Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre).
Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff.
I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!
No they don't. Because not everything is about money. Life in Australia is just better than some war zone in California.
No longer have to worry about gun violence, surprise bankrupting medical bills & an anti-intellectual population prolonging the devastation of a virus that's killed >500k of the fellow population.
There's going to be better opportunities to work for mega tech conglomerates in the US but I'd expect great devs will be able to get hired remotely, although the salary for IT professionals is pretty decent in Australia as well.
What? I mean, I don't live there and I don't really like it there (except the central coast region) but that characterization is a bit much.
Growing up in the sticks I'd heard so much about it and had hilariously low expectations when I went out for an internship, but then I found out that it's a fucking amazing place. I swear there's got to be a decades long campaign to make outsiders think the place is terrible in an attempt to keep density down. Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy if so. Don't want my paragliding ocean bluffs overpacked with people. :P
(I worked at Google Sydney for 5 years)
Given this reality, we'll continue to be safe/slow followers to the rest of the world. Which is sad given this statistic! It is a huge wasted opportunity where we could be leaders in ideation, creations, thoughts, inventions etc.
I don't want life to change, but in the bigger picture, I don't want us to fall behind in the pack.
Most Australian tech companies are mundane and boring. They lack ambition because the base quality of life is just so damn good.
Do you really see this as a negative?
As an average entrepreneur you are incentivised to play it safe by bootstrapping into existing industries, and because our market is so small the potential for hockey stick growth isn't there so investment isn't an attractive option either.
So I think you raise some good points but they may be aimed at people interested in the fast paced investment fueled software industries, and there are plenty of entrepreneurs and developers who much rather the moderate and grounded pace Australia offers.
I also agree that we have a lot of latent opportunities that can't be realised in that same environment, we are at an apex of cost and availability that makes it really difficult to pull off big risky projects so that leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
What's the definition of 'good use' here?
I've had plenty of offers to go work in the US but have always chosen to remain closer to my family and maintain an enjoyable work/life balance while still being able to travel internationally for projects as required.
I'd consider that an excellent use of my skills, though I admit a certain amount of bias.
I'm curious what you mean by this, and didn't get a full picture from the sentences afterwards.
I might not work in B2C "world changing" stuff, but the work I have done over the past decade runs infrastructure that the actual world is changed by. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, which is likely.
Edit: Well, I guess I said something wrong. Disparaging an entire country's developers as "never really getting to put their skills to good use" is acceptable, but pointing out that that simply isn't the case universally, and being proud of the work I've done isn't.
Great people and great experience overall.
This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.
Aside from that, and this isn't Australia specific, but the acceptance of WFH over the last year across industries is quite exciting, with regards to reducing CoL.
They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
She regularly looks at house prices in Sydney and dreams of selling our house and moving to Sydney but frankly I would never move there. I would visit, but I would not move there.
Silicon Valley pays USD$500k to staff engineers. CTOs for relatively large companies in Australia don't make that kind of money.
The UK value translates to just above £29k as an average annual salary. That might just about be an average annual new graduate starting salary across the whole of the UK, but even there it seems low. In terms of all software engineers it is most definitely off by several grand.
$71k is just barely above what the BLS reports as the 10th percentile for software developers in the US[1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany.
So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification?
So Germany is a failed state for software developers.
It's hilarious to me that most people in European countries will think this about their own country. I should know, as a Belgian having lived in Sweden with friends all over.
A 40% overall tax rate is among the highest, but about the same level as Belgium or Denmark as far as I understand. 4900€ gross as an average definitely isn't bad, though - that would probably be more like 3500€ here.
As to your conclusion of a "failed state": am I correct in assuming that like in Belgium, France, Holland and to a minor degree Sweden, the valuation of management types is much higher than any technical functions (i.e. engineers, programmers, devops) in Germany?
AND, these day jobs are fluid, just because someone works a mundane job does not mean that's their only job/contribution to society. In fact, the fact that they work a low demand job can enables them to be more entrepreneurial/creative/commit to their community/family, as opposed to some devs who spend every awaking moment perfecting their craft, only to use that skill to help some corporate sell people things they don't need.
AND, you're paying taxes for all the social services/safety net you're entitled, so you don't have to live in constant fear and save like crazy like people from Ukraine or Asia where I'm from.
Central European companies seem to outsource so much development work to Barcelona. You'd think that salaries would start increasing there by now.
However despite this, we find it hard to get candidates through our pipeline - even to the point where interviewers have been told "I have 15 years of programming experience, why do you expect me to code now". Now, I'm positive we could improve the screening and process we have in place for this - but by the same token it's not terrible... Yes, MSFT is not a FAANG and maybe there is some selection bias in the people who apply - but we also do manage to attract and retain good people who get through the process.
We also offer a competitive package for Sydney, with the ability to take that and work remote from anywhere in Australia, if anyone is looking for a SWE role :)
When a candidate flat out refuses to, then this is a huge red flag.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have.
I don’t agree with your whiteboarding assertion.
The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.
This could also say that they are now choosing to send tests to more desperate candidates than before. Either way, I see no way for stats like this to not suffer from selection bias, and after scanning the article I wouldn’t take the numbers too seriously.
Can I ask where you've learned this?
australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.
From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies.
I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
Kind of a joke, but for the devs who are on the receiving side of this platform, maybe not really.
You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution !
It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?
Check out https://www.instaclustr.com/careers
We work with companies like Doordash, Atlassian, Sonos and Dream 11 running some of their most important databases at massive scale.. and these are just the ones we can mention.
On top of that we are in Canberra :) Though if you wanna stay in Sydney or Melbourne that's cool to!
That feels risky?
For instance, Germany and France, colors vs. percentages, don't make sense to me. Are my eyes the problem?
It would be kind of ironic that it was a bug.
Well done AusDevs!
But the more interesting metric is, is this correlated with having the highest pay?
Cost of living normalized of course.
