I can confirm this is the case when my organisation advertises roles they get inundated with applications.
But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.
I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.
New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.
Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.
The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.
[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand
Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or are interested in good people with hard skills - it's almost all very basic web dev. Pretty much all the veterans I know around my age are doing work beneath them to pay the bills or have switched out of development completely.
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.
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.
Switzerland has something similar these days (UBS-CS merger, big tech layoffs, too expensive local workforce)
I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)
Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.
I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy
(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)
Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
I remember reading around here about how many companies in Switzerland like Roche, offshore a lot of mid-tier tech jobs (like web dev) out to places like Poland due to much better performance/cost. IIRC, Acronis also has most of their devs in Bulgaria now. I also remember reading a few years ago an interview with a Swisscom exec about offshoring their devops jobs to the Netherlands on the claim they can't find local devops talent.
Now I'm not in Switzerland and even I'm not buying that reason at face value, but it's clear that offshoring is an issue in most high-CoL countries in the post WFH era as a lot of tech jobs became more of a commodity in the post ZIRP era. So I can imagine the jobs not moving out of Switzerland are those "management" type of jobs where the job itself is having coffee and networking with the other managers on how to further reduce costs and increase profits while relocating engineering jobs to cheaper countries.
Due to this, it seems that Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
>the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
This explains some of the absurd arguments I often hear from delulu googlers on this board and how out of touch they are with the real world. The sad thing is they have little introspection to realize it and would rather die on their hill.
I know a trade unionist who tried to talk ex Googlers into bargaining for a compensation package after getting laid off, but many were absolutely clueless about any of that. They had no plans and didn't even want to collaborate with unions. Unfortunately, STEM folks still see themselves as above regular workers and thus incorrectly perceive themselves as shielded from capitalists wrath and mood swings.
Tbf, NZ had been in a recession until this past quarter, and NZ was never that hot of a tech hub compared to a number of hubs in Australia, let alone the rest of APAC.
And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
> And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
Not only do they require sponsorship, but as part of the application process for sponsoring I think they're required to prove or make a case that they couldn't find any local talent to fill the position.
I have worked on teams in NZ that had people where the company sponsored their visas, so it does happen.
I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.
We are heading back to New Zealand soon and the situation does seem pretty grim from what I hear from friends. Ideally, we’d like to settle down in NZ but it’s looking like we may end up in Australia instead.
To be honest, we Australians aren't doing so well either. But you're correct, it's a comparatively bigger economy. There are more opportunities. But we've hundreds if not thousands applying for the same job.
As a kiwi living in Australia and working for mini FANG, the thought of moving to Southeast Asia and living off savings for a couple of years in the hope that I might wait out this jobs/rental crisis has crossed my mind.
There are quite a few remote work opportunities around with US and AU companies. It might not be what you're looking for, but it seems to work pretty well with an NZ lifestyle.
Maybe I am badly informed but last time I heard about NZ, it was said that there is very little unemployment and you could switch job in a matter of week. Which leads to my question: wouldn't you just consider doing something else?
While I am happy working in IT right now, there are a number of other professional activities I could see myself learning.
NZ's business culture is very different from that of the US (which that FT article from the weekend was about). IMO, it's much more scelrotic and makes Australia's old boy's club look dynamic.
> "When an employer was initially interested, they often backed out once they realised I was based in Beijing."
Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.
Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?
Or rather; the candidate didn’t have a visa, the employer would need to jump through a bunch of hoops, then a multi-month wait, OR can just hire one of the many on-shore candidates available on the market.
I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.
This is not specific to China, any foreigner's application will likewise end up in the bin. (Australians are excepted, because they have reciprocal work rights.)
Few companies want to go through the uncertain and expensive hassle of sponsoring visas, waiting for them to relocate etc unless they really have no other options.
Everyone in New Zealand is struggling unless you've been there for 10-20+ years (when you could still afford a house) or you're an immigrant who sold a house in your home country and thus you can afford a house.
The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.
This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.
And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.
This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.
> Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy.
No, it is a transfer from those who don’t own land to those who already own land. Roughly correlates to young/poor/immigrant classes transferring wealth (or maintaining wealth disparity) to older/richer/beneficiary classes.
That is why it is politically popular. Low and flat land value tax rates have always enabled this, but their effects were temporarily masked by the population boom allowing a lot of upward movement in the lower (non land owning) classes due to broad economic growth.
It's got little to do with the ultra-wealthy, who have their wealth in equity. The problem is the upper middle class who have their wealth in land. They are 30% of the population and command election outcomes against anyone who tries to change the status quo. To them, the housing crisis is a housing bonanza and they plan on keeping it that way.
I also take issue with buzzword "neoliberal", as if leftists would be any better with their rent control, NIMBY tendencies, and ideological hostility to supply-side policy (see Dean Preston in US, Zohran Mamdani in US, Adrian Ramsay in UK, Chandler-Mather in AU). In my estimation, they would be worse than any "abundance neoliberal", who at least have Austin, Texas as a successful case study they can point to, and who have ideas that make logical sense. The problem is not their policy ideas but the political reality they exist in where they're constrained in what they can do by a politically active plurality (landowners) that wish to persist the status quo.
NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.
Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.
Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.
Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.
Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.
Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.
The framing of this story right from the start is disingenuous. The Microsoft job losses are explicitly reported as "part of a broader strategy to streamline operations and accelerate its AI initiatives." Immediately followed by reporting that Health NZ (rebranded from Te Whatu Ora) is cutting a third of its IT staff. The implication being that it's the same reason.
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
> It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
I did an interview the other day, the roles had like hundreds of applications.
The naked truth is that if you don't know recruiters, you are fcked!!
Why???
1. Big companies have fired people by the thousands. Many from which were hired during COVID gold era but the market now shrank;
2. The IT market has way too many high skilled folks from those big techs, some John Doe also;
3. Many places have adopted AI tools so unless your resume looks exactly that it is looking for, you are automatically denied;
4. Many roles are a mess, the role is DevOps but somehow the role descriptions is for a Network Engineer, go figure;
5. Social problems like hiring people based on weird ideology like wokeness and not based on skill and experience. You won't get in no matter how good you are and to be honest, you don't wanna be in such toxic culture anyway so a win-win.
6. Ghosted, very hard to avoid this.
7. AI: This is affecting more developers in some way. You cannot have or trust AI to manage infra/network yet.
I could go on and on, in short words, companies can afford to do whatever now.
During COVID, my last two jobs required one interview only and I was in, now??
4 interviews and you are ghosted.
Don't waste your time applying for jobs online, instead, focus on recruiters that hire folks based in your experience.
The recruiter that got me at my current job ( I know him for 3 years now) is the same one that got me an interview with that company with hundreds of applications within days not even weeks.
But still, there are two major problems you cannot avoid:
1. Companies can afford to wait, if you don't have experience on every single goddamn thing, it makes it very hard to get in. 3-4 interviews are the new normal now.
It is becoming normal now to require you to know everything if you are within DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps space.
2. Ghosted: Some recruiters themselves are just dogsh*t, they ghost you, others have no experience at all, just scripted so you will just waste time;
Companies ghost you while trying to find the perfect candidate after you have 4 interviews.
Yup, 4 interviews, the company disappeared only to show up a month later saying they found somebody better :)
Online applications is even worse (AI, your name it)
If you wanna somehow find a job, hunt recruiters, not job.
Have a decent resume that doesn't look a kids homework haha
You will stress less, you will avoid applying for a 100 places where 99% of them will never read your application. Let him/her do their thing.
This 35 thing referred to in the article is a phenomenon present in the Chinese tech market, not the NZ one. There's no such thing in the NZ one, and I pity the Chinese with their 996 and curse of 35. What an awfully structured tech industry they have. NZ is in general much better, but there is definitely fewer positions lately.
teruakohatu|9 months ago
But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.
I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.
New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.
Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.
The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.
[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.
droopyEyelids|9 months ago
nigel_bree|9 months ago
Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or are interested in good people with hard skills - it's almost all very basic web dev. Pretty much all the veterans I know around my age are doing work beneath them to pay the bills or have switched out of development completely.
JusticeJuice|9 months ago
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.
imadethis|9 months ago
* For some definitions of native. I've had to work as a translator for a Kiwi and an American, both native English speakers.
kavalg|9 months ago
kmarc|9 months ago
I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)
Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.
I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy
(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)
Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
FirmwareBurner|9 months ago
Now I'm not in Switzerland and even I'm not buying that reason at face value, but it's clear that offshoring is an issue in most high-CoL countries in the post WFH era as a lot of tech jobs became more of a commodity in the post ZIRP era. So I can imagine the jobs not moving out of Switzerland are those "management" type of jobs where the job itself is having coffee and networking with the other managers on how to further reduce costs and increase profits while relocating engineering jobs to cheaper countries.
Due to this, it seems that Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
>the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
This explains some of the absurd arguments I often hear from delulu googlers on this board and how out of touch they are with the real world. The sad thing is they have little introspection to realize it and would rather die on their hill.
derelicta|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
alephnerd|9 months ago
And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
latentsea|9 months ago
Not only do they require sponsorship, but as part of the application process for sponsoring I think they're required to prove or make a case that they couldn't find any local talent to fill the position.
I have worked on teams in NZ that had people where the company sponsored their visas, so it does happen.
solardev|9 months ago
They seem to have a couple of openings... https://grindinggear.com/?page=careers
I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.
creakingstairs|9 months ago
jp0d|9 months ago
apatheticonion|9 months ago
te_chris|9 months ago
bigfatkitten|9 months ago
jemmyw|9 months ago
prmoustache|9 months ago
While I am happy working in IT right now, there are a number of other professional activities I could see myself learning.
mvdtnz|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
gsf_emergency|9 months ago
https://archive.ph/YjX1w
alephnerd|9 months ago
HenryBemis|9 months ago
Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.
Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?
janstice|9 months ago
I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.
decimalenough|9 months ago
jmyeet|9 months ago
The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.
This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.
And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.
This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.
lotsofpulp|9 months ago
No, it is a transfer from those who don’t own land to those who already own land. Roughly correlates to young/poor/immigrant classes transferring wealth (or maintaining wealth disparity) to older/richer/beneficiary classes.
That is why it is politically popular. Low and flat land value tax rates have always enabled this, but their effects were temporarily masked by the population boom allowing a lot of upward movement in the lower (non land owning) classes due to broad economic growth.
energy123|9 months ago
I also take issue with buzzword "neoliberal", as if leftists would be any better with their rent control, NIMBY tendencies, and ideological hostility to supply-side policy (see Dean Preston in US, Zohran Mamdani in US, Adrian Ramsay in UK, Chandler-Mather in AU). In my estimation, they would be worse than any "abundance neoliberal", who at least have Austin, Texas as a successful case study they can point to, and who have ideas that make logical sense. The problem is not their policy ideas but the political reality they exist in where they're constrained in what they can do by a politically active plurality (landowners) that wish to persist the status quo.
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
reactordev|9 months ago
petesergeant|9 months ago
Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.
beachy|9 months ago
NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.
Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.
Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.
Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.
Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.
Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.
Nekhrimah|9 months ago
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
[0] https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360698953/funding-cut-rnz-m...
foxglacier|9 months ago
Do you have a source for that or is it just a conspiracy theory?
mvdtnz|9 months ago
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
h4kunamata|9 months ago
I did an interview the other day, the roles had like hundreds of applications. The naked truth is that if you don't know recruiters, you are fcked!!
Why???
1. Big companies have fired people by the thousands. Many from which were hired during COVID gold era but the market now shrank;
2. The IT market has way too many high skilled folks from those big techs, some John Doe also;
3. Many places have adopted AI tools so unless your resume looks exactly that it is looking for, you are automatically denied;
4. Many roles are a mess, the role is DevOps but somehow the role descriptions is for a Network Engineer, go figure;
5. Social problems like hiring people based on weird ideology like wokeness and not based on skill and experience. You won't get in no matter how good you are and to be honest, you don't wanna be in such toxic culture anyway so a win-win.
6. Ghosted, very hard to avoid this.
7. AI: This is affecting more developers in some way. You cannot have or trust AI to manage infra/network yet.
I could go on and on, in short words, companies can afford to do whatever now. During COVID, my last two jobs required one interview only and I was in, now?? 4 interviews and you are ghosted.
Don't waste your time applying for jobs online, instead, focus on recruiters that hire folks based in your experience. The recruiter that got me at my current job ( I know him for 3 years now) is the same one that got me an interview with that company with hundreds of applications within days not even weeks.
But still, there are two major problems you cannot avoid:
1. Companies can afford to wait, if you don't have experience on every single goddamn thing, it makes it very hard to get in. 3-4 interviews are the new normal now. It is becoming normal now to require you to know everything if you are within DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps space.
2. Ghosted: Some recruiters themselves are just dogsh*t, they ghost you, others have no experience at all, just scripted so you will just waste time; Companies ghost you while trying to find the perfect candidate after you have 4 interviews. Yup, 4 interviews, the company disappeared only to show up a month later saying they found somebody better :) Online applications is even worse (AI, your name it)
If you wanna somehow find a job, hunt recruiters, not job. Have a decent resume that doesn't look a kids homework haha
You will stress less, you will avoid applying for a 100 places where 99% of them will never read your application. Let him/her do their thing.
hcfman|9 months ago
I guess the reasons I left New Zealand more than 35 years ago are still true.
latentsea|9 months ago