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Comment by victor22 | Hacker News Reader

Dude, I don't even live in the US but I've worked with PR before (huge firm) and as soon as I started reading this my bullshit radar went off, this is clearly reads like a PR fake story, and when that happens it's always 1) to sell you a product or 2) to plant a fake idea on your head. Since there's no clearly a product, yeah, this article is clearly a psy0ps. Side note: when they report "...72% expects easier jobs..." they are talking about their expectations, while hiding employment data (which probably says otherwise). That's another cheap old "dark pattern" in lying PR article. They call it "soft data" (instead of real data, so you can lie easily. It's like Marlboro would tell you "...72% of smokers expects health improvements due to smoking...

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I live in NZ. Hiring is not easy at the moment.

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.

> Smart developers are leaving.

I'm in Ōtepoti/Dunedin (best city in NZ!), and within my social network most developers work remotely for overseas companies.

Good to meet you. I'm in Palmy, (most average city in NZ).

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.

Kia ora from Tauranga

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.

Where do people find jobs in the US that can be done from outside the US?

The few job boards I've seen all have either low salaries, or are US-only...

I got my first remote gig (firmware work) through a friend's referral, however that was years before COVID-19. These days I'd suggest looking for a remote-first company. Or, maybe apply for remote gigs that say US-only (assuming there's not an obvious or stated reason), then bring up your location when talking to a real human.

FWIW - technically I run a NZ company, so am a contractor and not an employee of the company that my day-to-day manager works for. This arrangement seems to be common among people who work for US companies, or are US citizens, which brings up some questions about the stats in the article...

People tend to post interesting jobs that they find in the #jobs channel on the DevelopNZ Slack if it's something you're interested in.

You forgot all the Kiwis working remote for Atlassian and Canva in the $200+k region.

My team of ~12 is nearly ~30% kiwi at this point.

this city is so damn small, I didn't even need to know your real name to know who you were :D

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)

I'm also in NZ and everything you say is true, except wtf $1k in electric and gas?! I'm not a conservative energy user, and I'm paying around $280 (mid winter) for a family of 4. Hard to believe/understand the $1k remark.

I have a 1910 villa and a Vietnamese wife with a new born. She has been here for 14 years but still likes it warm.

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.

> 75KWHs

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

Yeah, that kind of thing makes me think 'why do they have six refrigerators?' or 'is the electric dryer running literally 24/7?'.

Three chest freezers, one fridge freezer, dryer goes five to six times a day, three heat pumps and two radiant electric heaters.

So you live an unbelievably excessive existence.

No, I don't think so. I just want to keep my family warm and in clean clothes.

We do need to get down to less freezers but we have some home kill that we need to get through first.

How big is your family and how big is your house? Your situation is so far from anything that I've experienced in my life that I cannot even imagine it. How can you use a dryer that many times per day? Do you even need to use a dryer? Can't you air dry things?

I normally don't stay in places with a dryer and just let things air dry. If you're running heating/ac, they normally lower humidity so things dry really fast anyway.

2 adults, 2 infants. 110 Sqr metres.

6 a day is on the high side. It's probably an overestimate.

When there are no new borns we might dry 3 loads a week.

But the house is a work in progress. The curtains blow on a windy day.

Yeah 75KW per day is massive. Throw whatever money you have left in solar.

I suspect insulation would make a bigger difference than solar.

You can get a hot water tank insulation blanket that should help a little bit.

We use a califont gas hot water heater. So it's on demand, no storage tank.

Kia ora from Hawke's Bay.

"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.

Wrong things, often ridiculously wrong things get written all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s the result of a “psyop”. Here’s a roughly accurate flowchart for determining if you’re currently being subject to something that could non-ironically be termed a psyop: “is this a psyop?”—>”no”.

It sounds like you're saying there's No True (Scotsman's) Psyop.

Where are you drawing the line separating it from aggressive targeting marketing and PR?

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

If the actions are well precedented and widely known such that normal people would not find them shocking, I suppose. So things which we’ve made it since the beginning of the English language without finding the need to call them “psyops” and thereby assigning them fake intrigue. An article saying wrong things about the job market: no. Cambridge Analytica: sure.

I think you could replace "psyop" with "marketing campaign" for most of the times the expression is used today.

Cambridge Analytica is also entirely fake, in the sense that it's highly unlikely any votes were affected by it.

I doubt I would ever utter the word seriously to describe something, but operations can fail, no? If it indeed didn’t have any effect, the operation was still pretty shocking and intriguing.

Not really. It was more a marketing gimmick for the company. The kind of advertising targeting Cambridge did (based on cheap 2010s Era fb personality quiz responders) had absolutely no targeting value. It just sounded like techno magic to journalists.

Like imagine a developer consultancy said they used latex to fizzbuzz people's computers to get them to vote for Trump. If you understand advertising targeting, CA makes just as much sense as that.

Calling something a psyop is just a meme. But it is true that everybody has a perspective they want to promote. People have the ability to think and speak more or less objectively to differing levels, but people don’t tend to say things unless the want other people to think those things are true. If somebody makes a claim that is substantially different from your own experience of reality, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask yourself why does that person want me or others to think that that is true?

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”.

There’s a branch of the Canadian military that admitted that they were running an information warfare campaign against actual Canadians during COVID.

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.

Use of the word is a meme. But any use of information to try and influence what other people think is basically what a psyop is, and everybody does that all the time. People only tend to call things a psyop if they think the motives are especially sinister, but that's just a pointless distraction imo, as you can never know what somebody's motives truly are. Every statement the government makes is a psyop, or an act of information warfare. Same for journalists, or social commentators, or HN commentators, or anybody else...

You are probably right but this is about NZ. I can also attest to it being really difficult to find good hires in Australia at the moment. We have what you might call a grass roots tech scene, not heaps of startup activity, most work is in established businesses or new but bootstrapped going concerns. Sydney and Melb might have a bit more startup activity.

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.

Honest question: do you have resources or materials that you could refer me to so that I could learn more about how this part of the pr/publishing industry works?

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.

Ryan Holiday’s “trust me I’m lying” may reveal the corporate underbelly you are curious about.

What is the goal of this PR piece then?

A few years ago a similar move was making rounds in the US to promote increasing of the visa quotas or reforming the system due to the “shortage”

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

And strangely enough, the goal of these articles is never to increase the number of Americans trained for these plentiful jobs. The idea is always to bring more workers from other countries, so the industry will have an easier time to pay lower salaries.

Increase the pool of software engineers, specifically in New Zealand, so companies can hire more easily and don't need to increase salaries.

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.

Isn’t it more likely that the CEO of an industry wide association would be the best person to comment on trends impacting the whole industry?

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.

Not really. When assessing the credibility of a source, you have two main questions: do they have the information you need, and do they have an incentive to lie? Industry-wide associations usually have significantly worse information than people who are actually performing the jobs at companies in the organization, and they also have a responsibility to their member orgs to get the best outcomes for them (i.e. represent information in a way that achieves member organization goals).

If I wanted accurate information on the state of hiring in an industry, I would look for someone who had recently performed sourcing/interviewing/recruiting for one of the big companies in the industry but had also recently retired, left for another field, or become a stay-at-home mom/dad. They have the firsthand information as part of their job, but they also have no dog in the fight and hence no reason to distort that information.

You have never published, have you? Your last paragraph is all about finding impossible sources whose credibility won’t be apparent to average readers.

> 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'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.

I had a manager once who said that "[famous company] executive, [name]" should be an anti-Hearst pattern that shows [name] is clearly not an executive.

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