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Startup Australia

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Re: Startup Australia

#71

Post by jacques_chester »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #59

The author is indirectly describing what is known as "Dutch disease". 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 w…

> The first paragraph incorrectly implies that it has something to do with the manufacturing sector.

Because historically it's been the manufacturing and trades sectors that get crowded out; they are the industries most directly competing with mining for skills and equipment inputs.

Re: Startup Australia

#72

Post by jbarham »

sien wrote: post #64
jbarham wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

US mortgage rates are anomalous since the market has essentially been nationalized as the vast majority of mortgages are underwritten by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. It's insane that right now the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate in the US is 3.63%. (Source: http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/index.html?intcmp=CWS-HP) That's almost half what Australians pay for a 5-year mortgage!

Australia does have tight land release laws, but it means that property prices are kept artificially high and too much capital is tied up unproductively in mortgages instead of investing in innovative, high-growth industries.

Re: Startup Australia

#73

Post by josephagoss »

ghiculescu wrote: post #61
taligent wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was a bit unclear, but this is what I meant.

IT is not well regarded, you cannot argue otherwise, I live here and no one things highly of IT unless your pulling in a large salary, and Most IT grads I know hate coding and work in IT support (on the phones fixing modem settings)

How depressing it is. (I study engineering and computer science, because I felt computer science is dumbed down in the Universities here too and want to graduate with a mathematics based degree (Electrical Eng) Funny enough, computer science here is mathematically weak and most people in my computer science class can't do basic calculus)- no wonder they are getting IT jobs, they can't do anything else with their weak pass average computer science degree that was all about playing computer games.

Re: Startup Australia

#74

Post by kerno »

jacques_chester wrote: post #70
kerno wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we agree with each other.

I wasn't trying to claim that we can immediately shift these resources, but that this shift won't happen en masse until services has a bigger profile and more to offer than mining.

Re: Startup Australia

#75

Post by jacques_chester »

kerno wrote: post #74
jacques_chester wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we agree with each other. I wasn't trying to claim that we can immediately shift these resources, but that this shift won't happen en masse until services has a bigger profile and more to offer than mining.

Hostile agreement is a common thing hereabouts.

Re: Startup Australia

#76

Post by jacques_chester »

jbarham wrote: post #72
sien wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

US mortgage rates are anomalous since the market has essentially been nationalized as the vast majority of mortgages are underwritten by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. It's insane that right now the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate in the US is 3.63%. (Source: http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/index.html?intcmp=CWS-HP ) That's almost half what Australians pay for a 5-year mortgage! Australia does have tight land rel…

I'm not so sure. There's still institutional bias against venture investment in Australia.

Superannuation savings are north of AU$1.5 trillion dollars at this point. Supposing that "only" a trillion of that is held by fund managers, then a mere 0.5% shift in portfolio allocations would pump $5 billion dollars into VC.

Given that the total Australian VC is a few hundred million on an outside guesstimate, that'd be pretty noticeable.

Edit: maybe I should be knocking on doors at super funds? Though I guess the local VCs are doing that already.

Re: Startup Australia

#77

Post by jedmeyers »

I am originally from Eastern Europe. I have got an Australian permanent residence visa but decided not to move there at least for now. I feel much better in Silicon Valley on a work visa, where my salary is higher, my work is more meaningful, prices are MUCH lower and my wife found a job in a reasonable time, also in software engineering. I was shocked that you cannot find half-sized shoes in Sydney's stores, and this is considering that their price was 2.5 times higher than the price on Zappos. Australia has to wake up and deal with their protectionist policies regarding local businesses. By giving them protection from external markets they might survive for a while, but this definitely won't last long. No competition means no innovation and high prices for consumers.

Re: Startup Australia

#78

Post by kerno »

jacques_chester wrote: post #75
kerno wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we agree with each other. I wasn't trying to claim that we can immediately shift these resources, but that this shift won't happen en masse until services has a bigger profile and more to offer than mining.

Hostile agreement is a common thing hereabouts.

When Startup Aus have a meetup we should both go, so I can agree with you personally ;)

Re: Startup Australia

#79

Post by nikcub »

ShardPhoenix wrote: post #65
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.

My only requests would be to ask the government to strip away barriers and to step further away. The only real issue I can think of is tax on stock options, and there are two ways to get around that, both of which I have used and both of which are in active use today with startups in Australia.

Australia is too closely ranked to other countries with successful startup ecosystems in the major market and freedom indicies. The USA is now going through the long-term capital gains issue, and nobody has suggested that less startups would be founded, or that there would be less innovation because of it. As Warren Buffet says, he has never known an investor to turn down an investment opportunity because taxes are too high.

Re: Startup Australia

#80

Post by scorpioxy »

boyter wrote: post #57
josephagoss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

75k isn't a great salary in Sydney (not sure about Perth) and I have seen more basic PHP dev jobs offering 55k then 75k. Contractors always pull in large amounts of cash, but that's usually not what these places are looking for. 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.

I also have a problem understanding why people bother with a CS degree but don't want to go into programming or don't even understand it. Why don't they major in something else?
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