51–60 of 92 posts
Surely this guy doesn't think the answer is to vote in the liberals who will shut down the fibre to the home goal of the NBN? Is that really a good way to advance Australia's startups?
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…
The real technological bottleneck of our time isn't CPU's, GPU's or anything that can be purchased by the end user. Internet speed/latency limitations are what's stifling emerging markets and technologies. Let's have a look at some ideas around the corner, some of them already waiting for fibre to the home...
- OnLive-like game streaming with minimal latency or frame compression - would only require cheap hardware to play super detailed games rendered in the cloud
- OS in the browser/cloud - instant bootup, less hardware dependent, software/file system accessible anywhere
- Streaming 4k high definition video on demand
- Downloading 12Gb+ games on a whim as opposed to walking/driving down to your local JB Hifi or EB Games and paying for the game plus physical materials
These aren't pie in the sky ideas. They'd be here already if we had fibre to the home. Australia will be open to markets that aren't practical elsewhere because of the NBN.
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)
I don't know where you get this ridiculous idea from. Most IT in Australia is actually in software engineering and testing for banks, media, mining etc. Most of the tech support I am aware of is slowly being outsourced.
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…
"... for the price we want to pay" isn't accurate. I have an advert out at the moment for PHP dev in Melbourne that clearly states we want to pay top dollar. I'm still only getting applications from web developers who happen to know enough PHP to make them dangerous. Of the applicants, only four are reasonably interesting. Three of them are here on 457s.
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…
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…
> You can go a long way with sensible, basic policy settings. A pity then that Australia's federal and state government policies (negative gearing, first home buyers grants, interest only mortgages for investors etc. etc.) have done so much to pump up the real estate market into such a huge speculative bubble than will do untold damage when it finally pops. It's insane what Australians are expected to pay for basic h…
I was thinking of other things though: floating dollar, low tariffs, relatively light regulation of many subjects compared to world averages, somewhat predictable inflation targeting policy of the RBA and so on and so forth. We get a lot of things more or less right.
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)
Agree that most grads seem to want to avoid coding. Out of my class I think only 1 or 2 actually ended up coding for a living. Not sure why that is in Australia but it seems fairly common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-3_visa
It's a reciprocal visa program between Australia and the United States. Australia offers Americans the friendly 457 visa and the US offers Australians the friendly E-3 visa. It's an independent and generous quota compared to the H-1B visa.
It's surreal to me reading people weighing in so heavily about the difficulty in hiring Australians and ignoring the elephant in the room.
If you are a decently skilled Australian in IT, you get up and move to Silicon Valley. Why?
* More money.
* More respect.
* In the center of your industry.
* Paid travel!
This is the same complaint New Zealand has had about Australia for years too. Kiwis move to Australia for the similar reasons.
Background: I've been on a 457 for two and a half years.
Everyone I know from the US or Europe on a 457 is in Australia for the "lifestyle." The rest are people who came to Australia to study or work from place like India/China/Philippines[1], converted to a 457, and are working their way to permanent residence and finally citizenship.
And you'd be unsurprised how many move to work in the US or Europe after earning their Australian citizenship.
[1] http://www.immi.gov.au/media/statistics/pdf/457-state-territ...
When a country is rich in natural resources, smart and enterprising people specialize in learning to extract natural resources. This damages the technology sector because talent gravitates todward money in market economies.
Also, the first paragraph of wikipedia's article on dutch disease is flawed. Dutch disease is used by economists to describe when a domestic comparative advantage crowds out another industry. It has nothing to do with manufacturing. The first paragraph incorrectly implies that it has something to do with the manufacturing sector.
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…
"... for the price we want to pay" isn't accurate. I have an advert out at the moment for PHP dev in Melbourne that clearly states we want to pay top dollar. I'm still only getting applications from web developers who happen to know enough PHP to make them dangerous. Of the applicants, only four are reasonably interesting. Three of them are here on 457s.