Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnScolaro | Hacker News Reader

What a fantastic write-up. As a Brisbane native and software developer I often feel similarly to the author about Brisbane's software dev scene. Brisbane so often feels like a backwater, with the big dogs down in Melbourne and Sydney, and the 'peak of industry' in the US.

I'd love to move to Seattle and work for Amazon or something to get 'relevant industry experience' but what I'd really love to do is make a go of it here because - like the author - I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world ;-)

View on HN

I lived and worked as a dev in Seattle for 8 years before moving to Sydney. I want nothing more than for Australia to have a thriving tech scene but I haven’t seen much progress in that area since I moved here 5 years ago. I still love it and have no plans to go back. I just wish there was more opportunity here and not so much constant pressure to move back to the US for increased salary and challenge.

Hey there, I’ve been in Sydney 5 years same as you (after a 7 year stint in SF) and feel exactly the same way.

If you’re around in the next week or two it’d be great to grab coffee and talk about it! Coffee being the great Aussie connector and all.

You can find my email on my profile.

Australia in some ways is the opposite of the US. Too much regulation and not enough effort to help people start businesses. It really needs to change and they’re missing a big opportunity to make the start up scene better. Just as long as we don’t do it while throwing out sensible regulations.

Funny. I lived in Seattle for 5 years before I moved to Sydney, where I lived for 5 years. That was a different era though, tech wasn't the industry it is now and the internet still felt new. I moved down in 2003 and my American accent helped me land a job I wasn't qualified for (having self taught myself some php and java in Seattle, mostly working as a bartender though). In 2005 I started a small software shop with some friends. Back then (2003) the Ruby user's group was too small to get a reservation at a pub so we'd have to partner up with the Smalltalk guys. Rails came out a year or so later and that changed.

I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane.

Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.

Similar story but Melbourne.

I just don’t see _as much_ self-directed ambition or obsession? Going to a meetup in Seattle or SF in the early 2010s there were serious obsessives. Masters of domains like Go or JavaScript and someone from Sequoia at the Startup Weekend. Always flocks of folks looking to start their next business. That same bug just never hit here?

This I find weird, surely there are people who can sense opportunities unlockable by tech and Australia is not at all easier or any less expensive than the U.S., I still can’t quite put my finger on it. For me there’s still a magical cultural element to a place like SF, and to an extent – Seattle, when it comes to creating new opportunities.

Two factors I think: (1) obsessives have a higher likelihood to follow their obsession into immigration-a factor which works to the advantage of certain parts of the US, to the detriment of most of the rest of the world; (2) Australian investors tend to have a more risk-averse attitude, they will offer less money and demand a bigger stake for it, many of them will prefer later stage startups to the truly early stage ones

Lots of factors involved, some more regulatory others more cultural. One is that Australia’s property market has been so hot for so long it sucks up a lot of investment; the US market, while recently being quite hot as well, has historically been much more mixed (the US had a big price drop around the time of the GFC, Australia saw some declines but they were a lot smaller). Another is the US legal system tends to be more borrower-friendly in bankruptcy, foreclosures, etc, making people more willing to take out loans to fund their business ideas

I live down the street from Amazon's relatively nice suburban office (you couldn't pay me to step foot in Seattle).

Let me save you the trip, you don't want to work for Amazon at the money they pay. They would have to 1.5x it or maybe even double it to make it worth the suffering of working there.

Life is short-- work somewhere else, or failing that, on your own thing :)

As someone who’s from Brisbane but spent the last 7 years in London you’re 100% correct. Brisbane is the best city in the world. I’m excited to eventually move back.

I live in Canada and Bluey is the reason I really want to visit Brisbane.

Queensland has bluey, margot robbie, the irwins. What has melbourne or sydney done lately honestly?

"I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world"

Personally the 3 times I visited Brisbane, were all in all quite neutral for me, not great, not bad. But friends had way worse experiences and when I found a iconic backpackers book, "No shitting on the toilet", I had a good laugh about those passages:

"A friend of mine would never leave a place until he’d had a good time there. Another friend would not leave a destination until he had learnt something encouraging about the people and their culture. Both are currently stuck in Brisbane."

So .. I would have been stuck there as well. So please no offense about your home town. I love Queensland. And Bluey. And would give your hometown a chance again. But I do know people who never ever want to go there again. (But it also has been some years.)

Oh I can 100% see where all of that comes from too.

I think a lot of Brisbanes secret beauty is well hidden from people just visiting. The temperate rainforests, glasshouse mountains, some of the best beaches in the world all within an hours drive. The strange birds, the general attitude of the public. I think it's all quite nice. My only personal gripe is that I think it's far too hot in summer!

I'm also extremely biased though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Brisbane does have an awful lot of mediocrity too, but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!

"but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!"

Maybe see you there :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com