Reminder that there is no skills shortage. There's a shortage of suckers.
do you know if there is big influx of IT immigrants in NZ?
Then once they get an Australian passport, they can use it to work in the US on an E-3 visa :-)
(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
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.
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.
Basically the nice cities with nice weather attract a lot of candidates meaning employers don't need to pay so much, while employers in cloudy, windy, rainy and depressing cities need to pay good because otherwise there's no reason to move there. It's just supply and demand.
I could get a nice pay bump by moving to Netherlands or the UK, but I really can't stomach the weather in that part of Europe, as someone who like going outside for walks in the sun. Sometimes there's more to life than counting more money, and life is too short to spend it living somewhere where you don't like just to accumulate money.
Weather is one of those intensely personal things. I am very much outside of the norm, especially when it comes to sun.
I've lived in Seattle my whole life and right now it is in the mid-80s and not a cloud in the sky; the whole week is predicted to be like this. The people I know have filtered, as they do every year, into two groups. One group is posting on social media about how they're out to "enjoy the sun" and "such marvelous weather". The other, like me, is sitting inside waiting for the grey to return. (Anecdotally to my friend group, people who move here tend to be in the first group; people who were born around here in the second.)
Which is to say, I would happily take a pay cut to get away from the sun so I suppose I'm glad the "gloomier" places tend to pay more.
Of course it is, and if you grew up in a gloomy place your whole life you're used to it, but if you grew up in nice weather area it's tough to move somewhere depressing, and even people from depressing places want to live in nice weather places.
There's the scientific correlation between sun exposure, or at least seeing the sun with your eyes, not just bathing in it, and serotonin levels. Also people form northern gloomy places (at least in Europe) have higher suicide rates and consumption of antidepressants than the people living in the south despite the inverse correlation in wages.
So yeah, it seem like the sun and nice weather is better for your mental health than bigger wages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Principal Engineer, DevOps
The expected salary range for this position is $130,000 to $155,000.It sounds like they want someone 35+ years old, with top-tier skills, who doesn't prioritize a good night's sleep?
SSA is Special Stock Award given arbitrarily (M2s are not sure or have any say in who/how much to be given) but believed to be used for retention by HR. Annual stock refreshers for <L63 at Microsoft are in the range of 0-20k vesting over 5 years.
I chose to move to Amazon then recently Apple.
e: really for HN i would think people had a better sense of the market, i am seeing wrong statements all over the place
L59 at MS is absolutely not paid $250k
e: I know for a fact TC for a new hire in 2019 straight out of college with a BS was 250k, just because it doesn't match what you have seen doesn't make it wrong
There are 100 pages of salaries for level 59 reported here. If you made $250k starting, you would be in the 99.5%-ile. So yeah, not common at all.
I don’t doubt that TC for some individual new hire you know was $250k but that is different from your claim about starting TC, you can easily look at the levels.fyi bands, and I know multiple people at Microsoft that are paid less than $200k out of college.
FWIW i was also paid $250k by MS out of college, but that is because I worked for a subsidiary. It is not the starting TC at MS proper.
And it's on you for assuming the definite article, I only meant the indefinite. (A MSFT starting TC is...)
And I'm a native english speaker. But I've never felt I had to stick to the "standard" way of doing things. You shouldn't either. Certainly not when reading text you can't be sure is pulled straight from Strunk's.
I just realized you might be getting so emotional about this because you claim you also made 250k straight out of college and want to feel superior in some way?
[1] "Can make". Not "all make", "must make", "will make", "should make", or even "expect to make". "Can make". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37115731
(For context: I've seen new-grad-adjacent offers break 400K at FAANG for particularly in-demand candidates in the past, but I'm not going to claim that the starting pay at any company is 400K. It's not).
Check out comp for most “enterprise” jobs at banks, insurance companies, SaaS companies or even many YC companies.
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.
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.
Which is actually more than I was earning as a lead at a recent job in Canada
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.
Honest question; my lair is a remote beach paradise.
You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.
Nope. It is usually the higher stack eng.
I did some more digging and couldn't find stats supporting this either way.
I was thinking more ML eng but it doesn't seem that widespread.
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.
It doesn't really matter what your standard of living is when you look at how much faster you can fill your retirement fund.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
It’s all supply and demand. No (well run) company is ever going to pay their employees more than they need to.
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
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.
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.