Google Engineer on Australia's slow growing Silicon Valley

"Having a Silicon Valley" is totally unrelated I think.

I'm not in a financial position to fund my studies myself, so I'm making use of the federal government 'FEE-HELP' system, which basically means I don't begin repaying my loan(s) until I reach a certain income threshold. I also live in a 'regional' area on the NSW Mid North Coast, and despite living within an hour of a local university, the courses and degrees I've enrolled in aren't offered in this area.

I can understand that there are most likely different factors that determine whether or not a particular degree is covered by FEE-HELP, but it's a shame that it seems like a proper CS degree is still only viable for somebody living in a large capital city, with the finances available to self-fund their studies.

As you've mentioned, a Bachelor of IT does offer certain fundamental units that you'd encounter in a CS degree, but none of the advanced maths units seem to be offered.

If the National Broadband Network actually gets finished one day, hopefully more long distance education providers might be able to offer degrees such as CS, with the aid of fast, reliable internet connectivity to help solve the locale problem.

I interned at Google and know many people who work there -- whilst their interview process takes forever they wouldn't mind what your degree is if they have enough ticks from the Google interviewers.

Essentially Google are just slow to trust. It's easier for them to turn down a promising candidate than remove a candidate who showed promise but couldn't live up to their potential. The best suggestion is to have a friend on the inside recommend you -- internal recommendations feature a lot more klout.

1) It is remarkably easy to start a business in Australia. Three steps, IIRC, and can be done in a day.

2) There are significant tax breaks for people selling a company they started

3) The language is English, which is a big advantage for sales and marketing reasons, and many others

4) Australian-based businesses don't need to charge sales tat/VAT/GST to anyone except Australian customers. (In comparison, I'm currently based in Spain, so I have to charge various rates of VAT/sales tax to all European Union customers)

5) Relatively low bureaucratic hurdle (compared to UK, Germany, Spain, and Lebanon - the other countries where I've worked)

6) The infrastructure is excellent. (Internet infrastructure could be better though - it is not on par with western europe.)

Some cool things are going on and other stuff has happened here: Atlassian, Google Maps, Freelancer, Campaign Monitor, 99 Designs are some big-ish names.

Australia tends to hate on itself and think that everything is horrible, when we actually have it much better than many other places. For "Tech Startups" it's obvious that Silicon Valley is _the_ place to be - but that doesn't mean that you have to be there to succeed. Especially if you are using technology to transform a market back home.

However as a startup it has nothing on other countries.

The biggest problem is that the successful people in Australia simply don't give back like they do in other countries. There is no real sense of philanthropy or altruism nor has there been much pressure from the community to do so.

So it has the left the industry with some noble seed incubators at the low end (<50K), pretty hopeless VCs at the high end (2-5M+) and very little in between. You just don't have access to that 200-500K that most startups need (i.e. 2-3 devs + 1 business) but which isn't that hard to get in UK/US/Europe.

And you see it in the outcomes. We only really have a small handful of internationally successful IT companies despite the huge wealth in the country.

The only issue I've heard is that some brick/mortar shops have been putting pressure on suppliers not to deal with online companies. But our beloved ACCC (pro-consumer agency) is investigating as we speak and I doubt that will last very long.