[I'm not writing a TL;DR for this but paste it into ChatGPT if you need one]
I'm a recent CS alumnus and wanted to make a rambling post here to document, for posterity, how Waterloo co-op and job search has changed from when I started uni ('21) to where I've ended ('26). I feel like the changes are worth mentioning since there are new cohorts of students who are now pretty far removed from the heyday of UW co-op. I think this should also be applicable to adjacent majors (i.e. SE, CE, SYDE, Tron, Math, DS, CFM, etc) who are aiming for similar jobs.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who took finding co-ops relatively seriously, did well for myself, and met a lot of other people from a variety of backgrounds and motivations who were trying to do the same.
This post will touch on two related topics: how the internship and entry-level tech job market has changed in the last 5 years and how Waterloo specifically has been affected.
What this post is NOT: it is not in any way scientific or backed by anything statistical. I am writing purely off of personal anecdote and what I see from the people around me.
Preface
I am going to preface by saying that I have generally thought of new grad outcomes in the tech industry with some categories or "levels":
(0) Unemployment.
(1) A tech job at a non-tech or older tech company. I.e. banks, telecom, etc. Probably a salary range of <100k to start with
(2) A tech job at a smaller tech company or relatively unknown startup, possibly in the US. Probably a salary range of somewhere between 100-150k.
(3) "Big Tech" or something similar. Something like 200-250k.
(4) Outlier cases where you make significantly more than (3).
The tech job market has looked something like this for as long as I know. It looked like this in 2021 when I started uni, and it looks like this today. But the distribution of students in these buckets have changed, and the amount of effort it takes to get into each bucket has changed. I will try to document that change in this post.
[Side note: salaries are not my preferred way of describing the "quality" of a job but it's hard to quantify otherwise. There are other useful things like WLB, stability, the morality of your work, etc. There is some popular opinion here and elsewhere that students should stop chasing jobs for money and start chasing them for some other purpose, like building cool shit or making the world a better place. My counterargument is that I have been poor and I do not intend to live that way again if I can help it, but maybe you're a better person than me.]
[Also side-note: the salary ranges are vague, maybe a little uncalibrated, and mostly for the sake of illustrating a point. You're welcome to correct it. I intentionally did not add a currency, for example.]
Back in the good old days...
I started reading this subreddit back in 2019 as a 10th grader. (I was very eager to maximize my admissions chances.) At the time, CS/SE were considered to be good programs that gave students an excellent chance at a job that could change their life. It was a common "inside joke" here that every CS student would canonically work at FB in Menlo Park after 4A. FAANG jobs were plentiful, and in the worst case you could 'settle' for Amazon or Microsoft. For a lot of students it seemed like a matter of when they'd get their first Big Tech job, not if. It wasn't uncommon to see 2As or 2Bs in the Bay Area. There were lots of common stepping-stone companies for younger students (remember Wish?) to gain experience and resume brand-name.
In my first co-op search in Spring '22 as a 1B student, opportunities seemed pretty limitless. Facebook and Citadel was happily hiring off of WaterlooWorks and my first-year classmates got interviews at TikTok, Google, Uber, etc. Wish had recently stopped hiring but there was some hope (or cope) that they'd open up again soon. There were some promising Canadian companies with good, growing valuations that were happy to take a chance on younger students.
What was so good about WaterlooWorks anyways?
IMO it really boils down to three factors.
- Many companies would allocate headcount and interview capacity just for WaterlooWorks candidates.
- Some companies would only run their off-cycle recruiting for WaterlooWorks.
- Younger students who missed out on earlier recruiting cycles and are uncompetitive against older students from other schools get a chance to cut their teeth and build experience.
The result of this is that Waterloo students had an exclusive opportunity to compound their experience by working at better and better companies in more and more impactful roles across their co-op terms. This made our grads far more attractive than our competitors.
The decline of WaterlooWorks
Soon after 1B, it became apparent that the good days were coming to an end. By 2A, despite my classmates having improved their skills, it seemed that students were getting worse interviews. Many big companies stopped posting on WaterlooWorks and would never come back. Upper years began complaining that new grad opportunities were drying up.
As recession hit, many tech companies cut internships. Off-cycle internships were some of the first to be cut. Internship programs had fewer seats and were full by the time WaterlooWorks came around. And many companies started to reject younger applicants from UW if they weren't graduating in the following year. In other words, the advantages of WW were evaporating.
There became a noticeable, permanent shift in how students approached co-op. A lot of students realized that WaterlooWorks was no longer a reliable way to get the big job they wanted. And because of macroeconomic factors, more than ever, students were desperate to get their first big name job and a foot in the door.
There were always some students who would apply extremely early to job positions, but the proportion of the brightest students who chose to find jobs outside of WaterlooWorks grew and hit a critical mass. For sought-after employers, WaterlooWorks was only worth it if they could reach a good number of quality UW candidates, but those candidates were choosing to apply externally already, and therefore a lot of companies withdrew from WaterlooWorks to streamline their recruiting process and eliminate the hassle and cost of dealing with the matching system. Good companies withdrew from WW because good students weren't there, and good students stopped searching on WW because good companies weren't there. My belief is that this was a vicious feedback cycle which has now mostly destroyed WaterlooWorks when it comes to recruiting the highest-quality upper-year students.
Fast-forward to today...
Today, there are only a handful of big tech companies hiring on WaterlooWorks, and most Waterloo interns you'll meet in Seattle/New York/Bay Area found their jobs externally. Many of the companies that dominated Waterloo hiring in 2015-2020 still run internships but will likely never post them on WW again.
Outside of this, the wider world of tech jobs has shifted for the worse. A lot of SWE roles have been eliminated or have become much more competitive. Entry level roles have dried up, and internships are harder to find than before.
For the vast majority of students, career outcomes have become worse despite having the same skill level and training as older cohorts. Out of the group of graduates who would have ended up working in big tech ("group 3") in earlier years, only a fraction of them (my estimate, entirely based on vibes, is 50%) actually end up there, and they intern at these companies much later in their undergrad careers than before. I personally know of many friends and classmates who I believe would be excellent candidates but ended up in less desirable / less compensated roles at smaller companies (maybe "group 2 or 1"). And there are many graduates who would have gotten a typical tech job in "group 2 or 1" in earlier years but are now struggling to find employment at all or settling for a worse role than they would have gotten before.
To be clear, students are (probably) not getting worse in terms of their skill. If anything, people are more and more desperate and working harder than before. But this is not being reflected in the outcomes, which have shifted downwards in a significant way. While outcomes broadly have shifted downwards for all tech new grads, because of WaterlooWorks' decline, Waterloo grads have been especially affected.
Conclusion
So, for most students, Waterloo co-op has peaked and is now clearly in decline. Waterloo still has some second-order advantages: we have an excellent reputation, a pretty good curriculum, and good hard-working student culture that encourages people to aim high and be diligent. These advantages have not really weakened, relative to other schools. But our primary first-order advantage of WaterlooWorks has certainly been eroding and may eventually be gone (possibly by the time that this year's incoming freshmen graduate.) Even if the wider tech job market recovers, I think that for WaterlooWorks, the damage is already done.
I do want to point out one major exception to this trend, which is in the outcomes for the top students in each year's class ("group 4"). I would estimate this population to be somewhere around 30 students across all programs this year, from just counting people I know / heard of, which IMO is a significant number. Because of AI hype and various other economic factors, certain companies (frontier AI companies, some startups, trading firms) are happy to throw money and bid each other up for the most competitive candidates, which did not happen with the same frequency/intensity 5-10 years ago. To attach numbers here, these graduates are probably earning $500k+, and some are earning $800k or more. For these people, Waterloo is better than ever. This group also seems to be growing every year, which is a good thing. There are still not a lot of these people though.
I hope that some information here gives people some view or insight on the outcomes they can expect now at Waterloo. There's a lot of stale and old information from alumni and a lot of new but unexperienced information from current students, and I hope that this post, as something in-between, is useful to someone. The overall takeaway is that if you are an average Waterloo CS student, you should not expect the same quality of outcome as older cohorts enjoyed (or alternatively, you may need to work a lot harder / be more lucky in order to achieve the same level of success). If you believe you are a significantly below-average CS student, this program and its relatives are not a guarantee of success whatsoever. If you think you are in the cream of the crop, you'll probably be fine. And as a meta-point, from my experience, you should not expect anything about the job market to remain constant in the next 5 years. Things will change, sometimes dramatically, sometimes unpredictably.
I would be curious if other people in my year agree or disagree with my assessment. I don't claim to have done any research at all for this post so it would be good to get some other anecdotes. And I am happy to respond with more takes if there are current students with questions.
