151–160 of 169 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aussie dev here with a similar story. I lived and worked in the bay area for a couple of years a few years ago. I wouldn't choose to go back there either, especially now. And I have Australian friends in the bay area now who are reconsidering which country they want their tax dollars to go to.
How come?
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How come?
Here's what I wrote about it when I left: https://josephg.com/blog/goodbye-sf/
How have you found London? And where would you recommend a Perthian turned Melbourian dev head to if we have to go overseas to find ourselves?
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Here's what I wrote about it when I left: https://josephg.com/blog/goodbye-sf/
Sydney and Melbourne have had massive increases in homelessness since you wrote this unfortunately. How have you found London? And where would you recommend a Perthian turned Melbourian dev head to if we have to go overseas to find ourselves?
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Software is NOT easy to outsource. I have been part of many outsourcing projects over the last 15 years, and I can count on one hand the number of those that have been acceptable. Outsourcing requires a completely different style of management than of a local team of developers. I have had better luck outsourcing art and animation tasks. But even there cultural barriers pop up all the time.
Sure it is, most of the problems I've seen described fall squarely in to "we went cost cutting all the way and got shit results - who could have guessed". If you hire cheap devs even by local standards then you get cheap devs, add to that the lack of proper management like you said because it would cost to do it properly and you get crap. Tech giants all have teams all over the world and it works OK, but they pay top…
Having teams all over the world is a very different cost and business model from outsourcing.
With overseas teams they tend to either be salary matched to market and the quality not so great or good wage even by US (but maybe not SV) standards but getting the very best people.
Outsourcing is much more of a mess because markup is ~3x.
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>Because the salaries of US-based programmers would rise? Because companies would be more motivated to train locals instead of importing foreigners? Or it just speeds up outsourcing.
Exactly. Salaries in western Europe are about half of US salaries, if you go to the East, while still within EU, a programmer could be paid as little as $15-20k/year. If you go even more to the East - Ukraine, Russia, China, India, etc. you can get very highly qualified people for even less, happy to work on a project for you. Software is one of the easiest things to outsource/offshore, unlike manufacturing or servic…
Honestly companies have tried, and keep trying, but the work keeps coming back to the US.
Hint: Its because software engineering is a lot more than cutting code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software is NOT easy to outsource. I have been part of many outsourcing projects over the last 15 years, and I can count on one hand the number of those that have been acceptable. Outsourcing requires a completely different style of management than of a local team of developers. I have had better luck outsourcing art and animation tasks. But even there cultural barriers pop up all the time.
I am not saying it is easy, only that it is the easiest when compared to e.g. manufacturing or services. You can't exactly outsource a dentist or barber to India and outsourcing manufacturing is a hugely expensive and complicated task, with a ton of logistics involved. Compared to that moving software development to another country is much simpler. It is difficult to get it right, but it is simpler to move things lik…
It is actually the other way around regarding manufacturing and software development.
Software development is high-growth, quickly changing, highly skilled, high levels of communication, transferable, low capital, and doesn't scale well.
Manufacturing for the most part is steady demand, slow rates of change, low-moderate skill, low communication, not very transferable, high capital and scales really well.
This leads to software dev being very difficult to outsource without being out-competed.
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Is there any (hopefully hilarious) argument behind this statement?
Background: - Behold, the Australian "IT tax" makes everything 60% more expensive here Just Because™. - There's absolutely nothing like Silicon Valley here. If there is I've never heard of it, and I live in Sydney, the most population-dense area. Situation: the two political parties here (Labor and Liberal) have opposing ideas about how to implement our new fiber network. I forget who wants what (which says a lot). -…
This is a decent summary of the situation in Australia. The NBN rollout map, however, makes things look better than they are. There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered. I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Background: - Behold, the Australian "IT tax" makes everything 60% more expensive here Just Because™. - There's absolutely nothing like Silicon Valley here. If there is I've never heard of it, and I live in Sydney, the most population-dense area. Situation: the two political parties here (Labor and Liberal) have opposing ideas about how to implement our new fiber network. I forget who wants what (which says a lot). -…
Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house. This is a decent summary of the situation in Australia. The NBN rollout map, however, makes things look better than they are. There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope…
OH, that's why I couldn't remember the second one, I confused it with the first one. Thanks.
> There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I see. I've talked to Telstra people (instore tech support) while discussing other things, and my understanding of their consensus was that if a given area doesn't seem to be moving, you could probably use it's stuck-ness as structural support for something.
> I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered.
I'm in the North Shore area of Sydney myself, smack bang right in the middle of the new Sydney Metro project (a ~20 minute bus ride away from the closest station), and to be honest I do wonder if the NBN service to those new buildings (which does light up green on the map...) is actually live and functioning. There's no cable in this area and my current ADSL2+ is... right now my modem says 13102kbps - 12.79Mbps. My situation is similar: little dots of NBN connectivity (I see where all the new developments are!) but... crickets chirping where I live. Which, to be fair, isn't a major town center, just a suburb like any other, but still. I'm glad I'm moving soon.
> I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
Wait, what? I thought the NBN was all fiber and satellite. How does this work?