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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

> IMHO the only countries that really understand software at both a technical and business value add level are US, AUS, Canada, China, with India less so but in that group and Japan just barely getting in.

What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian? Besides that, I’ve only heard of developers in Aus/Canada/Japan being well paid if they work for US companies like Google or are parked there because of US visa issues.

Australians are well paid in general though, even if they don’t value software like FAANG does, because Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy. Japan values software but doesn't pay anyone well because of the system where you earn salaryman virtue by suffering for the first 30 years of your career. (Hot takes.)

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I'm a Canadian living in Australia.

Australia has much more than just Atlassian. Canva is the 9th most valuable private company according to crunchbase [1].

But you need to look deeper than just "who has the biggest most successful companies. Note, the comment says "countries that understand software".

From what I've seen, and one of the reasons I moved here, Australia values quality production. They understand where software drives business and invest in that.

I'm former NICTA/CSIRO, and those organizations used to be drivers of technology and research.

Canada is a major technology hub. Microsoft and Facebook both have major development centres in Canada. Of course, being so close to the US, most of the brain drain goes directly out of the country, but that is part of the country and the people understanding the value of software. The education is good, and so people go to where the dollars are.

Canada and Australia are not going to be able to compete with the US from a dollar perspective. So many of the best Canadians, Australians, Chinese and Indian are going to end up in the US.

[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/lists/crunchbase-private-unicorn-...

As an Australian I appreciate you understanding my root comment!

Canada has started to be competitive, mostly because of US companies coming in and bidding up wages, but when I left (~10 years ago) a top salary for a SWE was about $80k. I'm not sure it's because of some cultural appreciation of software as a value driver versus a cost center. The (self-proclaimed) branding as "Silicon Valley North" seems a bit excessive.

I also left roughly the same time as you, so I agree with what they were, but the range is truly wild now. You'll still find $80k positions but the ceiling is now easily 3-4x as much.

It's not the SV of the north yet -- local VCs are still a joke (expect one to two orders of magnitude worse terms) but it's getting better. The angel scene has actually been pretty incredible over the past few years.

Atlassian certainly does not value software quality.

To a point where Microsoft should consider acquiring Atlassian because they are so similar in this regard

Nice, then how comes everyone and their grandparents are running Jira and MS Office? The latter across FAANG as well (maybe not the G with an in house competitor).

That's really not an indicator of quality. They lack competition. There is some correlation there but that's a different story.

This is because both companies sell to the enterprise, not to the end users.

This is how Microsoft drove their phone business off the cliff: they built a product that their customers (corporate IT) loved but the users detested. When the iphone showed up Microsoft famously knew it was dumb because it addressed nothing that their customers cared about. But the workforce demanded change.

> Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy

Come now, it’s more of an iron ore or coal state than an oil one. Beef is more of their exports.

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/aus

As an Australian I agreed with your comment, but the link you shared indicate that petroleum actually is a larger export for us

> The top exports of Australia are Iron Ore ($79.6B), Coal Briquettes ($36.4B), Petroleum Gas ($26.8B), Gold ($17.7B), and Frozen Bovine Meat ($4B)

That’s natural gas, not petroleum as in the liquid. A fine pedantic distinction I know but if natural gas is petroleum so is coal.

I think you mean homegrown companies and Canada had Flickr, Slack, Autodesk, SideFX, Hootsuite, Shopify and Corel just to name a few off the top of my head.

pedalpete responded about Australia and Canada.

Japan considers programming a blue collar task so pays accordingly (though there are exceptions, like Sony Computer Entertainment). But culturally the companies tend to understand the role of software better and have for a while. Remember how great the Keitei were in the late 90s/early 2000s compared to anywhere else in the world?

The kind of software in keitai (feature phones), car ECUs, and video games is different from the rest of the software industry. They’re good at making gadgets with embedded software and nothing else. In particular, nothing ever gets reused and nothing is ever made more abstract or flexible - that’s why most of the products can’t be exported and the iPhone killed all the Galapagos phones.

There are a lot of interesting lessons in video games though; it’s the only kind of software people love using enough to write emulators for, and game developers seem to exist in a lot more countries than other software businesses do.

Japan sees software as "blue collar" because they put software in everything. e.g. toilets, which basically nobody else on earth does.

There's a famous story in 2000s that Japanese feature phone engineer did hard work for low quality code. Phone manufacturers and telcos just wanted to make a great featured phone, but didn't focus on high quality software. https://lolipop-teru.ssl-lolipop.jp/gunsou/

Finally, they made very crappy Android phone and local industry shrunk. So Japanese consumers now love iPhone because Android phone is a trauma for some of them.

> What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian?

There are plenty of wellknown tech/software companies originating in Australia. Xero, Freelancer, Canva, REA Group, MYOB, Airtasker, BigCommerce, Afterpay...

Many foreign software companies have development teams in Aus as well. Google, Zendesk, Square, Squarespace spring to mind.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/the-top-50-tech-c...

I’m a US-UK dual citizen but my partner is Australian. I’m collecting the whole Anglosphere.

But when looking at living there, the wages/housing prices seemed like a poor trade off even compared to California. Although of course it’s a great place to live in many other ways.

I’ve heard of some of those but haven’t looked up their pay bands, not sure Afterpay has a moat though…

Having recently looked at wages/housing in the same anglosphere, Canada was way ahead of Australia. I know several folks who have left Australia for Canada in the last five years because of exactly this.

Google maps is from Australia

Google Photos is from Australia. I thought Maps was US and Japan but am not up to date on that.

Maps originated in Australia, originally developed by an Australian company Where 2 Technologies employing two Danish brothers in Sydney.

> Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.[9] In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc.[10] where it transformed into the web application Google Maps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions

Xero is from New Zealand

Like Crowded House and pavlova, Australians will claim anything good originating in New Zealand as our own :-p

Red Hat and (Maybe apple still) have engineering teams in Australia.

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