Tech workers remain some of the highest paid in New Zealand
reseller.co.nz
reseller.co.nz
NZ salaries are also pretty laughable, even if you're on $150k you can't really afford to live on your own (even an apartment is a stretch) as housing and living expenses are so high. It's only really good if you're in your early twenties and can find flatmates or live with parents and save.
And if a country has plenty of land, and food, to go around - then for scarcity to become a norm, something(s) must have their hands pretty deep in the cookie jar.
Either they accrued capital already, or borrowing from relatives who did, or they're not living independently. They're sharing accommodation that would be cramped for two among six.
Lifestyles once only necessary for students are now de rigueur for established graduates, with the possible exception of better food.
"You achieved a university degree, so you deserve to be elevated for life" is little different in its entitlement bias than "you achieved house ownership, so you deserve to be elevated for life".
Equality goes beyond such things.
However, a degree usually requires hard work (being born wealthy does not), and has been widely recognised as the best legal route out of poverty for decades. We are not a communist society and do expect hard work to lead to greater standards of life, on average, even if there are exceptional non-graduates and lazy graduates. If even the best legal route is failing en masse, then we are screwed.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...
New Zealand is an honourable 2nd place and Auckland clocks at 7th with ~11 (median household annual income for median house). The other cities worse off are around 11 as well, with Vancouver at 12 and Sydney at 13. Hong Kong is the usual autist at 18 in its own league
To answer another comment here, Melbourne and Toronto are comparable, London is 20% better off, Austin and Dublin are half that bad, can't even compare
The housing market is broken (and not just in NZ; I'm a Kiwi living in London). In the 90s the outside London average first time buyer age was 29, now it's 33.4 and steadily increasing.
But the real kicker is; how did you get your deposit? Scrimping and saving? Never have house prices been such a high multiple of the average salary. The difference now between the haves and have nots are those whose parents can drop a 30-50kgbp deposit for each of their children and those children who inherit a stake in properties worth around 300-1000kgbp from deceased grandparents.
All of the "news" around properties is through the eyes of home owners and not prospective buyers. There are more people cheering when prices go up and booing when prices go down than vice versa, even when their house is worth many times more than the original price adjusted for inflation.
I had a Kiwi mate stay with me for a holiday recently (also late 40s) and in his mind the high house prices/ridiculous value increase made sense to him because "I pay my rates the whole time I own the house therefore the value should go up". I tried to explain that rates (known as council tax in the UK) were a _service_ just like paying your electricity bill but it just did not compute; he wasn't interested.
Pretty much -- more saving then scrimping. My parents and my partner's parents didn't help us, mainly because they couldn't. And we didn't expect them to. And, no, we didn't have other benevolent relatives or money magically appearing in our bank accounts. If only ... Also were also able to use some of our KiwiSavers (government retirement savings plan for those of you outside of NZ) to take advantage of the first home buyer's scheme.
Overall, though, for us it was a matter of living modestly, paying our bills, and remembering to pay ourselves. Not that we didn't/don't indulge from time to time -- pay a visit to our favourite local cafes and we take the occasional trip here and there.
I'm sure this all would have been a bit easier if I was making $150K or more annually (or even if my partner was making $20K or so more a year). But we're not unique or special or anything like that. I know several people in a situation like mine who are doing or have done the same thing.
I will highlight one difference between the US and Oceania - our currencies are at least a third less than the USD. So $150k in NZ is probably closer to $100k and in Aus it’s $110k.
I can't think of a single improvement. Look at migration patterns, people are voting with their feet. NZ is the one with the incompetent government.
That's pretty standard outside the USA too.
(And it's not true in the US, only some coastal regions.)
Singles in their 20's do not qualify for govt subsidised housing (HDB). Rents here in Singapore range for 3k + for a basic apartment, 4k for a basic Condo apartment. Salary averages are about 6 - 9k (gross) for developers in that experience / age range
Apartments are govt provided public housing with a 99 year lease. Most of the population live in these. Only citizens and PR holders are allowed to purchase one per household.
Condos are gated compounds built by private developers, some have a 99 year lease too. These are for the rich. You can own as many as you like.
You may only own one or the other.
80% of housing is government subsidized ownership for citizen couples (or singles after 35). It’s brutal but philosophically aligned with the ‘good for the country’ - not enough space for people to be single.
BTO flats are very heavily subsidized and monthly payment will be in the hundreds for people matching the expectations.
I'm told Greece has some interesting housing typologies (polikatoikia):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-desig...
The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/If you stick to that societal expectation, the country is very affordable as the government will subsidize you a lot.
If you do not or can not, you will pay for it.
On one hand it’s brutal efficient and in many ways necessary (there just ain’t that much space for people to be single) and it’s reflected in immigration policy as well - trying to get PR/green card as a single is very very hard because that’s the only way for the government to seriously affect demographic curve without forcing people to have children.
Tokyo is 619km² with a population of almost 10m [0]. And that's not accounting yet for the surrounding population that commutes into Tokyo. During the last census in 2020, Tokyo's daytime population surges to 16m. [1]
The difference between these two cities is that a large portion of Japanese real estate are micro 1~2 bedroom apartments (below 20m²) built specifically for singles and young adults. The SG govt has for years claimed that it doesn't have enough space, in reality they're just want to encourage multi-generational living.
0: https://ieagent.jp/blog/eria/tokyo23population-601355#:~:tex... 1: https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGKKZO62846080T20C22A7EA4000/...
Go have a look on real estate sites and tell me you cant find 1/2 bedroom apartments for well under 1 million.
Op is single and clearly not telling the whole story about what he is willing to buy or where he is willing to live.
EDIT: Here did it for you: https://www.barfoot.co.nz/properties/residential/region=auck...
Plenty of places OP could look at if they were serious but they aren't. I'm not saying housing isn't in a bad spot as it definitely needs serious attention as a key (perhaps "THE") political issue. But hyperbole and lies doesn't help anyone or anything.
I was doing a job in Australia in the 90s and I remember the ratio there being high. In my job in NZ there was also significant immigrant numbers (although tended to be immigrants from English speaking countries at that time due to NZ immigration laws).
However... in general, it is easier to transition into a more lucrative position at another firm, than try to negotiate with people/agencies that think employees can be outsourced for 20 cents to the dollar. FAANG colluded to prevent labor organization on several occasions, and political critters saw an opportunity to make a quick buck.
There is likely no real STEM shortage, but rather a shortage of people willing to work in poverty domestically. I would argue we need more politicians, CEOs, and investment bankers willing to work for just standard wage rates... think of the investor profit margins.
Best of luck, =)
You know there are plenty of high level engineers under 45 so I'm not sure how you see a stalled vertical movement. 25 years ago was 1998.
If you want to grow in tech, than expect to hop companies every 2 years.
Good luck, =)
All of my friends are either reporting layoffs or belt tightening at work. It's hitting recent graduates and retrained workers really hard.
On the other hand, Germany is about to dramatically lower the residence permit and citizenship requirements, as it panicks about its aging population. This might further depress the wages.
The skilled worker shortage (Fachkräftemangel) is constantly in the news, although the worker response is the same as in other Western countries: have you tried paying more? Relaxing job requirements? Training people?
They want to saturate the market with massive immigration so the salaries never rise, but when there are too many developers, they can actually push them down. If there would be real shortage, they would increase the salary.
Technically, a shortage occurs when an external mechanism prevents price from rising. Think price gouging laws as once such mechanism.
Where I am from, doctors are prevented from raising their prices in an effort to give equal access to all, rich and poor alike, which would allow for a doctor shortage to transpire. But a real labour shortage outside of such unique situations would be unheard of.
Where is this? In Austria the government also caps how much the public doctos can charge, but guess what, most doctors exit the public system and go fully private where they can charge however much they want leaving a shortage in the public system.
The immigration system in Germany is peculiarly hostile, getting visas is very hard, interacting with the local bureaucracy is a nightmare, there are so many catch-22 that either you pay an agency or… God knows how they do it. If you are not an EU citizen, it may take months to complete all the paperwork even to the perfect immigrant.
Streamlining this system and lowering the requirements for a skilled visa won’t hurt anybody, it would just make the lives of some people less miserable.
Consider that Germany has an almost endless reservoir of potential immigrants in southern Europe (and to some extent in Turkey), it has been there for the past decades and salaries keep going up.
Compared to US visas, it's a walk in the park.
>Streamlining this system and lowering the requirements for a skilled visa won’t hurt anybody
It will defiantly hurt the housing market because Germany doesn't build enough.
The population is getting older and they need more young people in order to support their standards of living and to care for the ageing population. So either they get more people and house them somehow, or they will have to accept that there won't be enough working people to support the country with their work. Another option, and I'm being sarcastic here, is to destroy the healthcare system like the Conservative government is doing in the UK and hope that eventually life expectancy will drop.
Germany, along with UK, Canada, AU, NZ, is attractive for all those for whom a US visa is out of reach, a.k.a. almost everyone.
Most international workers who can't get into US, go for the next best thing which is those countries.
The difference is US is better at absorbing more immigrants due to already being a melting pot and being the country with the fastest growing economy due to VC funding so importing more workers means more fuel on the fire.
VC funding is almost non-existent in most of those other countries so importing more workers in a stagnat economy, means just wage suppression and increasing housing costs.
Time to buy a house if you can afford it. Immigration of skilled workers drives house prices up!
It's meant to lower growth and investment.
Making the move from an NZ employer to (essentially) an AU employer got me a ~40% pay rise.
I'm now afraid I've priced my self out of the NZ market and will have a rude landing if I'm forced back into the NZ market (you never know, things happen).
But it is frankly ridiculous how far NZ employers have their heads in the clouds. If remote work stays around and more US companies don't mind a few hours overlap with the West Coast timezone to get access to a native English speaking, Western culture, talent pool... well, I think those NZ employers will start banging the immigration drum a lot harder.
When the recruiter told me the offered salary, I thought it was a typo, scam, or someone was smoking crack.
And the NZ software employers who cry the most about "a skills shortage" are ones that locals won't work for because they're known shit employers.
Looking at you, Orion Health.
Just go contracting - I charge probably on the low end for my experience but take home almost 2.5x what I used to as a salaried worker for less time on the clock. As long as you keep a decent chunk of cash (which is easier since you're making more) then you can ride out short-term gaps between contracts. That being said, I haven't been without work for the six years I've been contracting so haven't had to dip into it yet.
It's really true. We see a lot of New Zealanders applying for jobs in Australia and they are often good candidates.
I still love NZ but to keep progressing in my career I felt it was really helpful to be able to access a bigger market.
do you know if there is big influx of IT immigrants in NZ?
It's exactly the same in Austria (the one with schnitzel, not kangaroos). Employers will tell you, "you don't need more than 60k/year because the quality of life is so good, you know we keep winning most livable city in the world", to the point where I think the whole winning most livable city in the world is some paid BS advertising from Austria to sucker in foreigners willing to lowball themselves and fill in the so called "skill shortage", up until they move here and realize a house costs 1 million Euros, stuff is more expensive than in Germany while salaries are lower and then they fuck off.
i.e suggesting because a place has nice weather that you should be paid less.
It would be amusing to see a list of "most livable city in the world". Vienna, Sydney, Auckland... they probably all win from slightly different orgs awarding.
Then once they get an Australian passport, they can use it to work in the US on an E-3 visa :-)
I wouldn't be surprised if their (and others') ultimate goal is the US. That's the case with Canada, where my understanding is that FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.
(My last role paid 240-250K NZD depending on exchange rate; the local role prior to that: 120K NZD)
Didn’t know about E3 visa route. Very interesting, thank you
Principal Engineer, DevOps
The expected salary range for this position is $130,000 to $155,000.1. It’s ProPublica - “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” Such a job is likely to appeal to someone who, despite the salary, is looking to make a wide social impact.
2. the job also states:
> This is a good faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.
3. It is not in NZ:
> This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is headquartered in New York, but we have offices across the country and will consider remote applicants.
Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO. And frankly, for the lower level roles where remote is fine, it’s hard to ignore Eastern Europe.
Sorry guys, but these premiums were all about Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc trying to keep talent away from competitors. If you were making $500k to be a sysadmin, that’s probably a gravy train that will slow down.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
It doesn't really matter what your standard of living is when you look at how much faster you can fill your retirement fund.
The larger systems, AWS Batch, K8S, Fargate, etc... have all replaced sysadmin with specific commits in specific TF files. There's no longer a need for someone to "watch" for servers to go down or discs to run out of space if everything is using the appropriate service.
If you're unaware of this, of course you won't have a sysadmin job going forward. 8 9's is now guaranteed if you just choose anything but us-east-1
Honest question; my lair is a remote beach paradise.
You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.
IMO, jobs where you have some other incentives (moral or otherwise) should still pay market and expect some competition for thier roles because they're highly desirable not just because of some idealistic stance. At the end of the day, ideals aren't going to pay the bills.
Senior may have diluted to just mean “non-junior employee”, but I’ve never heard someone using principal for that.
Principal at Microsoft is between senior & staff at Google. Principal at Amazon is directly above senior, but is generally higher than staff at Google. Principal at Roblox is about the same as Microsoft.
My point was that I've never seen principal used to mean "non-junior employee" in the way that senior occasionally is.
It sounds like they want someone 35+ years old, with top-tier skills, who doesn't prioritize a good night's sleep?
Which is actually more than I was earning as a lead at a recent job in Canada
The scale of difference and difference of scale between New Zealand and the USA cannot be overstated. There really are not enough people in New Zealand to make the level of differentiation between a Senior, a Principal and a Staff engineer meaningful in the vast, vast majority of our industry.
The titles are basically pointless and just word salad. They're also used very differently company to company, although I don't think that's unique to this geography.
Check out comp for most “enterprise” jobs at banks, insurance companies, SaaS companies or even many YC companies.
It might be off on the high end by $20K
There is wage fomo or insecurity that I am a sucker, but I do not dwell on that thought too much. Have to live with the cards in your hand at some point.
In the beginning of 2020 I was making $150K and entertaining offers making $165K as an experienced developer with cloud experience.
Then I fell into a role working at AWS ProServe making - a lot more working remotely.
I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a long term thing and that Amazon was going to Amazon.
I made my money, paid off debt, built savings, decreased my fixed expenses, built my network, learned a lot of soft skills and now I’m looking at very senior/team lead roles on the enterprise architect side making $170K - $185K. I’m actively interviewing and I am sure I will have something in two weeks (found opportunities based on my network at smaller companies).
On one hand, emotionally I have the same FOMO. But logically I know our expenses are $1000 less per month than they were 3 years ago and I moved and I’m also paying $700 less in taxes than I was then.
I’m also having a lot of fun working remotely.
It's not uncommon for tech roles on non-tech/IT teams to have some title inflation so they can match compensation better based on the pay-scale of their business unit.
JFC, if you have "an idea for an app, bro", but you can't build the product, and you can't raise the honest VC necessary to build or acquire the team that builds the product, YOU DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT.
I don't know how these people get to go around without being challenged on the obvious fact that, for there to be seniors, there has to be someone training juniors. The level of hypocrisy and greed are beyond words, and the fact that every two-bit podcaster and reporter doesn't call these people out loudly and repeatedly is worse.
(They don't have complementary skills to themselves, so they're more likely to suppress wages of other immigrants - so you could say the rational thing would be for them to shut each other out and you to encourage it.)
PhDs get paid nothing and yet there's been a "shortage" for half a century.
As a work immigrant myself I can't complain, but it's hard to ignore the cold calculation behind it. We're meant to be cheap labour that shows up pre-trained, and leaves before they get old.
Also the housing Ponzi scheme. Germany says they're desperate for workers but actually is lacking the housing for them and puts no real effort in building more because it has Co2 caps in places (lol).
You got a new job in Berlin? Great, now good luck finding an apartment. Germany housing prices are completely out of whack. Munich land prices are similar to SF but wages are 1/3 those in the Bay.
So yeah, you're just cannon fodder for the German economy. Great time to be an employer or landlord in Germany though.
I know that it's not personal - the system is broken for Germans too - but it diminishes my feeling of belonging. I accept this relationship as transactional.
That's because it really doesn't. Businesses and parts of the government probably do, but public opinion is definitely divided on the issue. Germany as a country was founded less than 200 years ago as a nation-state, that is a to say, a country bound by common ancestry and language. The idea that a country like this (or any European country founded the Westphalian system) was just going to turn into a "melting pot" pro immigration state in just a few decades has always struck me as foolish.
The problem is that modern life destroys fertility rates, everywhere from the USA to South Korea the pattern is the same. But the economic systems, particularly pensions and retirement systems, are built around the fundamental assumption that, at the very least, there is a large enough working-age population to support retirees.
So to keep the system going you either need to increase birth rates (which is quite hard, Germany pays you £200 per month per kid and still has abysmal TFR) or increase immigration.
Using immigration to try to solve this issue is either a band-aid solution or a form of population planning "technical debt".
Because if you effectively integrate immigrants, they behave almost exactly like your existing population, including not having enough kids to sustain a workforce and then you're back at square one, needing to either solve the fertility rate issue or increase immigration.
On the other hand, if you fail to effectively integrate immigrants, you run the risk of them forming parallel societies, where even second and third generation individuals from these groups don't feel any attachment or loyalty to the host country, don't properly learn the local language, reject the local culture in favor of their heritage culture, and so on. The problems associated with this become their own issues that the country needs to deal with in addition to the population problems.
So yeah, the entire system is sick, beyond Germany as well. So your take of: > I accept this relationship as transactional. Is probably the right one to have.
Germany doesn't want immigrants, the business owners do, because they need labor.
It's always a PITA with no straightforward way, but if you paid for 20 years you'll probably be motivated to go through the hoops to see that money back in some form.
Literally every "shortage" regarding any good in the world follows the same pattern you described which is "well it is a just a shortage at this low of a price. If price increases then there wouldn't be a shortage!"
So you describing literally every shortage ever for any good, but doing it in this weird moralizing way isnt particularly useful.
If you redefine shortage to mean literally anything that people wish was cheaper, then it becomes entirely detached from reality and economics. But if you think it's the appropriate definition, then let's make sure everyone is on the same page. We don't want half the population thinking that shortage means something acute, negative, and resolvable.
And don't get me started on mid-level developers looking at spending 50% of their net earnings on paying even a small mortgage, even with the small price drop happening right now.
As an NZ based CTO - I feel things have slowed quite a bit since the start of the year. That said, the market is more buoyant than the US based on comments from others here. I think things will pick up in the new year again.
Also our wages are low. Look at the current job postings. https://www.seek.co.nz/Software-Developer-jobs
Then take into account that $1 NZD is equal to 0.59742741 US Dollars. So if you are earning $100k in NZD that is not even $60k USD. Our national average house price is $888,999. It's much higher in big cities. Our food costs are rapidly increasing as well. I pay over $1,000 NZD for power and gas.
Smart developers are leaving.
I'm working on getting her to understand that we don't need to heat rooms we don't use.
But $280 is cheaper than I pay during summer. I'm averaging about 20KWHs in the summer. At the moment it's closer to 75KWHs per day. Our hot water is all gas. About 1 x $150 bottle per month in the summer. That moves up to 1 per week in the winter.
Double glassing is in the wish list. Then wall insulation. But we have a mortgage and an asbestos roof to deal with first.
That's a lot of energy per day, mate. I'm in the US and not particularly careful with usage and I'm averaging about 25KWH a day. You might want to get a usage meter that lets you check various appliances/lights/switches in real time to find the heavy usage
I'm in Ōtepoti/Dunedin (best city in NZ!), and within my social network most developers work remotely for overseas companies.
100%. There are 2 NZ employment markets. Those working for NZ companies in the $100k region, and those working for US firms for the $200+k region.
I've had an annoying time explaining this to past US employers when they present median values for NZ salary fudge factors.
The few job boards I've seen all have either low salaries, or are US-only...
My team of ~12 is nearly ~30% kiwi at this point.
All you other NZ devs should join the Slack server I founded for IT people in NZ. https://dev.elop.nz/ a lot of us work remotely. We have a dedicated jobs channel and all - we also have some very good recruiters. (700ish people)
That is something I need to look into. I'm guessing now is a bad time to be looking for international work. It seems like the job market is not great internationally.
"Smart developers are leaving" - or working for overseas employers. This seems to be quite common. Too bad NZ is a small market which I feel make many jobs not that interesting.
Where are you drawing the line separating it from aggressive targeting marketing and PR?
I can also create a roughly accurate flow chart to demonstrate this: “does this person want me to believe something that aligns with their own agenda/perspective/goals?” -> “yes”.
Small and insignificant as it may have been, there are real psyop’s out there, and dismissing them all as a meme is lazy thinking.
Wages here are good for the area, but not SV level good, and I think that makes it slightly less attractive but also less inflammatory. More sustainable as wages are pegged to real dollars in and out of a business.
I don’t doubt you, and it sounds like one of those “seedy underbelly of the industry” kinds of things that I’d be interested in knowing more about.
Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article. Here, it quotes "NZTech CEO Graeme Muller". If you click through the one link in the article, that one also quotes NZTech CEO Graeme Muller, and all the source data is from NZTech. Reading through it, you see that NZTech is an industry trade association of New Zealand's tech companies. They have a pretty obvious vested interest in increasing the pool of tech workers in New Zealand.
Here's another one that a surprising number of people still don't realize: If you're reading an article where any company employee or exec is "quoted", the quote is almost always something written by the company's professional PR team and not an actual quote from the person.
Edit - I’m a recovering publisher so have a lot of experience being the target of PR and choosing what kinds of articles can be printed.
Edit: 2013
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/h-1b-visas-and-the-stem-s...
2021
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/h-1b-visa-reform-is-...
First you plant studies in the news, then you can quote those studies when lobbying lawmakers
Edit2:
The issue dates back to 1959. There’s always been a “shortage”
Kenneth Arrow: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883726
Now, I get cold-rejected via automated email, even with a personal referral from someone I worked with directly, about 85% of the time.
I'm seeing 600+ applicants for a Bay Area FAANG+ EM role listed on LinkedIn, 2 weeks after posting the JD. That doesn't include those that applied directly on the company's career page...
Job market rn is wack, yo.
edit: specifically front-line EM roles managing ICs
The job market many of you all are describing seems to have been standard for new grads for the last few years
If you're not willing/can't write and ship code, companies are taking a much harder look at those roles.
To your point, yeah, I'm also seeing a lot more "hands on" call outs in JDs for EMs, if not writing code, at least doing code reviews.
Idk what EM means, but IT is looking for admins. Try Kansas.
You are slashing $80k. Over here (rest of the world, $80k is the TC typically, and often much less!)
This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.
This is not to say one should accept injustice handed down from on high. There are some who will try to exploit contraction for their own short-term benefit at everyone else's expense. Be wary, and be prepared.
While that sounds obvious, it’s not necessarily true. Empirically the real price of many commodities has come down, even in the face of growing population.
https://www.aier.org/article/review-of-superabundance-by-mar...
that's a bit of a defeatist attitude though.
I expect a better retirement than the current generation of retirees right now, and i expect to achieve that by purchasing as many assets as possible, while earning as much as possible, before i retire. Of course, one does not know what the future holds - so the method i am using may turn out fruitless.
That was always going to make the US less competitive once the economic foundations that supported those very high compensation levels broke. Unfortunately for those in the industry in the US that probably means there will be a sharp contraction in both the size of the market and the TC being offered. Those affected have my sympathy but pragmatically they also need to realise that what they're going to have to get used to for the next few years is probably still (slightly) better than what everyone else in the world doing the same jobs with the same skills and in some cases with a similar cost of living has had available all along.
It all depends how effectively you can lobby for your rights & prevent foreign competition (and control the pipeline of new entrants / gatekeep / keep your industry profitable)
Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US, unless in High Frequency Trading, managing a team of > 200 people, or working for a hot AI startup, Crypto or similar. It is quiet exceptional.
I say this as someone who is, compared to East Europe, Indonesia, Cuba, India, etc, earning a high salary. Same thing could happen to me quite easily if I am out of a job and looking again. It is scary.
Examples on the far end of the extremes only serve to skew our perspectives, unless we remind ourselves these are the extremes, not the norm.
I don't think it's too far off the mark for Australia. Mind you, that's gross. US$180 is about AU$280k. Of that, you'd pay around AU$100k in income tax (and then there's a 10% sales tax).
Everyone disagrees with me, but I believe we're already seeing it. I moved down to the Los Angeles area after college, as I took a job down here. The houses here that used to rent for $3000 10 years ago currently rent for $5000+. Meanwhile in the Bay Area, I can still find a number of comparable houses for $4000 or less. Granted, those are more like - outer sunset, fremont, concord, etc...
But those are still pretty nice areas!
If I moved right now I'd have to pay $1000/mo more in rent - at least. Probably more. The housing market in SoCal is basically stuck because nobody can afford to move, and so nobody's moving unless they have to lol. And that drove the prices up.
As far as I can tell, the rent market is still fairly healthy in the Bay. So the prices haven't escalated quite the same.
Compare to a ~year ago when I was easily making in the low single digit (1/N) millions.
Damn interest rates, I tell myself.
Luckily I saved enough in bigtech to give me a few solid years of runway for working on things myself. Wouldn't want to have a family right now, that's for sure.
Lately it's been seeming my best career option is to enlist in the armed forces. They seem to be the only ones with an actual "skills shortage" around.
Feels like 2003. Back then I went from getting an interview whenever I wanted to not getting any response for almost a year.
You could have saved in one year what you’d make in 10 years in the military.
If it doesn't change anything why make a big deal about it?
People had families during economic downturns, wars and famines. It is also a long term commitment so there are going to be bad times no matter when you decide to take the plunge.
That said, I would like a family. Preferable I'd have some way to provide first though.
I wish we could get a more granular breakdown on demand in the tech world. There's a vast difference in skills, requirements and pay scale for strict DevOps positions versus more traditional software developer roles.
Less AI hype
Less HR personnel
Less restrictions on where tech work may be performed
Better hours for on call staff
Less spending on fancy HQ offices (from an aesthetic)
Hot-desks
Lower executive pay
Better transparency in business costs which companies hide in their compensation considerations based on their money
Etc etc etc
Dumb money (and unimaginative executives) waits for someone else to tell a "story" in order to act. Smart companies should be hiring like crazy, sucking up all the great talent these dummy companies are shedding. Tech companies, more than at any time I can remember, seem to have no ideas--they're just watching their competitors and aping whatever they are doing. Competitors are laying off? We're laying off! Competitors are returning to the office? We are returning to the office! Competitors are getting into AI? We are getting into AI. Everyone is chasing each other's tail and sniffing each other's farts and there isn't even a spark of creativity left.
7 months ago you got a new gig in two weeks and making bank. Now you're unemployed and can't find a single job?
Edit: https://layoffs.fyi shows 2023 has been fairly rough as well as late 2022 for confirmation. My troubles started around early 2020 so something to consider. 5 years or so of steady employment and gainful experience before that.
Reading in between the lines, these were mostly just prospects and they were also 2021 numbers which were aberrations.
Also I expect to see minor cuts to compensation for existing jobs to first come in the form of slashing of bonuses, yearly raises and promotions. For various, mostly social, reasons employers are reluctant to cut the nominal salary of existing employees, even more so than they seem reluctant to fire people.
Since the article brought up NZ, and so we are already talking about 'weird' job markets: here in Singapore the market is also supposed to be down, but I'm still getting pitched good jobs left and right by recruiters for my particular speciality.
Things are rough out there for sure.
In my view, tech just means IT but you've got a ping pong table at work and can wear jeans. IT isn't going anywhere and can be a good career path still, but the wild salary increases were clearly driven by speculation, and there was absolutely a lot of hiring of less than qualified people going on, which will probably take another year or two to wash out.
If it were my son, I would tell him to do what he likes, and if that's computer stuff then that is still a better than average career path. That being said, I'd make sure they really understand that what they are really probably getting into is IT, i.e. its highly unlikely he will end up working at a startup that is going to make it big and change the world with some hot new invention. The reality is, you are probably going to be working at a bank or something at some point, and that's okay if you didn't get your expectations way out of wack.
There's a difference between hiring staff and getting a job done. Most companies choose one or the other, but they're peanut butter and chocolate!
As a hiring manager, I definitely felt the shift. It was a complete opposite from my hiring experience pre-pandemic.
My point is that after tech stocks dropped, they probably weren't making that much money anymore. They were likely already making $100k less, or would have been if they were still employed there, because their equity is no longer as valuable.
During COVID they shot up so I guess it's just returning to normal. Which is good in a way, I saw too many very unqualified people making way more than I would have expected.
I know we haven't been hiring for many roles at all and very reluctant to replace people that have been retiring etc.
So I mean, sure, for mid-levels with low standards/expectations, or for folks who just have to take any job they can (trust me I've been there, folks, this isn't a dig on you), the market is still bumpin. For senior to staff (and beyond) folks with strong work-life balance or team layout opinions, this market is still laughably atrocious in the "I guess I should probably start prepping a consulting outlet so I'll have it ready in case anything happens to my job in the coming year or two, huh?" kind of way.
You don’t even need to look hard to see how many people are out of work. Simply post a job on LinkedIn and you’ll get nearly 1,000 applicants in a few weeks. It’s genuinely alarming how many people need work right now. I’m not sure how it ends, but there’s no way at it ends well.
That’s when I believed.
I want to say that we have an oversupply of non-traditional tech workers that were from these schools that couldn’t or didn’t sustain a job.
Now when companies are trying to find qualified individuals, there’s a challenge weeding out these from actual skilled and experienced individuals.
Combat this with experienced non-US tech workers who are willing to work for lower wages, makes locals finding jobs a challenge.
For companies looking to hire US-only workers, too many people are applying drowning out actual qualified individuals.
Seriously consider working in the states for a few years if you can get an E3 visa, and if you don’t like it head home in 4-6 years with a million bucks.
Anecdotally, I know a number of recruiters (some were even good ones) that got cut in recent years.