Ask HN: Australian devs how’s the job market at the moment?

[el_dev_hell]

I’m a dev in Australia looking for new gigs. Recruiters were absolutely hounding me 8 months to a year ago. Now it’s crickets.

Startups seem to be gone. Some bigger corporate gigs have been offered but it’s pretty quiet.

Is this the reality or am I just playing a bad hand at the moment?

[shoo]

Some of the larger recruitment firms gather data about the market. Hays publishes an IT Salary guide, their latest FY 23-24 doc was created in May:

https://www.hays.com.au/documents/276732/1102429/Hays+Salary...

In the prior year's general guide for the entire AU/NZ job market - not just IT - Hays said the labour market was the tightest they'd ever seen in half a century, on the back of covid-related border restrictions to immigration.

Re: the salaries listed for roles salary guide, they might be representative of median offers, but there's also a tail of situations and niches where a specific project in a business is willing to offer 2x or 3x the median salary to the right employee/contractor at the right time. Although granted, maybe that's based on what the market was like 12 months ago.

I suspect the Australian IT job market & salaries are bi- or tri- modal. Small local businesses don't have enough scale in their business operations and aren't in a position to bid as high for engineering salaries offered by the large non-tech domestic employers such as the big banks. Then our large domestic employers compete against each other for engineering talent, but aren't necessarily willing to bid against well funded US companies that have engineering offices or are willing to hire remote in Australia.

[shoo]

Another facet of this might be the changes in interest rates.

It's easier to bet lots of money on speculative startups when interest rates are so low that money is approximately free to borrow, opportunities for good investments are increasingly rare, and investors are increasing willing to invest in ventures with less and less plausible business models. (c.f. the "golden age of fraud")

It's a different environment when interest rates have risen by 4% (AU) & 5% (US). If sources of cheap funding for ventures are drying up, and investors are looking for their startup investments to begin returning a profit (vs 5% nominal returns they could get by simply putting money into short term US treasuries), then we might expect waves of failures from some of these startups that have not built scalable business models that can be turned profitable, or rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting from startups that can become profitable businesses provided they stop pouring engineering resources into projects that aren't core to their business. Both of these reduce demand for engineering talent & increase supply of people on the market looking for a new job.

[re-thc]

There are definitely less roles being advertised right now.

Having said that - I don't know if it's for the better or worse. A lot of the past roles were highways to burnout.

There are still startups hiring. Also it depends on the domain, language and other factors. C# is still going strong.

[quickthrower2]

Not sure, I think companies can be more fussy and the recruiter spam has decreased. Grateful that I am not needing to look right now.

[mierz00]

I’ve just got a new role and it took me about 2 months of looking.

I did find there were quite a few jobs out there and start ups too, but no where near as much as a year or two ago when LinkedIn was crazy.

[ParadisoShlee]

Australia is heading into a recession.