Hi everyone!

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but kept thinking “I’ll publish it once I have good news to share.” Well, that’s clearly not a strategy that’s working, so here we are. I’m still job searching, and it’s been a while!

Beginning of the search

When I first started looking last April, my mom was here visiting, which meant I actually had someone to watch my toddler (1.5 year old back then) during the day. So I had this window of a few months where I could do interviews without the logistics being a complete disaster. And not even interviews, I first had to remember everything I did before I went on mat leave, which is another story of how the brain was operating after a year of no sleep. But anyway, things were kinda moving and I was excited. And then people would ask: “When can you start?” And I’d have to say: “I’m not sure yet, I need some time to find childcare.”

And while it wasn’t a deal breaker per se, you could feel the energy shift in some of those calls. A few recruiters said they understood, but most didn’t, and I get it. From a hiring perspective, why would you wait for someone when there are fifty other candidates who can start in two weeks? It’s not personal, it’s just how it works.

Childcare

But here’s the thing about Vancouver daycare that I feel like I need to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived this: it’s genuinely insane. You are on the waitlists for a year or two, but waitlists don’t work (they do for some daycares but for most they don’t). You have to constantly call and kind of humiliate yourself, ask everyone around, MAYBE you get lucky and get a spot but it’s pure luck. A nanny sounds like the obvious backup plan until you see that it costs around $4,000 a month. So you can’t afford the nanny without the second income, but you can’t get the second income without the childcare. A fun little loop.

We finally got a daycare spot starting in September 2025 for $2,000 a month. We thought: oh great, now everything can move because this is the investment that unlocks the job. It’s April 2026 and there’s still no job. During all this time I took off some months from looking for a job: winter breaks, illnesses, spring break, but mostly I’ve been actively looking.

I want to be clear that I’m not complaining about the daycare or money or anything, it’s great and my son loves it most of the time. But I’d be lying if I said the math doesn’t feel a bit bleak some months.

Mom guilt

And then there’s the mom guilt part that nobody really wants to talk about.

People ask: “Have you found a job yet?” And I say no. And they don’t say anything, but you can feel them doing the math. Two thousand dollars a month for daycare and no income? That math doesn’t work, unless you must be super rich (we are not haha). Sometimes they ask it directly: “But aren’t you paying for daycare while you’re not working?” Yes, yes, I am.

There’s this weird shame that lands on you in those moments. Like I’m being irresponsible somehow or I should have planned this better, or figured it out differently, or picked a different time.

I know some men who’ve been job searching for more than a year (it’s just a reality of the current market, nothing to be ashamed of). Nobody asks them about daycare costs or implies they’re wasting money or being irresponsible. It’s just a thing they’re doing. For the men, it’s a job search and for me it’s starting to feel like a character flaw.

And it’s not just one thing at a time. My son ages out of his current daycare in September, which means I’m starting the search all over again. Three months of calls, waitlists, hoping to get lucky. All of this happening in parallel with the job search and feeling completely drained because I can’t find either. My husband is incredibly supportive, but I’m the one with the time to make all the calls, track all the waitlists, follow up on everything.

The market

Okay, now let’s talk about the job market itself, which is its own thing.

Tech has had wave after wave of layoffs over the past couple of years, which means there are a lot of experienced people looking for the same roles I’m looking for. So even when a good position opens up, the competition is intense in a way it just wasn’t a few years ago.

On top of that, the RTO trend has quietly made Vancouver a harder market. Most of the interesting roles I find are in Toronto, or they used to be remote and now require hybrid. Vancouver has always had fewer options, so it’s really bad now. You find something promising, click through, and it’s either Toronto-based, or EST only or has been sitting on LinkedIn for four months with no signs of life.

The other thing nobody talks about is the ghost jobs. Postings that have been up forever, that get reshared and reposted, that may or may not reflect an actual open role. You spend time researching the company, tailoring your application, maybe even getting excited, and then nothing. It’s hard to know if you should keep applying or just accept that some of these positions don’t really exist.

So you’re dealing with: fewer real openings, more candidates per opening, a city that’s not exactly a tech hiring hub, and a feed full of positions that may be mirages.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself busy. Building personal projects, doing courses, using AI tools in ways that actually help me think through GTM problems, talking to people in the industry, doing interviews, some of which went really well and ended in nothing (that’s a special kind of confusion and depression trigger).

I’m also watching the whole “consultant posting daily on LinkedIn” thing from a distance and genuinely not knowing what to think (I do sometimes take on side projects and would love to have more consulting work). Like, is it working? Is the daily content actually generating business, or are we all just performing busyness for each other? I honestly don’t know the answer.

The honest truth is that I want to be back in a full-time PMM role. Not because my projects aren’t interesting (or I don’t have motivation to publish them..), but because I miss the thing itself: the cross-functional collaboration, the launches, the actual team.

I don’t even know how to end this post. Guess I’ll write another one when I have some good news.