New Zealand Will Give You a Free Trip If You Agree to a Job Interview
time.com
time.com
That being said, most of the tech is centralized in just a few shops. Everything is contracted out to Datacom, Catalyst, Frondie, Solnet, etc. etc.
I mean companies do have their own IT staff, but just due to the shortage of talent, a lot gets contracted out, including tons of government stuff.
If you're under 30 and a US citizen, you can get a Holiday Work Visa and live/work there for a year. (This is how I started out, before switching to another visa). If you're a citizen of a commonwealth state, I think you can get a two year visa to most other commonwealth countries (including AU/NZ).
Oh and Wellington is the windiest city in the world. This is not an exaggeration. Oh and expect at least one earthquake a year too.
Seriously. I agree that it's a beautiful city in so many ways, but just spending a week there made me wonder if I would want to live in such a windy place.
New Zealand is really nice though. Laid back, safe(accept CBD on drinking nights), clean, etc.
It's what Aussies (like myself) and Kiwis call "downtown", or the city-centre.
Wow, if you think Auckland winters are bad, you must not have experienced a real winter in the northern hemisphere!
There's far colder (and darker, and wetter) winters in much of North America and Europe.
As for New Zealand (and I'm saying this as a Kiwi), it's an amazing place for the lifestyle. Not necessarily an amazing place for career opportunities, though.
I grew up there (and Christchurch) and remember being excited when their was a frost - it was the closest to snow we ever got.
It's an amazing place for sure but everytime I look at moving back to NZ I just get depressed about housing costs.
How does it compare to bay area housing costs?
Shh. The locals like it that way.
Of course winter is a shorter duration in Christchurch!
Constant weather is a bummer, but the cold and snow doesn't really bother me. As long as I can control the environment of my home without going broke from space heaters and dehumidifiers.
I have a very nuanced opinion of the life style :)I do miss the road trips and coffee. You're right about the opportunities; I may end up back in NZ some day when that's less of a concern.
I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but it doesn't snow in Auckland.
It's true that there's a big services sector, especially around government work. But there's also a lively startup/R&D scene. I worked 4 years for Mindscape (a dev tools startup, later to become Raygun), and then moved to GreenButton (HPC in the cloud, later acquired by Microsoft; the R&D team is still based in Wellington). Xero is a thriving, lively product company, although now large and mature; same with TradeMe. Weta Digital has a lot of in-house tech. And there are companies like 8i, just kicking off doing amazing things in motion capture and rendering.
So what you're saying is fair for "IT services" tech - if you want to do that, then yeah, Datacom is it. But there's so much more to the Wellington tech scene than IT services.
I don't know what Frondie is, and it's weird to see those companies mentioned on HN. Yes, they're all terrible body-shops to work for and they outsource a lot of work.
A woman in a wheelchair was declined residency due to her paralysis, despite working and having family in New Zealand: http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=...
https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/apply-for-...
[0] https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/options/wo...
Again, I am not prejudiced or anything. This is just a fact that I have accepted.
Edit: are you downvoting my comment because you think this is bad practice (which I agree to) OR are you saying my view of the reality is wrong?
as defined by Silicon Valley. There are plenty of roles outside of SV for the gray hairs.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/assigned/robpike
1. staying healthy
2. finding inspiration in your work
3. finding an employer that values the strengths and accommodates the limitation of older brains.
Grey of hair, ye need not despair.
*None love the bearer of bad news* --SophoclesAge discrimination exists, but it's not really the reason there are so few 55 year olds in software today. That's simply because very very few people in the 1980s took up a career in software. The industry was orders of magnitude smaller!
I've worked in multiple places that had absolutely zero problem hiring people in their 50s - when we were lucky enough to find people that experienced.
I've only seen this occur to people who failed to keep their skills up to date and failed to keep growing their abilities commensurate to their number of years of experience. Demand is still tremendous for people who are experienced and competent.
Neither reading that wiki page nor quick googling helped me find examples of the two different styles.
It's unethical to discriminate against your own citizens. They have zero obligation to provide entrance or any service to foreigners. No one has a natural right to enter New Zealand, especially if they aren't providing value to that country.
That's one of the sad costs of public safety nets though. You need to control immigration to keep out people who would take advantage of it. Otherwise this wouldn't be an issue.
It could be a reality show. Have your people call my people!
New Zealand's national fibre plan is brilliant. If only Australia could come up with such ideas...
I live 8km from Auckland CBD and haven't got fibre or an install date. Lines crap out when it rains. Every fibre install I have seen (and I keep an eye out for them) is terrible. Through driveway expansion joints, along fences etc. My view is quite the opposite on how good the roll out has been.
Mitchell and Webb had a sketch about a reality show that asked a couple to live in an early 1990s house for a while. There's a bit about the Internet in it.
At one point they discover that there's ice cream in the freezer... but it's Neapolitan. One of the couple starts sobbing.
(Source: doing the return trip right now)
For those who made the move - how was your experience ? IT scene ? Machine Learning related stuff anyone ?
There are two sides to this. The advert is for a job, and as an employee you're relatively protected against bad employers. Not protected enough in my view, but for those from other political environments it might seem rather alien. Given that most are employees and not employers it's a perspective worth considering.
Depends who you're talking to and their perspective. To an American, it seems like France. To someone from France (ie who you were replying to), it would seem like America.
Ease of Doing Business Index:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.BUS.EASE.XQ?view=map&...
NZ is top of the list.
As far as letting go of employees that aren't working out, NZ industrial relations legislation does include provision for a trial period that can be included in an employment contract. This trial period can be up to 90 days.
https://employment.govt.nz/starting-employment/trial-and-pro...
The UK is the same. Actually, most civilized countries have similar laws. You can't sack people at will (something I personally believe to be a terrible practice) and you have to have a good reason to do so. Never had a problem firing people that had to be fired. Just keep records, do things by the book. It isn't as onerous as it sounds. Send some emails, send some letters, most of the times nothing will be a surprise for anybody anyway.
I don't know where you get the idea that you cannot legally fire an employee. You can fire employees, and I have fired a fair share myself. You just have to do it correctly.
My impressions are:
PROS: - very beautiful country. Really, nature here is amazing!
- people are very friendly
- everything is quite simple and small, people know each other. It is more like a village, not a City
- climate is fine (in Auckland). Humidity is high - that is why it feels hot in summer and cold in winter
- no earthquakes (Auckland)
- very safe country
- coffee and beer and foods are amazing!
- it is clean
- lack of stress, slow pace of life
CONS:
- NZ is unreasonably expensive country to live in
- you can't really make money here. All salaries are pretty much the same. You'll get enough for living, but not much more.
- job market is small and weird (hence, limited career opportunities)
- rent is very high. You'll spend 40-60% of your salary on a rent.
- house prices are unreasonably high. It will be very difficult to buy a good house/apartment here
- quality of houses/apartments is very bad. They are tiny, old, ugly. Well, there are some nice houses, but they are far from CBD
- it is far far away from the rest of the world, hence it is expensive to travel from NZ to other countries
- it is boring here. Nothing is going on. About 4-5 good concerts/exhibitions/shows per year and that's it. The only ways to entertain yourself are: food (pubs, cafes, restaurants etc. But choice is very limited) and nature (hiking, camping, surfing, caving etc.)
- almost all cafes and shops close at 4-6pm. Yes, not many places to go after work.
- if you (or your wife) like shopping, then you'll be disappointed. Again, choice is very limited, quality is quite low, prices are unreasonably high.
- IT: it is just my opinion, but I would say that average IT specialist in NZ doesn't know much. I see a lot of IT people here who, for example, don't know how to use Git. Who never heard about Rust. Who never heard about LISP. Who have 8 years of Java experience, but don't know basic Java stuff. And so on. Honestly, this is quite disappointing
- companies don't hire you for your skills. They don't usually ask any technical question during interviews. Most probably they will just check if you are kind, polite, if you smile, if you can sell yourself
- employers here often require mythical 'New Zealand Experience'. Which means that if you've never worked in NZ, then it will be difficult for you to find your first job here (because you don't have NZ experience yet)
- people don't work hard here. They come to work slowly, relax, read news, drink coffee, work a little bit, then have lunch, then work a little bit again. When it's 5pm - they just go home.
- public transport is bad
Overall, NZ is a very very nice country, but it has some REALLY annoying and weird stuff. If you _don't_ really want to make a Career and Money, just want to relax, want to have no stress and anxiety, if you enjoy nature, then it would be great for you.
If you are more a 'city guy', who wants things to happen all the time around, who wants to make a career, have opportunities, who wants to live in a big modern city, then honestly, I would recommend Australia (Melbourne/Sydney) over New Zealand.
My wife and I are planning to move to Australia in the future.
I'm a bit surprised about the salary. I've seen than in IT it's pretty limited, but also that some other profession can make a very good living - my wife is a doctor and it looks like it's quite a good place to be for medical professionals.
Living costs, yes - that's something I expect. But coming from Paris, I don't think I will be shocked neither... Also, we already have 2 kids and will rather be looking at houses in the suburbs / outside of the main cities, so this should bring the costs down.
Again, thanks for great answer !
And NZ is a wonderful country for kids!
Also, french community is quite large here!
No, it doesn't work like that. Have a look at some RE websites and Google Maps. Prices are insane, even in places where you can't reasonably commute to places where there are jobs for educated people. Only places where prices aren't insane is in places people only go to get away from other people. Look, I loved living in NZ in some aspects, but it's not a place for someone with ambition. Even kiwis with ambition leave, even if they don't want really want to.
As for houses, I've checked and it sure looks expensive, but again - I'm living in Paris area where the prices are insane in my opinion. In the suburbs where I live, it's ~5000e/m2 - with almost 1h commute to work.
Yes, compared with central Paris, prices aren't that insane. But if you want to bootstrap a company, you are looking for (one or more of):
- cheap COL - access to customers - access to staff
In NZ, you have none of those. You'll be much cheaper off living in northern France or somewhere else 'remote' and rural in France, or even the rest of Europe. You'll spend thousands a month renting somewhere that isn't even particularly nice (houses are of crap quality in general), money that you won't have when you're getting a business started.
There aren't many companies that need or are willing to pay for cutting edge software. Sure, you can sell to anywhere in the world through the internet nowadays, but then why would you live hours flying away from your customers, on (relatively) crappy internet lines, many timezones away?
Most Kiwis worth hiring have moved to Oz. That is not to say that all Kiwis left are idiots, of course, but in general they won't be the sort of high-flying, go-getter people you'll want in the initial stages of your company. And those that are left will be hard to find or to convince joining you. It will be easier to convince young people looking for adventure coming from abroad to join you, but they'll be gone just as easily, too (I've seen it happen several times).
NZ is a great place to live if you want to have an outdoorsy-oriented, good work/life balanced lifestyle, while still being in an English-speaking, originally Europe (British) oriented country. Your friends and family will love saying how they will come visit you and then won't once they realize how far away it actually is (exaggerating only slightly here). Until the 1970's, NZ was a very insular, inward-facing, closed economy, of which the effects are still felt today. People like to live very spread out, which makes 4mm people responsible for maintaining infrastructure in an area bigger than the UK. It's true that the majority lives in a few cities, but that also makes those cities expensive.
May I suggest you go live there for a few months first before you move - and treat it as 'living' there, not 'holiday'. So living in the same place, daily rhythm of Mon-Fri 9-5 and doing laundry on the weekends, not being able to go anywhere without a car (this is the number one thing my daughter complained about, although she was only 4 at the time).
Good luck. If you take the plunge, I'm sure you'll have a great time and it'll be a great adventure, but your chances of being the traditional definition of 'successful' will not improve with going there (nothing wrong with that, of course - everybody has to define for themselves what constitutes 'successful').
I may be wrong, but money shouldn't be that much of issue based on what I've heard / read - it seems like doctors are making plenty of money there (as opposed to France, where they are very underpaid, compared to cost of living). Does this sound plausible to live on one income only (family with two kids) ?
We are actually going there next week for 15 days, to see how life is. We're only doing the northern island since it's most probably were we would like to live (and we will have plenty of time to visit the southern one once there). 15 days is short, but I hope we will get a fair idea about the country.
Thank you all guys for the opinions !
- IT: it is just my opinion, but I would say that average IT specialist in NZ doesn't know much. I see a lot of IT people here who, for example, don't know how to use Git. Who never heard about Rust. Who never heard about LISP. Who have 8 years of Java experience, but don't know basic Java stuff. And so on. Honestly, this is quite disappointing
As a New Zealander, I found this quite jarring when I got out into industry as well. I just assumed it was because I was an outlier though. I thought it's probably fairly unusual for programmers in general to spend a lot of time on hacker news or technical IRC channels or trying out different programming languages. Again, where is this different? I'd love to go.
It depends. I'm talking more about salary/rent ratio. In Russia I was spending about 30% of my salary for rent (and apartment was big and new and nice). Here I spend about 40%. And apartment is tiny and bad (in comparison). Then, here I pay much more for broadband ($95, and it is much slower), more for a phone. And fuel is muuuch more expensive here.
> Again, where is this different? I'd love to go.
Back in Russia, in all companies I've worked at (not top-tier companies) the team was great: they knew a lot of stuff, we were discussing JVM internals during lunch breaks, talked about new things in IT etc. I miss that.
I'm assuming that what you save in NZ is higher than what you save in Russia though - after feeding, clothing, housing and entertaining yourself.
Back in Russia, in all companies I've worked at (not top-tier companies) the team was great: they knew a lot of stuff, we were discussing JVM internals during lunch breaks, talked about new things in IT etc. I miss that.
That's really interesting. The only thing I really know that came out of Russia is Nginx, I didn't know that in general Russia had such a tech scene. Wonder if that's because English language proficiency isn't high.
Russian techies are among the best in the world, and the stuff they work on would surprise you. Companies like Luxoft write in-flight software for Boeing. Outsourcing to Russia and Eastern Europe is massive. If you have a seriously tough problem, get a Russian to fix it. Source: My late wife was Russian, and a software developer. Have worked almost exclusively with Russian developers for the past years. They do amazing stuff, with a fantastic attitude.
I think that depends on where you're working. It's definitely true in the general corporate/govt 'IT' scene, but working for startups / product companies (in Wellington at least) it is definitely not the case.
What's right: There's not much money to be made as an employee, and the further south you head, the worse it is. About 15 minutes south of Christchurch onwards, employers have this idea that they've hired you so you owe them. If you work in Dunedin, expect very low wages and a requirement for unpaid overtime from 25% of your ordinary hours upwards; my last fulltime job there was working 70 hours a week and then taking another 5-15 hours home, meaning I was paid illegally - $4/hour less than minimum wage.
Worker protections are collapsing, and discrimination against age and disabilities is rife. A friend of mine couldn't get a job because he was 46, and one particular company I applied to loved me until they learned I had a disability.
Employers were surveyed a couple of years ago (I can't find the article that reported it, I think it was on the New Zealand Herald website) and a good portion of them said that discrimination against the disabled was disgusting and should be punished, but they were willing to do it for their own businesses.
Anti-intellectualism is also quite strong here, and many emigrants from the country are exporting the attitude. One particular individual gave me hell for years, for bothering to get a CS degree. "Why bother? You can get corporate experience in your home!" He refused to get his head around the whole CS != IT thing. (I've recently discovered that he's gone to university to get himself a degree in design, quite the hypocrite.)
Housing is terrible, again the further south you go the worse it is, with the worst (oldest) in Dunedin. I rented a house down there that had no underfloor insulation, shredded paper as insulation in the roof space, with gaps around doors and windows I could fit fingers through. It was just two bedrooms, and you have to perform section maintenance (i.e. mow the lawns, trim the hedges) too. That's par for the course, and cost about 40% of our wages. If you want a warm and nicely insulated three bedroom house, you'd be looking at nearer to 60% of your income.
I heard of one research project into energy efficiency in Dunedin housing, where it was revealed that 70% of energy (might have been more) is leaked out of a house before a person is warmed.
Food is quite expensive, too.
Public transport is godawful.
There is very little to do - shops and cafes do close early, although restaurants, bars, and fast food joints are open late. If you're into the big four sports, you're fine (rugby and it's derivatives, cricket, netball, and hockey) otherwise you're basically out of luck. There are some paintball courses and that kind of thing, but basically if you're not into sports or hunting, be prepared to be taunted. There's a very vocal but relatively small section (~37%) of the population who believe that sports are manly and anybody who doesn't like sports is of dubious sexuality. Oh, and if the local rugby team (the All Blacks) lose a match, domestic violence rates as well as general assaults go up as people look to avenge that defeat, but if the team wins, general assaults go up as people go out looking to boost how great the country is.
If you get a "decent" job working in IT, you will likely be expected to go far beyond what would be expected for your role. Watch out for "...and anything else we say is your job," clauses in your contracts. Also make sure you get copies of your contracts (my last five jobs illegally refused to provide me with one and made it very clear that if I made a fuss about it, I would never work again).
Let's see, what wasn't mentioned. You have to love it here, if you don't you'll be told to "go back where you came from."
If you cross a particular politician (Paula Bennett), she can and will release all your private information if she likes, and not get in any trouble for it. Google it, if you doubt me.
If you want to hear the absolute worst of the country, browse this: https://e2nz.org/migrant-stories/
It's not all that bad, and I always made a point of accepting people for who they are and how they behave towards me. As someone who lived there for years, there is quite honestly no future in the place unless you have a significant income stream.
What's wrong: people don't work hard here.
Not completely wrong, but I will explain. In my last job, I wasn't the only one working double my hours - my immediate boss was working the same hours I was, plus another 20% at one point. I'm sure you can imagine why many people don't bother putting in a good effort. That particular workplace, very few worked to the best of their ability because there was no recognition for it (the guy running the place took the credit, and the cash bonus) and it meant that was your new standard.
His boss was working 8 hours a day, getting paid almost $100k/year. He made (and probably makes) the worst decisions imaginable, such as rolling staff cuts but increasing workload for staff who are already working some hours for free each day. He'll pay attractive female staff members much more (as much as 2 1/3 times), but if you're a plain or unattractive female you get only slightly more (measured in cents) than the males, who get minimum. Try and do something about it, you'll wind up meeting a half dozen of the owner's friends. Also see this: https://e2nz.org/2015/01/27/migrant-tales-engineer-says-new-...
tl;dr: if you're in a low paid job, you have to do more work. If you're in a high paid job, you do little and blame others for what goes wrong.
Think carefully before committing to New Zealand. It can be a filthy little hole.
I disagree. I'm kiwi, and have lived in a few countries overseas (I still do) and think that New Zealanders are the hardest working people I've ever met. Compared to many Europeans, and even Americans, kiwi employees seem to actually deliver more in the allocated time, and go home. That work-life balance is awesome, and I don't think it's a negative. Our company constantly hires kiwis because, well, they seem to work better than anyone else.
Honestly I can't really see why I should go to New Zeeland even if they had a great jobmarket: why relocate half-way around the world to a country that as far as I know has no interesting tech companies.
If that's truly what's holding you back, I gather that New Zealand might not be the place for you. I have been told, however, that NZ has other fine qualities having little to do with tech. For instance, the fact that it's half-way around the world, and they talk like those musicians on that HBO show, might be reason enough for me personally.
It's this vacuum and the growing tech needs that allows for these programs to happen, or for somebody to get a 5 year work visa on work experience alone.
As of March 2nd 16:00 GMT
International speeds can occasionally be a bit slow, but the widespread use of caching and CDNs limits the impact of this. It's mostly pretty good.
Not for me.
Having no real winter must get really boring.
My ideal summer includes a month or two of 30C, rather than that being the highest temperature ever recorded.
The long flight to NZ is covered. You're only paying for a short NZ/Aus return flight.
That just seems like the fair thing to do.
You've already traveled that far and you've done what they've asked you to. What you do in your spare time is your business. I see nothing unethical about paying for your own return flight to Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to extend your chances at employment.
New Zealand: free plane ticket. Rugby. But then, Australia has that, too. Umm.
Hmmm.
Honestly, being born in New Zealand, earned a Bachelor CS degree, unable to get a job there. Before I graduated, I had plenty of experience but no qualification so nobody would take me. After I graduated, the same places said I had a qualification but no experience so they wouldn't take me.
The two hardest things in programming are naming things, caching things, and off-by-one errors.
I would need a week just to adjust, and then talking english all the time is a major drain that to.
But I can't afford it just to hear "sorry, we've decided to go with someone else."
United entered the market within the last two years and that does seem to have driven the prices down a bit.
I fly to Auckland or Christchurch at least once a year with a family of 4 so welcome cheaper prices!
I'd love to visit New Zealand, not sure I wanna stay. It's nice there but it's really far from everything.
P(Move to NZ | Visit NZ) >> P(Move to NZ)
Exactly how we like it.
Yes, we've all met (or been, at occasion) such people; and yes, it's theoretically possible to interview 100 of such people at the same time. But in reality, the probability of that happening is astronomically lower compared to the probability that the problem was in the interviewer in the first place.
The costs of this interview are higher but then so is the relative gain of a good hire if they're bleeding talent internationally. The fundamental nature of the gamble is the same.