241–250 of 431 posts
Good luck courting new tech talent when existing tech talent gets hung out to dry at the first hint of pressure. See Kim Dotcom's troubles for reference.
I know several kiwis and my wife has traveled there extensively. The biggest issues seem to stem from "island culture" which means: - Most things are expensive and lower quality than you are used to. Furniture, housing, food, etc. Simply because of isolation and logistics. - Poor job market, terribly poor for most people. - Which leads to rules making it much harder to move to NZ long term. Unless you meet some high…
You forgot the 3rd option - be on a skills shortage list. We hire many developers/testers from overseas and they have no issue obtaining PR or citizenship.
> Poor job market, terribly poor for most people.
Define 'poor' - our unemployment rate is slightly above the US unemployment rate, and in my area (Canterbury, main city Christchurch), unemployment is 3.7%.
We do have a "low wage" economy thanks to a neoliberal government crushing the unions in the 90s, but this doesn't really apply to developers.
> For all sorts of reasons, New Zealand suddenly makes sense. The cost of living is less than in San Francisco. Commuting is less wearying. And American politics, “Brexit” and the Islamic State are on the other side of the world. For the most part, this is all true in, say, Tulsa. Especially if you stay off Facebook. You especially don't have to go to New Zealand to find a cheaper, commuter-friendly place to work. No…
Houses in New Zealand are mad expensive. Auckland (for instance) now has an average house price over $1M, about $700k US. It is, I believe, the fourth least affordable housing market in the world after Hong Kong, Sydney and Vancouver.
Good luck courting new tech talent when existing tech talent gets hung out to dry at the first hint of pressure. See Kim Dotcom's troubles for reference.
You also forgot the part where Kim Dotcom is a convicted fraudster, who was making money through deliberate violation of copyright, is all tech talent like him?
Oh, and then there was the time he tried to get involved in NZ politics. That was not superpopular.
That's interesting ! I'm intending to make a move with my family in near future, and we actually went to visit the northern island for 15 days last month. The country is really beautiful, and there are not a lot of people around, so you can't help but feel blessed by the surrounding nature. The people are great, probably the nicest I've ever seen (as a whole). I've noted some cons though (not blocking for us thankful…
Our Internet is great . We're mostly fibre now and the cheapest plans are 20 up and 100 down.
My understanding was that it costs ~100NZD to get a decent connection and I was very surprised to notice than in most hotels / airbnbs it was one of the first things advertised - free WiFi. With our French mobiles, which costs 20e/month, you have unlimited data while in France and 5Go per stay, up to 35 days in a year in many countries (all Europe, US, New Zealand etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I think of NZ, I imagine South Pacific beaches, lush forests of emu and kiwi and other exotic animals, and the landscape of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. What natural beauty does Tulsa have?
There are no emu here, you're thinking of Australia. And Kiwi are both endangered and nocturnal. We have, really, nothing exotic at all apart from Tui's (that are awesome), Kereru (a huge wood pigeon) and Kea's (that are bastards).
Has anyone here made the move? It would be interesting to hear some real life stories, and post honeymoon-phase pros/cons evaluation of NZ.
Not me, but I knew someone who moved to Christchurch. He had to delay his interview because the office was demolished by an earthquake. He loves the place, but I think would agree with the "poor housing" comments upthread - inexplicably under-insulated.
It all revolves around jobs in which face-to-face spitting is deemed essential. My own job is about programming. I do that from Southeast Asia nowadays. I wonder why I would ever consider doing that from New Zealand? I would not make one more dollar while I would spend truck loads on things that I do not need, such as taxes and inflated housing cost, and what have you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I think of NZ, I imagine South Pacific beaches, lush forests of emu and kiwi and other exotic animals, and the landscape of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. What natural beauty does Tulsa have?
Looks like our tourism marketing campaigns are paying off, although emus are Australian, we had moa, but they're extinct now. Not pictured in the tourism campaigns - our vast reliance on agriculture.
Ireland is similar, minus the isolation. In Shannon you can leave a car 100 meters from terminal, and board direct US flight in 30 minutes.