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Startup Australia

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Re: Startup Australia

#81

Post by jeza »

coopdog wrote: post #22
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…

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…

You can put controls on public monopolies that you can't with private ones, such as making them accountable to the voting public. Even the free market is regulated by the government in an attempt to create a level playing field. When it comes to telecommunications though, it's a natural monopoly since it's not really economical to connect each house to multiple underground fibre networks (though the redundancy would be nice :D).

Re: Startup Australia

#82

Post by jasey »

boyter wrote: post #55
coopdog wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's one of my other complaints. If you are hiring someone for a full-time position if they are anyway decent they can learn whatever skills are required. Im sick of being overlooked for jobs because I know CodeIgniter rather then Cake or am more familiar with MySQL then Oracle.

This is partly due to recruiters really having no idea how to judge candidates other than scanning resumes and cover letters for buzz words.

Re: Startup Australia

#83

Post by novocaine7 »

josephagoss wrote: post #73
ghiculescu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

why would you focus on what's happening to the bottom tier students?

what do you think is happening to the distinction and high distinction students?

all the interesting from uni (unsw) i know either have good jobs or are doing really interesting research.

and software engineering is plenty well respected - people usually know it means you build apps and generally assume you're pretty smart. cheer up mate.

Re: Startup Australia

#84

Post by joonix »

josephagoss wrote: post #73
ghiculescu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a feedback loop. Lack of startups and support => Lack of successful, prestigious software companies => Geeks have not earned public admiration the way they have in the US via Facebook, Google, etc etc.

It then applies to IT as well.

Re: Startup Australia

#85

Post by joonix »

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 forgot to mention housing (property) investment. Australians worship real estate investment above all things. Most think property will still double every few years even though they are already at insanely high levels.

Re: Startup Australia

#86

Post by joonix »

jedmeyers wrote: post #77

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 thi…

Protectionist is exactly right. But things are quickly changing, at least when it comes to local retail. The incumbent bloated chains like Meyer are being disrupted rapidly by overseas online retailers as well as shrewd foreign retailers like Zara setting up in Australia. It's a good thing, too, because the duopolies in Australian retail deserve to be disrupted. They have coasted for far too long providing mediocre value to the customer.

Re: Startup Australia

#87

Post by joonix »

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.

Yes, just take a look at Australia's capital gains taxation to see where their priorities are.

In fact, there is no capital gains tax. It's all taxed as income. There is no incentive to sweat it out for years building equity because once you exit, you will give an enormous chunk to the government because you are suddenly in a $1M+ tax bracket for that year only.

Their bankruptcy laws also don't reward risk taking as well as the US either.

Re: Startup Australia

#88

Post by mattbarrie »

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…

Actually the 457 issue is the side issue. The key issue for me really is there are not enough people in the industry due to declining enrollments in STEM. We need to fix our education system and build awareness of the industry with high school students, parents, educators and the government. The whole system here is setup so that law and medicine are the pinnacle professions. STEM in this country is rotting. There are some chances underway with the national curriculum through ACARA, and where you can help is to make a submission by May 10th.

http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/

Re: Startup Australia

#89

Post by mattbarrie »

Smerity wrote: post #16

To expand on one of the points in the article, let's expand venture capital raised per capita[1]... Israel: $170 per capita, USA: $75 per capita, Australia: $4.09 per capita. Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry. The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more…

It would be 4,000 local IT graduates per year spread across our 1,500 startups, multinationals like Google and the corporate sector like banking & finance. It's not enough by any stretch.

Also that's not saying that all those 4,000 are good graduates. A top tier institution like the University of Sydney might graduate 100 per year. If you look at Sydney city, there might be the same from UNSW, UTS, UWS, Macquarie etc. That leaves it pretty thin on the ground.

Re: Startup Australia

#90

Post by mattbarrie »

josephagoss wrote: post #33
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)

I have ads looking for great javascript developers for 100k+ and I am getting zero applicants. Zero.
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