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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing you haven't had to try and hire devs in Australia before if cost of developers is what you think the main problem is.

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I've recently had a pretty good look at the Melbourne software dev market and there are seemingly plenty of senior devs looking for work, companies here appear to have the "pick of the litter" when hiring.

Maybe you're just in the wrong part of Australia?

When you say you had a pretty good look at the market what do you mean?

I mean I helped someone look for a new role and got to see the major local players and the talent pool they're hiring from (if they hire at all, lots of places seem to advertise but are in no hurry to actually hire anyone.)

There are plenty of fish in the sea, at least around here. All you have do is go to a meetup group or two to see that.

How did you see the talent pool they are hiring from if you were helping someone look for a job and not helping someone hire for a job?

Did you ask companies to see their applicant lists and CVs or something?

Any of the meetups I've been to in Australia are mostly employed people(half only there to try and find other devs), recruiters and uni students or recent grads. Which meetups did you go to it would likely be worth adding them to my list for next time I'm in Melbourne.

I think he's implying that there should be more poaching... Personally I find it a strange concept which seems confined to sales and tech jobs (especially in America)

Melbourne is a positive outlier and not at all representative of the rest of Australia. Finding senior devs in Brisbane is an insanely arduous process and its not uncommon to see positions take 6+ months to fill (at least at the places I've worked at). Even when companies start throwing money around like crazy, the talent just isn't there.

I've heard that Sydney isn't so great either. Once devs hit seniority they run along to join a hip Melbournian startup, get gobbled up by Atlassian, or just migrate to Silicon Valley.

So what's the salary you're offering for this unfillable position, and what's the average price of a home there?

Can you explain?

It's really hard to find intermediate to senior devs in Australia and has been for nearly a decade. It's even harder now with a few big companies like Atlassian grabbing them up enmasse whenever they become available.

Sounds like they're simply expensive to hire, not necessarily hard to find.

Say you need a senior developer and there are none on the market so you offer mine a 10% increase and free chocolate bars to come work for you. You now have a senior developer and I'm now in need of one but there are none of the market.

When you suggest someone pay developers more to hire them away from the competition you aren't solving the problem you are just moving it to another company.

Wages go up, people flood into the field -- I'm not sure what the problem is there? Don't we collectively want software development to become more financially attractive so that more students choose to study it?

You seem to fail to understand the difference between a junior and an intermediate to senior dev and think they are interchangeable.

A bunch of new people flooding into the field are zero use to companies that need higher level employees to grow. And will be zero use for a number of years.

I get planning for the future is good but it doesn't solve the current problem at all.

The current problem is that companies are unwilling to pay what they need to to get what they want.

I understand your point about there not being enough senior devs locally, but I'm still iffy about that being true. I would accept that argument if the wages had doubled in the past few years or so, but that hasn't happened. The companies aren't trying hard enough.

So I'm guessing you have found your attempts to hire senior devs in Australia to be easy?

I'm not a hirer but a lowly employee.

See my recent edit. I keep an eye on the market and I haven't seen any crazy wage increases.

I'm not against being convinced of the point but atm I'm just not convinced that there's no senior devs to find, at the right price.

Also, how long have these visas been going on for?

It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem I guess. Because of the band-aid fix of the visas, the wages never go up and there's no extra incentive for people to become devs.

edit: I can't reply any more, I guess because it's become too deep.

You say I don't know the problem, but I am actually intermediate-level IT, and atm I have little incentive to move up because the wages are not commensurate with the extra responsibilities in my opinion.

So I feel I do have some knowledge of the problem at least anecdotally, as I would personally be applying for those positions if I felt I would be fairly paid for the extra stress/time/responsibility.

I've explained elsewhere why raising wages doesn't solve the problem.

You are convinced there is no problem when you admittedly have no experience with the issue. You're also expecting to see changes that wouldn't fix the problem because of your lack of experience with The problem.

What you don't seem to understand is that the visa system destroys the whole concept of supply and demand.

If your business can't hire workers, you will have to raise salaries. If you can't afford the higher salaries, you don't have a viable business (at least, without the use of wage arbitrage and indentured servants).

The extra supply of labor will come into the market as soon as they're receiving signals that wages are rising, working conditions good, etc. Until then, it seems like a waste of time: why study really difficult software when you will be competing with folks willing to work much more cheaply.

You might have to wait a bit for this pipeline to fix itself since you purposefully broke it this past decade by using visas to game the system.

I've already responded to this claim in these comments. For what you say to be true there would need to be a large market of senior developers waiting in the wings refusing to work until wages go up.

You're also assuming the growth in jobs has been steady and predictable which it hasn't a spoiler in demand runs the whole idea that we just need more juniors starting.

The problem is companies can't wait so they can bring in workers who pay taxes here and contribute to the economy or they can move there jobs over seas. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of the latter going forward.

So you are claiming that the only thing holding you back from progressing your career is that you don't want to do more work for what you see as not enough money? If that is true you suffer from some serious short sightedness in regards to your career. AND you don't have any experience in the topic.

Well, we're only talking about me now, but I have pretty much decided that I do not want to progress any further in my current direction. I'm on a pretty good pay now and the work situation is acceptable.

I am investigating ways to invest the money I have made/am still making in the best ways for the best possible return, and also looking to downshift by pursuing projects/businesses in my free time that I am simply interested in - that have no guarantee of financial success, while also looking into the possibility of moving to a less expensive part of the country.

I am not looking for a promotion which includes taking on more stress and less free time in exchange for an insufficient pay increase. It would need to be significant for me to take the chance, and from what I have seen out there, I haven't found anything that would satisfy me, although if I was actually out of work now perhaps I would accept less.

If that makes me unqualified in your opinion to comment about whether pays are sufficient for exactly the type of job that I'd be applying for, I don't care. I also don't care if you think I'm ambitious enough. I'm very sure I wouldn't want to work for you anyway.

There was even an out-of-work dev commenting that he was looking for work in this very thread. I don't know what more I can say.

edit: I was being a dick here

It does make you unqualified because you haven't been on there other side of the table trying to hire ever.

The only person I saw was looking to change jobs which is to say leave their current employer with a need for an intermediate developer.

re: you being a dick. Yes we can all be dicks sometimes but that was incorrect as well as rude. Of course I have considered negotiating. It's absolutely none of your business of course but I work government so no possibility of negotiation. I am on the highest pay grade I can get with my skills without a complete change of occupation, and tbh I feel I'm getting an ok deal for the amount of stress I have with my pay and conditions. Especially so when I work closely with people in different roles that are getting completely exploited pay-wise in my opinion.

I know it'd be more work doing stuff for myself but at least I'd have more control over my own destiny, plus the possibility that it would work out very well, which I don't have now working a 9-to-5. It'd be pretty disappointing if it fell in a flaming heap though.

Well, I do feel that being a prospective employee makes me qualified to comment, so there you go. Just because I haven't put a job ad up with an artificially lowered pay and had no applicants doesn't mean I haven't seen what's on offer out there.

Have you considered, like people have been saying in these comments, that you may not have been getting applicants (such as myself) because the conditions or pay weren't as reasonable as you think?

ie, Do you really think if you doubled the pay you were offering you wouldn't have got more applicants?

If I left my job, for argument's sake, say to work at your place, someone with a lower level of skill could start at my old job and learn it as they go, like I had to with little training so many years ago. Some old people leave, some new people start. I think there's lots of skilled people out there. We shouldn't be bringing in slave labour from overseas so we can continue with our artificially lowered pays. If we're going to do capitalism we might as well do it properly... So if your business can't afford to pay what its costs are, then it is not a viable business.

Also obviously that guy who did apply was not happy with the pay or conditions at the place he was working at, so there's that.

Anyway we obviously don't see eye-to-eye on this issue.

I thought the whole premise of capitalism is that jobs will be paid what they are worth according to supply and demand.

If the wages go up because there is more demand (or it's a job that people are unwilling to do), you will be amazed how quickly more devs will appear.

Putting the band aid of cheap workers from overseas will not fix the problem either.

I've answered this elsewhere in these comments.

I've had quite a few friends pack up and move to the US, frustrated that it seemed to be the only option for growing their development work.

I guess this all depends where your perspective sits.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. A lot of the top talent will go to the states because there are more opportunities for them there further draining the pool in Australia.

The companies that choose to remain in Australia then are handicapped by an inability to find good talent and either limit growth or move overseas. The later ones make the above developers choice even easier since there are now even more jobs over there.

Very good point.

An inability to find intermediate and senior australian devs -- (but apparently not entry level) -- sounds like a failure of tech employers to grow talent. Shipping people in from overseas works around that problem, and so the problem goes unfixed.

If the industry got that problem fixed, they could drive down labor costs for all intermediate and senior devs, not just foreign ones.

>sounds like a failure of tech employers to grow talent

I see this a lot but people making this argument never seem to consider the fact that demand can increase substantially in a field over a very small amount of time. You blame it on companies not training talent but haven't even considered that the numbers just aren't there.

Again costs aren't an issue so driving down costs is at best a tertiary goal.

Btw I'm one of those intermediate and senior australian devs. Looking at changing jobs if you're interested.

Now it becomes the responsibility of the industry to encourage students to study computer science in uni...

And those students might be helpful for these roles in a decade. So do you expect these companies to survive just cooling their heels until then?

That's a bit of a gotcha argument. Besides, it's my experience there are plenty of senior devs to go around.

Your experience is apparently going to a meet up to help a friend find a job. I'm not sure your experience is reality.

Too bad for these companies. They gamed with basic supply and demand. Lot of industries which don't abuse foreign labor as much have a steady pipeline of candidates because these grads saw your company - shitty wages, awful working conditions, no future - and bailed the fuck out and into a other career path. Now these companies, dependent on cheap visa labor, may have to pay back some of the fat cash they've gained by screwing their own nations' workforce for the last two decades.

Tech doesn't need a steady pipeline there has been a huge increase in demand.

Where after you looking with shitty wages and awful working conditions? And what other career paths do you think these people bailed out into that have better pay?

Sure it does need more talent, but alleged pipeline has been stalled by multiple factors.

1) Foreign and outsourced labour taking the entry level jobs preventing experience from accumulating.

2) Turning many jobs into glorified web apps and CRUD. Can't really go senior on that. You could on OSS or big and long personal projects but that takes a lot of time and thus money.

1) Very few people are going to go through the hassle of sponsoring an overseas worker for a junior role. It's a pain in the ass. I think this is an issue that is hugely over stated.

2) I don't know if you remember this but back before everything was a crud web app they were crud desktop apps. Most development work just isn't ever that exciting.

Lastly you don't consider at all that demand has outpaced the pipeline.

To be fair, anecdotally at least, a ton of seniors/intermediates just migrate elsewhere. The pay for dev work in the US is _WAY_ higher than in Oz, especially at that level. Though, I've been away for almost ten years so maybe that has changed.

As sanswork said, easy to get new devs, but as soon as they've put in a few years it's very easy to go out on your own or go overseas.

So what? You'll have to compete?

You've gotten so used to your cheap labor, indentured workforce,that you can't even contemplate employees participating in a free market?

There are 10 people working that can do the job there industry needs 15. How do you get the extra 5 just by increasing salaries?

That's globalization I guess, an extreme example is: would you blame a nation in poverty struggling for existence in the modern world for not attracting good techos?

As for contractors, all's fair in the free market except when contracting to government who are blind to /real/ value due to a range of bureaucratic reasons.

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