate registration” link, and you will be able to fill out your candidate profile. 

The easiest way to fix this would be to disable the fields in the “candidate registration” landing page if the user is not logged in, and inform the user that they must be logged in before continuing.

However, it appears that the web dev teams at the CRA operate in silos, where each team is responsible for small individual parts of the site while remaining blissfully unaware of what the other teams are doing. Those teams are probably offshore, working for different companies, and have no clear way of communicating with one another. I don’t know what happened to the “Canada First” and “Elbows up” attitude that the Prime Minister keeps talking about, but it doesn’t seem to apply to IT work done for the federal government. That’s a shame, because there are thousands of Canadian IT workers currently desperately looking for jobs, running through their EI, and eventually forced to apply for welfare at the provincial level. If I’d been in that same situation 20 years ago I would have just looked for employment in the USA, or somewhere else in the world, but that’s no longer an acceptable (in the case of the USA) or even possible option for a guy my age.

So, CRA, I’ve figured it out for you. Fix your damned web site!

The post A follow-up on my bug report about the CRA careers site first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Checking my email this morning I found three more emails in my inbox! Each one as dodgy as the four I already mentioned.

One of them came to me from someone claiming to be from the “Robert Walters” recruitment agency, but the domain of the email was “robertwaltters.com”. Which obviously is a typosquatting tactic that works if you don’t pay attention to these “little” details.

Another came from a Gmail account, but a very funny one. The account that originated the scam was [name].[company].sgourmetpizzaa@gmail.com. I mean, come on. This guy was barely even trying. The interesting thing is that this came as a message that used Gmail “Confidential Mode”, which I thought was a scam until I read up on it and found that it actually exists. Nevertheless the only people I’ve seen using that feature are recruitment scammers, so I must add it to the already long list of “tells” of recruitment scams.

The third also came to me via Gmail “Confidential Mode”, and claimed to be from Northrop Grumman. Now that is a big company involved in aviation, so why would they be relying on free gmail addresses? FWIW the address they used was [lastname].[firstname].northrop.grumman@gmail.com.

So, stay vigilant my employment-seeking friends. The vultures out there know there are lots of bodies ripe for pickin’. In more positive news I did score an interview tomorrow. For Costco. I haven’t worked there for 35 years, but hey, it’s a job.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026 – an epilogue first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Unsurprisingly, all four “new connection” recuiters turned out to be scammers. I noticed that 3 of them no longer have LinkedIn accounts, and I just reported the fourth one.

The game is this: these “people” (probably AI bots) pretend to be “independent recruiters” who have a job you’d be interested in. This can be sniffed easily enough from your profile. They give you a little spiel about they’re impressed by your qualifications and experience and you’re almost sure to get the job… BUT they want to make sure you get picked and your resume could use improvement! And of course they know someone who can do this, for a fee.

What are the tells? Just look at the profile. Low number of connections (for a recruiter in this economy?), their email is a free account (gmail, outlook, yahoo), often they don’t appear in the “recruitment firm” they claim to work at but they follow that company, sometimes they’ll redirect you away from Linkedin messaging and onto a proper custom-domained email account… that’s also a free email account. 1/4 of the candidates in my experiment did this, and probably just didn’t know that Yahoo mail adds branding to the emails they send. Also the custom domain had no web site. For a recruiter. In 2026.

They’ll also be as impatient as a Nigerian scammer — if you don’t answer quickly they’ll keep pinging you on Linkedin, and send reminder emails that say stuff like “looking forward to your feedback”. 2/4 of the scammers “suggested” resume optimization within 2 hours. One of them even showed that my resume had an ATS score of 39%… when all the ATS checkers I used showed high 60s to low 70s.

So, yeah. Looking for a job makes you a huge target for scammers on Linkedin. But at least Linkedin seems to be doing something about it, or at least acting on the reports they get, even on a long weekend. So, there’s something positive to get out of this.

Ultimately, if something seems just a little too good to be true, it’s because it is. The tech job market is absolute shit right now and it’s not about to get better.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026: the unsurprising conclusion first appeared on The Clever Shark.

I’ve now been looking for employment for 8 months, after 4 month of unemployment last year and an unsuccessful stint at a job I had not applied for but been offered by the manager in charge, which turned out to be a complete shit show. So, I’ve come to know a lot about how companies hire — or, more exactly, DON’T hire — candidates at this time in history.

Along the way I’ve come across a number of sus “recruiters” who take it on themselves to string candidates along, promising jobs that pay a little too well, and try to sell you on “resume reviews” costing hundreds of dollars, while not really having any access or say in hiring decisions and probably not even being recruiters. Now, the thing about scams is that they tend to follow patterns. This is not a field of creative geniuses, and they have a number of tells.

So today I went to LinkedIn, posted a video entitled “Yes, You ARE Getting Auto-Rejected” which is apparently causing a whole lot of controversy in the HR community. A mere minutes later I was contacted by FOUR people claiming to be recruiters who have a job for me. One of them was for a job I had already applied for at the target company, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes from that. Two more advertised a job I had seen in my local job searches but was not a good fit for me for certain specific reasons.

Well, I decided to take the bait and send all four of them my resume, which has already been optimized by Claude AI for ATS performance. As things progress I’ll make follow-ups to track  the progress of these “applications”. So, stay tuned.

The post An experiment in hiring in 2026 first appeared on The Clever Shark.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

The post Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Swept into power after assuming the Liberal leadership after Justin Trudeau’s retirement, Carney did the two things Canada needed him to do at the time — stand up to the criminally insane Donald Trump, and save the country from the humiliation and indignity of a “Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre”, which honestly it probably wouldn’t have survived. However since that time, the mask of “great Canadian hero” has come off. Yes, Carney was an alternative to Poilievre, but sadly, that distinction has becomes little more than skin deep.

Where are the Canadian values in the Carney government? They’re just plain missing. The Prime Minister has done little for the country but consolidate power for himself by making recruiting MPs from other parties his first priority — not because he values diversity of opinion, but on the contrary, because he wants to consolidate the sort of power that a PM wields in the British Parliamentary system has an absolute majority.

And to achieve this, he has abandoned virtually every principle the Liberal Party has stood for, or at least has traditionally pretended to stand for. He has shown little but contempt for the country’s First Nations. He started his government by abandoning women’s issues, beginning with abolishing the ministry for women and gender equality and effectively relegating it as a back-burner issue. He has now officially told the country that the environment doesn’t matter, if it impacts business.

In short, he’s pretty much ruling as a Conservative. But he’s not going to tell you that.

The signs are all there, however. He waxed nostalgic about how Trudeau Senior’s national energy policy left him feeling betrayed as youth in Edmonton. He talks a good game about “data sovereignty” for Canada, but doesn’t see a problem with Canadian data being essentially controlled by Microsoft and other large American corporations. But the faux-nationalistic chest-beating and tired hockey cliches can’t hide the truth — as a country, we will be weaker than we’ve ever been in the face of the neo-liberal menace which has gradually been siphoning away everything we hold dear as a country. EI has become kind of a joke, and its decimation continues to accelerate, even as it is more needed than ever in the face of job purges led by “efficiency gains” of artificial intelligence, which Carney never fails to promote. Waiting lists in Canadian hospitals keep getting longer and longer, because Ottawa is constantly cutting transfer payments to provinces, and on top of that cutting the federal government payroll, which leads to more unemployment and a shrinking tax base not only for the provinces but also the federal government itself. The government is getting leaner and meaner with every passing month.

But oddly enough, the federal deficit is at a record high. Which would seem weird, if you didn’t realize that we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to push the neo-liberal accelerationism to new highs. And of course we’re doing all that without raising any taxes. I mean, Canadians are already very highly taxed, and as I’ve previously mentioned we’re getting less and less value for the value of our tax dollars, but that’s only half the story. Our corporate taxes are, frankly, a joke. The big reason why we’re paying more and getting less, as individual taxpayers, is that the overall tax burdens has shifted since the 1980s. 46 years ago the corporate sector paid a majority of the tax burden in North America. Now they pay less than half of the tax burden paid by individual taxpayers. That’s the neoliberal accelerationism I’m talking about.

So while increasing military spending and data infrastructure are not necessarily bad things, they also overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporate interests — not even necessarily Canadian corporate interests — while the burden of paying for all this investment will fall overwhelmingly on the people, who are increasingly poorer, less cared for, and less free. That’s a reference to many bills like C22 which Carney is ushering through Parliament, something I plan to write more about later, but I want to get this piece out today.

But you wouldn’t hear about that from the Canadian corporate news media, any more than the American corporate news media mentions Donald Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state — which many honest observers would describe as a descent into madness. Because in the corporate world, nations no longer matter. We are effectively ruled by billionaire media owners who control what we see and hear, and Carney’s pseudo-nationalism has done a great job bamboozling the people of this country, while corporate tax cuts have sent a clear message that the rich should get on Carney’s side because he’s looking out for them.

We’re more like the USA than we like to think. We may think they’re dumb for having voted Trump in, but we’re hardly better. We took the word of an establishment figure without checking any receipts, and like our neighbors to the South we’re soon going to be facing a bill that’s much, much higher than we can imagine.

The post We Need to Talk About Carney first appeared on The Clever Shark.