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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

Not so sure if I agree with the comment about not being able to hire developers. I think it could be better said "We are unable to hire developers for the price we want to pay".

I am going to take up the offer to email and see how it goes... but I would be surprised if I get an offer which pays enough to actually live in Sydney.

I recently went hunting for jobs and my experience was less then stellar. Many companies didn't even bother sending feedback to coding tests, and one expected me to pay for the Yahoo Boss API and violate Google's terms of service for a test. I will say I had an excellent experience with Hotels Combined though despite declining their offer for personal reasons.

EDIT - Emailed then, and got a response within 1 minute. I will say this for Matt he's very responsive.

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Interesting, I know a basic php dev in Perth working for 75k a year, and many IT contractors are pulling in 200K. The thing is most of our grads end up in tech support on 40k. And that's why we are getting in many overseas IT people to actually code (The majority of my computer science class dislikes code)

75k isn't a great salary in Sydney (not sure about Perth) and I have seen more basic PHP dev jobs offering 55k then 75k. Contractors always pull in large amounts of cash, but that's usually not what these places are looking for.

Agree that most grads seem to want to avoid coding. Out of my class I think only 1 or 2 actually ended up coding for a living. Not sure why that is in Australia but it seems fairly common.

I also have a problem understanding why people bother with a CS degree but don't want to go into programming or don't even understand it. Why don't they major in something else?

I have ads looking for great javascript developers for 100k+ and I am getting zero applicants. Zero.

Maybe those guys are afraid of being "poor, driven and hungry" (your words man) and do not believe in this 100k+?

The pay is actually pretty great in Australia (living costs are also high though).

I think another problem is that there's no one with the -exact- skillset they're after. Why take a chance on a local person that would take a couple of weeks to get up to speed when a foreigner has the exact skillset you're after. Not that I'm against foreign visas, but they do let industry off the hook on the whole training thing to a degree.

That's one of my other complaints. If you are hiring someone for a full-time position if they are anyway decent they can learn whatever skills are required. Im sick of being overlooked for jobs because I know CodeIgniter rather then Cake or am more familiar with MySQL then Oracle.

This is partly due to recruiters really having no idea how to judge candidates other than scanning resumes and cover letters for buzz words.

"... for the price we want to pay" isn't accurate.

I have an advert out at the moment for PHP dev in Melbourne that clearly states we want to pay top dollar.

I'm still only getting applications from web developers who happen to know enough PHP to make them dangerous.

Of the applicants, only four are reasonably interesting.

Three of them are here on 457s.

What figure would you put as "top dollar"? Your opinion of top dollar and mine might be totally different.

So tell me what you're looking for? The ad doesn't say more than we're willing to pay.

Nowhere does the ad say "competitive salary offered". We all know that means "we're cheap and don't want to pay".

For Sydney I am mostly unwilling to look at a job for less then 100k. That figure is somewhat dependent on what the place is like though its not a hard line rule.

My experience has previously shown that if you mention PHP though the salary expectations are usually less then 75.

If you want top talent you need to pay $100-150k+

Any reason why you need PHP devs specifically?

All our code is already written in PHP. But I'm more interested in a great coder that knows PHP rather than someone who's been writing PHP for years.

It would be nice to say any great coder would be good, but I do need someone who at least knows PHP.

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