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Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#81

Post by saiya-jin »

gelatocar wrote: post #12
regecks wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like u…

I think he meant a single person working remotely from home, for which, like it or not, a true 10 MBit/s connection is more than needed. Yes, 3.5 GB file download will take 1 hour, but I haven't met a single dev in past 11 years in +- 7 companies that would claim it prevents them from doing their work.

Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another topic. This is not typical for most devs.

Teleconferencing - for most devs, what is the above value over classic conf call (an honest question)? I see little, it's still far from having people sitting behind same desk and brainstorming.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#83

Post by jacques_chester »

ajdlinux wrote: post #49
voltagex_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to Sydney for a job could be almost as expensive as moving to the States. I'm looking in Melbourne but the market down there seems like a mess right now. Couple that with the falling Australian dollar and moving to the US and getting paid in USD doesn't sound so bad.

The primary motivation for those I know who have moved to the Bay Area isn't the pay (although that certainly is part of it), it's finding more interesting work and being in the SF/SV culture. Personally, I don't like the start-up culture, and I happen to work at a place that does interesting things already, so I'm quite happy staying in Canberra.

I moved to NYC.

NYC's tech scene is bigger than all of Australia's scenes added up.

The Bay Area is bigger than all of Australia's scenes multiplied.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#84

Post by kalleboo »

regecks wrote: post #4
andrewstuart wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of the blog post is that any tech company that succeeds in Australia does so purely on its own two feet and that governments are at best mildly supportive of technology and at worst actively hostile. Turnbull destroyed the fibre to the home NBN and I can't see high speed ubiquitous Internet access coming any time soon. Imagine if 95% of Australian home - including ones in the country areas - had super h…

I really don't understand the NBN meme. I've worked for small tech companies in Australia my entire (not so long) career, and access to high internet speeds has never ever really been a problem. When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? Yes, regional areas should be upgraded from dialup/slow sattelite to at least 10mbps. What kind of impact will that have wrt the OP…

I work remotely/online and I'm visiting my parents in rural Australia for 2 months right now. I can live with the 5/.5 Mbit 3G connection they have (roof-mounted antenna), often with clever use of a shell on a remote server (e.g. doing big file downloads/video transcodes on a server instead of my laptop). I've actually had a more stable/high quality connection during our weekly Skype group meetings than a coworker on a 100 Mbit/s comcast connection in NH...

The real issue is the cost - around $8/GB. Things are a lot better in cities, but costs are still higher than elsewhere and caps are still prevalent.

It gets even more ridiculous that just down the valley (a 30 minute drive down winding dirt roads, but as the bird flies not too far, and it's the origin of the 3G signal they get now) there's an LTE signal where I got 100 MBit/s on speedtest. At that speed you're spending $8 every 10 seconds!

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#85

Post by StavrosK »

saiya-jin wrote: post #81
gelatocar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you're a programmer, what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? There's a pretty long list actually. If you've got 10 people in a office sharing a 10mbit pipe then the internet is straight up prohibitively slow. On top of that, if your users are on slow internet then they are less likely to interact with whatever you are building, especially if it involves rich media interaction like u…

I think he meant a single person working remotely from home, for which, like it or not, a true 10 MBit/s connection is more than needed. Yes, 3.5 GB file download will take 1 hour, but I haven't met a single dev in past 11 years in +- 7 companies that would claim it prevents them from doing their work. Now if your work is rather unusual, OR you have to upload lots of stuff and that goes 100 KB/s max, that's another t…

As a remote developer, I agree. I need low latency for calls and meetings, but I don't care much about file transfer speeds. I'm perfectly fine on 4 Mbit.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#86

Post by meric »

ruffrey wrote: post #24
theandrewbailey wrote: post #16

> In an age where the state of the art broadband to the home in the U.S.A. is 10 gigabits, Australia is currently building (it claims) a National Broadband Network at great expense that promises a blistering 12 to 100 megabits per second at the top end I know it mentioned "state of the art", but the vast majority of Americans would be lucky to get 100 megabits without breaking the bank every month. Many (most?) don't…

Comcast is horrible and has a monopoly in Sacramento, California. Fastest speeds are typically 25 - 75mbps. 25mbps costs $59.99. Well, technically you can get AT&T "high speed" internet for $50+ per month, at a whopping 18mbps max. This is the capital of Califoria, so, yeah.

I pay A$70 per month for 6mbps in Sydney. So, you know.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#87

Post by forlulz »

l33tbro wrote: post #74
polemic wrote: post #52

Hey Australia, why not consider moving to NZ? 1. You can already move / live / work here without any immigration hassle. 2. We have an actual UFB fibre to the home network rolling out now that actually works. 3. Local and central government is pretty keen to support the technology scene - from government grants (refer Callaghan Innovation) to local tech hubs. AND help to connect in SF ( http://kiwilandingpad.com/ ) 4…

Better coffee? That's a pretty huge claim ...

8) Better beer

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#88

Post by kalleboo »

xxpor wrote: post #36
qzervaas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to say your point isn't true, but that has nothing to do with successive governments shitting on each other's plans when it comes to installing infrastructure to houses (or choosing the right infrastructure to install).

Sure. I think they are two separate, but related problems. Even if the NBN were perfect and brought gigabit internet access to the entire country, without more intl transit it wouldn't help as much as people would hope.

It would still make a huge difference on the things that matter the most bandwidth-wise, such a video services and software distribution - all things that are on geographically distributed CDNs with local nodes in Australia

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#89

Post by jondubois »

I think that so far Australia has been a pretty bad place to start a tech company. The startup community is quite small (even in Sydney). And in spite of it being small, it's really hard to raise funding.

Almost all of the successful Australian companies you hear about have bootstrapped themselves from nothing and succeeded against astronomical odds. It seems that the few companies that do get funded rarely go anywhere.

A big problem with Australian investors is that they're extremely hesitant to invest in projects which are not within their immediate area of expertise - And this is generally limited to simple B2C companies which are basically rip-offs of successful startups in the US. Investors don't care much about potential - They care about numbers.

High-tech projects like NoSQL databases, backend-as-a-service platforms, machine learning platforms, etc... These things generally don't get funded in Australia.

Re: Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business

#90

Post by jsmeaton »

regecks wrote: post #39
beefsack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is the difference to your work between 10 and 100mbps, really? I'd imagine you'd be less nonchalant about it if you were transferring gigabytes of data from a backup in an emergency.

My backup strategy does not involve a residential internet connection so I cannot relate.

Even at home? Do you backup your laptop/PC/NAS? Would your internet connection even allow that? I get 1.5mb upload at the very best of times.
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