Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Startup Australia

linkedin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 92 posts

Re: Startup Australia

#31

Post by boyter »

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.

Re: Startup Australia

#32

Post by josephagoss »

joonix wrote: post #28

Lack of enrollment in IT and entrepreneurship is a symptom of the culture, really. You've got tall poppy syndrome combined with protectionism that makes shooting for the easy low-risk stuff desirable... trades pay insanely well due to strong unions and tight immigration policy, for example.

IT is not a admirable career here at all, Medicine, Law and Engineering are the good careers that pay well and are generally respected, but IT is looked down upon big time over here. Its a shame really, but to most IT is tech support (I know many computer science grads who are on minimium wage tech support)

Re: Startup Australia

#33

Post by josephagoss »

boyter wrote: post #31

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…

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)

Re: Startup Australia

#34

Post by jacques_chester »

stephen_g wrote: post #24
lubos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please explain how NBN will pay for itself? Not to mention, NBN Corp. will not be any different monopoly from Telstra Wholesale. And regarding speeds, how is NBN going to solve that? Australia doesn't even have enough international throughput in the current network. NBN will make speeds even worst as the demand will only increase. The bottleneck here is not copper, it is international capacity. What's the p…

I haven't looked into the specifics, but in the corporate plan they expect to pay off the government contribution in 20 to 30 years. And it's been audited by more than two audit firms now, so I expect it must be somewhat realistic. Yes, it is still a monopoly, but what would you rather have - a fast network that reaches the whole population with open access to providers, or the Coalition granting Telstra and Optus so…

> And it's been audited by more than two audit firms now, so I expect it must be somewhat realistic.

Nitpick: we can't see the actual financials because they are "Commercial-in-Confidence".

When you bring in an outside firm to audit something, if it's not a report regulated by law (eg the annual report of a public company) you can instruct them to use any assumptions or constraints that you wish.

An audit will only point out if your formulae are incorrectly formed (invalid), not whether they are at all realistic.

For example, NBN's internal funding plan might say something like:

"We assume 100% takeup in 2 years".

And the auditor's job isn't to say "2 years to 100%? That seems unlikely".

It's actually to say, "given 100% in 2 years, our calculation is X, and your calculation is also X, therefore the audit passes".

Re: Startup Australia

#36

Post by coopdog »

boyter wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Re: Startup Australia

#37

Post by jacques_chester »

A lot of the VC funds that have launched in the past few years are actually seeded by government funds. Not a model that lends itself to genuine risk taking.

Just imagine the headlines:

    TEN MILLION WASTED ON PHONE APPS
I live in Perth. Fellow ex-UWA folks of my acquaintance have the same complaint as me, which is as follows:

Perth has buckets and buckets of capital. This town is stupidly flush with cash. And Perth's taste for risk is much higher than the rest of country. You can raise tens of millions of dollars for high-risk, high-reward ventures in a relatively short time.

But there's a catch: this only applies if your proposal is to take some geologists and a drilling crew for mineral exploration.

The lifecycle for startups is ostensibly quite similar, but ... no dosh. The local investors don't really want to know about it.

edit:

That said, I wonder if Australia's intelligentsia will ever get over fetishising whatever industry and country which happens to be in the news a lot. I remember endless song and dance about Japanese cars. Now it's Silicon Valley.

Eventually it will be, I dunno, rockets and jetpacks. From Montenegro.

Meanwhile Australia is one of only 3 countries left with AAA rating and is the only country in the world that has had a growing economy for umpteen years. You can go a long way with sensible, basic policy settings.

Re: Startup Australia

#38

Post by vtjendra »

AUS image = mining. USA image = tech innovation.

Many Australians talented developer and computer engineers have been flocking to USA for mainly two reasons:

1. They are rewarded more in USA, both socially and financially. Who doesn't want to be in the middle of global innovation among other great people?

2. It is much more prestigious and hard to resist. Many US-based companies have been actively recruiting Australians, for example Amazon.com.

This leave Australia with limited local talents and therefore comes up with need to employ overseas eng-IT professionals. Note that 457 are neither cheap nor simple to lodge and employ. We are currently at a phase where it is necessary to keep feeding our demand of technical professionals to keep the growth of Australia tech industry.

Re: Startup Australia

#39

Post by Volpe »

lubos wrote: post #26
coopdog wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NBN Corp would become a monopoly like Telstra wholesale (and I hope they don't sell it, just outsource the operation), but at least it would split Telstra wholesale and retail. There was some seriously strange things going on there, like when the retail price goes below the wholesale price and the fine is nothing compared to the dollars lost by competitors. The copper situation is ok in inner city areas (except some…

So we have established that NBN Corp will be the same as Telstra Wholesale. The only difference will be that NBN Corp will be owned by government rather than being a public listed company (the question is for how long) Exchanges in some areas are full because nobody wants to invest into building new capacity since government has volunteered $50bn to make it all redundant. The problem has been created by government by…

I think you are building a narrative to suit your own argument. Industry (telstra, optus, iinet, etc) NEVER planned a nationwide network of fiber (even before NBN was announced) let alone a Fiber-to-the-Home solution.

Australia has 20 million people spread across one of the largest countries in the world, there is not enough market (i.e critical mass) for private firms to build this kind of infrastructure, it is called market failure, it is EXACTLY when government should intervene.

>I'm still not convinced. How is ability of users being able to send each other high-resolution images, HD video etc. going to be worth $50bn+ to economy?

Why was electricity so important just to spread nighttime lighting!? Why'd we even bother!? You don't know that all we will use data for is HD video/image.

Also I think you underestimate how much caching occurs, speeding up local network with speed up "the internet" as ISPs cache a lot.

Re: Startup Australia

#40

Post by jacques_chester »

kerno wrote: post #11

Coming back to Oz from London put into perspective how far behind we are. With HN London now attracting so many people they've had to start charging a fee to get in, and the community built around Silicon Roundabout, it is very sad to come back home and see the fragmented efforts to build a startup group in Australia. With Silicon Beach on and off, Startup Grind, lots of small meetups, and Fishburners in Sydney, ther…

Nitpick: labour isn't a homogenous, fungible good.

People who are good at trades are not 1-to-1 exchangeable with people who are good at STEM subjects.

Post reply on HN