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Startup Australia

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Re: Startup Australia

#61

Post by ghiculescu »

taligent wrote: post #53
josephagoss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> but to most IT is 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.

I think he means the public perspective of "IT" is tech support, which doesn't make it look very exciting in the eyes of prospective students.

Re: Startup Australia

#62

Post by lessnonymous »

Trezoid wrote: post #60
lessnonymous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

Any reason why you need PHP devs specifically?

All our code is already written in PHP. But I'm more interested in a great coder that knows PHP rather than someone who's been writing PHP for years.

It would be nice to say any great coder would be good, but I do need someone who at least knows PHP.

Re: Startup Australia

#63

Post by lessnonymous »

boyter wrote: post #54
lessnonymous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

What figure would you put as "top dollar"? Your opinion of top dollar and mine might be totally different.

So tell me what you're looking for? The ad doesn't say more than we're willing to pay.

Nowhere does the ad say "competitive salary offered". We all know that means "we're cheap and don't want to pay".

Re: Startup Australia

#64

Post by sien »

jbarham wrote: post #50
jacques_chester wrote: post #37

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…

Many other countries have laws that allow negative gearing. The US has substantially cheaper housing (even at the height of the bubble in much of the country) and there you can deduct the interest on your own house against your income and get a 30 year fixed loan, something you haven't been able to do in Australia since the 1980s.

Australia has pretty tight land release laws.

If we had more cities with decent jobs you might see housing prices go down or at least go flat.

It's also worth noting that Australian housing was fairly cheap until the early 2000s (excluding Sydney)

Re: Startup Australia

#65

Post by ShardPhoenix »

nikcub wrote: post #45

There are two distinct points here that are being a bit muddled. The first is the 457 visa issue. For those that don't know, it is a skilled immigration visa, similar to the H1B in the United States. Australia is coming up to an election in September where the sitting center-left Prime Minister is very likely to lose her Prime Ministership to the center-right party. To sure up her base on the left yesterday she came…

Having good ease of doing business in general doesn't mean that Australia doesn't have a specific problem with startup equity and tax.

Re: Startup Australia

#66

Post by anip »

boyter wrote: post #54
lessnonymous wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

What figure would you put as "top dollar"? Your opinion of top dollar and mine might be totally different.

If you want top talent you need to pay $100-150k+

Re: Startup Australia

#67

Post by boyter »

lessnonymous wrote: post #63
boyter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What figure would you put as "top dollar"? Your opinion of top dollar and mine might be totally different.

So tell me what you're looking for? The ad doesn't say more than we're willing to pay. Nowhere does the ad say "competitive salary offered". We all know that means "we're cheap and don't want to pay".

For Sydney I am mostly unwilling to look at a job for less then 100k. That figure is somewhat dependent on what the place is like though its not a hard line rule.

My experience has previously shown that if you mention PHP though the salary expectations are usually less then 75.

Re: Startup Australia

#68

Post by anip »

chucknthem wrote: post #42
josephagoss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There's a huge difference between IT and software engineering, and using IT as the umbrella term is really doing us a disservice.

I hate the use of the term IT, and won't work again for the company that doesn't have an Engineering department, but only an IT department.

Re: Startup Australia

#69

Post by kerno »

jacques_chester wrote: post #40
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.

No, probably not 1-to-1.

However, before the industrial revolution we were all toiling in fields, so I think perhaps labour is more fungible that you give it credit.

Re: Startup Australia

#70

Post by jacques_chester »

kerno wrote: post #69
jacques_chester wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, probably not 1-to-1. However, before the industrial revolution we were all toiling in fields, so I think perhaps labour is more fungible that you give it credit.

Well now we sail off into matters of comparative advantage, division of labour / gains from trade and so on.

But the general point that labour and capital are highly heterogenous still stands. You can't pluck a boiler fitter out of the Pilbara, drop him at a desk in Perth, and expect to see anything useful for your web business any time soon. And vice versa.

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