Hacker News Reader

Comment by JusticeJuice | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the nz tech startup market for 8 years before moving overseas. To say nz tech is a tiny market is an understatement, when the population of the country is the size of most cities, there’s just that not that many opportunities.

It does mean for many people the only way for career growth is to go elsewhere. When I left nz my salary 3x’d.

The opportunity here is that there is many talented tech workers who choose to stay in NZ for lifestyle reasons. Foreign companies can compete so easily on salaries, it’s easy to just buy the top of the market for half the price. You will need local recruitment help though to find them.

The time zones are rough, you need to be a company that’s embraced async working, and are able to give a team a clear brief and just let them do it. But the hiring opportunities are there.

View on HN

Are there many people involved in follow the sun support or SRE roles there? I know my company only has an engineering presence in Aus and Japan because of the large coverage gap between the US west coast and the EU. Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.

* For some definitions of native. I've had to work as a translator for a Kiwi and an American, both native English speakers.

I know that aws has a few reliability engineers in Wellington, but that’s just to support their aus servers. There really isn’t that many foreign companies outsourcing support to NZ.

> Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.

It's not always native English. It's always at least proficient enough, but a good chunk of the workers in the tech sector speak English as a second language. NZ has very diverse population.

It's a slightly weird one, but Octopus Energy (UK) have setup a new utility in NZ and it also covers off-hours support.

How does it compare to e.g. Eastern Europe? What is the typical salary of a senior developer or architect in NZ?

Depending on skillset $150k-$230k is common. You do have to balance this against the cost of living though, we definitely don’t have Eastern Europe’s cost of living advantage.

That's contracting rate and not sure how common anymore.

That’s full time employment and pretty common with the people I asked for architect-equivalent positions.

Assuming $ is NZD and you are quoting net, yearly income, then it is 1.5-2.5 times higher than Eastern Europe wages according to statistics in my environment. Unfortunately, cost of living has increased substantially here as well. For example, a decent (but not spacious) 2-bedroom apartment is in the range of EUR 300k-500k already.

That’s gross yearly income, after tax it’s $125k. Though for a lot of people there aren’t many other expenses after tax, just rent and food.

A decent 2 bedroom apartment in Auckland or Wellington will set you back $800k-$1.2M based on a quick look at the market. It can be a lot cheaper away from the cities.

Food however is expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com