Is the current job market purely luck based?

Hi, I’m 23M international student in Canada, almost done with my master’s in computer science. I’ve been programming since before high school. I used to build simple games and stuff in C++ which I learnt by myself using turbo C++ docs and no internet. Then I moved to Python learnt it through some online videos, tried web dev (Django, Flask, HTML, CSS, js etc.) and tried building my own company during undergrad with the website, promotions and the whole thing. But then COVID hit and it didn’t work out. During COVID I did several internships while still an undergrad in my country, attending all my classes and excellent grades.

There was a time during that when I was doing 3 internships at the same time and handling them with no difficulty. One was at a trading startup where I built several trading algorithms and tools from scratch by myself which are still in use and sold as a standalone service by the company. The Second was at an e-learning company where I worked on their e-learning platform (still in use today) using Django backend and vanilla frontend. The third was at an IoT company building security devices on a contract basis, nailed that one as well, worked on 2 contracts with them, delivered on time and made several post changes for the client.

2nd year of COVID I worked at a company called IHS Markit (now part of S&P Global) as a Data Analyst intern to analyze big data and use deep learning to propose better and faster architectures. Final year of COVID and my final year at undergrad I worked at Amazon as a support engineer intern. That work was too simple for me, completed my tasks by the middle of 2nd month then contributed to other active projects in the team and with international teams working on other products using Python as I already had a lot of experience by then. Also, published 2 research papers, on machine learning and video generation using deep learning. And worked on 2 freelance projects which I delivered on time and am still maintaining one of them till now (for hosting, occasional changes etc.)

Then tragedy struck, I didn’t get any good job offers, I received a few and the best of those from Amazon for a horrible pay as a support engineer. Whereas my batchmates got lucrative job offers from big companies both domestic and international, I couldn’t even find one with decent pay, at a good company, which I believed I deserved after working so hard all these years.

So I left the country, came to Canada for my master’s somehow got into research and did pretty well. On my way to submitting my 4th research paper in computer science and a patent soon, on an algorithm in the field of machine learning and nanoscience. And a final GPA of 9.8. But even still last summer I tried applying for co-op positions, got 2 interviews and 0 offers. I left the hope of finding one somewhere around 300+ applications.

Now I’m about to graduate, I have a good-looking resume, ATS friendly resume with keywords and metrics, a polished LinkedIn profile, and a customized cover letter for all the jobs I apply to (AI). I’m at the 200 application mark with some applied using a referral, for Data Scientist, Data Analyst and if nothing then at least Data Engineer. Yet I have 0 replies, 0 interviews and 0 you are under consideration.

I have altogether done 6 internships, all relevant to my background, 2 freelance projects, several research papers (many still in review) and research assistantships, a thesis soon to be completed in CS/ML, several projects and soon a patent. None “technically” count as full-time, but I worked 40h a week on all the jobs and just on the jobs alone I have close to 4 years of work experience and I am still 23. My list of skills and experiences doesn’t even fit on 1 page of my resume so I have to trim down a lot of it to the latest stuff.

I don’t want to boast anymore because the previous paragraphs already seem a lot boasty but all of it is true and still quite some left out. So I want to just ask this, what else do employers want? Even after all this what more am I supposed to do to get a simple entry-level job? How is all this still not enough to get a good job at a good company? Is the entire tech job market sooo good at every skill in the world and more experienced than I am?

Is it just luck that I’m lacking?