I can confirm this is the case when my organisation advertises roles they get inundated with applications.
But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.
I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.
New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.
Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.
The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.
[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.
nigel_bree · 22h ago
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand
Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or are interested in good people with hard skills - it's almost all very basic web dev. Pretty much all the veterans I know around my age are doing work beneath them to pay the bills or have switched out of development completely.
teruakohatu · 22h ago
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand
> Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent
In my experience it is incredibly hard to hire top-tier talent, but both of our experiences could simultaneously be true.
Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them?
I know of three excellent devs who are IMHO vastly unemployed. At least two of them would struggle to get through a corperate interview process. The other is happy with the chill job they have.
nigel_bree · 20h ago
> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them?
No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard development skills, and the tiny handful that do come up in public tend to be for very specialized verticals where they made hard demands on past experience in that niche area first and foremost over everything else.
> The other is happy with the chill job they have
I mean, I can't blame them for that - there are lots of toxic employers, ageism, credentialism, etc etc. If you're just going to be underemployed doing kiddie-level work anyway, better the devil you know, particularly if you have a family to take care of.
It's all just a big old mess of market failure, though. The problem isn't that the talent pool isn't there, it's that since there's no VC money around, the firms that _really_ need that talent can't pay what the hungrier younger people (who want more than anything else to get on the FAANG gravy train) want and the fantastically talented folks mostly can't earn any kind of premium remotely matching their business value and so make lifestyle choices it's hard to pry them out of.
droopyEyelids · 1d ago
Hard to make it an electricity analogy, when the anode is actually the source of electrons! But i got your point and agree
irjustin · 1d ago
Such is my pet peeve.
Soap box - Analogies simply don't help. They invariably have some flaw and rarely aid in actual understanding as is the case with the anode/cathode reference. I know 100% of readers understand that countries want to attract talent, but <100% of people understand anode+cathode functions.
It gets worse when others attempt to build off the analogy and so it becomes flawed on top of flawed. At some point, semantic arguments begin, i.e. source of electrons, and now we're quite far from countries+talent.
STOP USING ANALOGIES
npteljes · 21h ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I have both a hard time to grasp when others are using analogies, especially when they use phrases that are wrong in the public consciousness, like "fish rots from the head" - no, fish rots from the softer places first, or from wherever, the head is not particular.
Pet peeve - soapbox is also used in an abstract way here, not better than the overuse of analogies. A whole century has since passed since people routinely stood on literal soapboxes.
Furthermore, and I was (am?) guilty of this myself, people often use analogies and other kinds of abstract speech to hide the fact that they have no idea what is going on, or they don't know how to express something. And then the responsibility to decode meaning is passed on to the listener.
agubelu · 1d ago
Would you say that analogies are like a sink where meaning and intentionality is lost?
HenryBemis · 23h ago
You brought in my mind the "Elon walking in with a sink" and saying "let that sink in".
phendrenad2 · 20h ago
Okay you have two complaints about analogies: They're leaky abstractions (people get tripped up on the mismatch), and people don't understand the analogy domain (and miss the analogy entirely).
The former is mostly a problem for a certain kind of concrete-thinking persons, and the former can be solved by picking a more universally understood analogy domain (like puppies). So analogies can be good, given the right audience and analogy domain.
7bit · 1d ago
Analogies are a great tool to illustrate problems, to make the issue more accessible. So I don't think the issue is with analogies, but analogies that are far more complex that the issue he wants to illustrate.
In the specific context you're replying, however, I agree that any analogy would not add any useful information.
malux85 · 1d ago
You're making a huge assumption yourself - that the goal of communication is to appeal to the greatest number of readers. This is not always true and often deliberately not always true.
roenxi · 1d ago
Some of the best pieces of art are when a smart person wants to communicate a subversive idea to another smart person without anyone pedestrian arcing up. It can lead to wonderful comedy.
7bit · 1d ago
"Appeal to" and "being understood by" are two different things.
You can write a text that appeals to a small audience, but is understood by a big audience.
You can also write a text that would appeal to a big audience - but doesn't because no one understands it.
It's not hard to write a text that can be understood by a large audience. Using an analogy that only some people understand is counter productive as analogies are used exactly to allow the audience to illustrate the problem.
JusticeJuice · 1d ago
I worked in the nz tech startup market for 8 years before moving overseas. To say nz tech is a tiny market is an understatement, when the population of the country is the size of most cities, there’s just that not that many opportunities.
It does mean for many people the only way for career growth is to go elsewhere. When I left nz my salary 3x’d.
The opportunity here is that there is many talented tech workers who choose to stay in NZ for lifestyle reasons. Foreign companies can compete so easily on salaries, it’s easy to just buy the top of the market for half the price. You will need local recruitment help though to find them.
The time zones are rough, you need to be a company that’s embraced async working, and are able to give a team a clear brief and just let them do it. But the hiring opportunities are there.
imadethis · 1d ago
Are there many people involved in follow the sun support or SRE roles there? I know my company only has an engineering presence in Aus and Japan because of the large coverage gap between the US west coast and the EU. Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.
* For some definitions of native. I've had to work as a translator for a Kiwi and an American, both native English speakers.
latentsea · 23h ago
> Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.
It's not always native English. It's always at least proficient enough, but a good chunk of the workers in the tech sector speak English as a second language. NZ has very diverse population.
JusticeJuice · 1d ago
I know that aws has a few reliability engineers in Wellington, but that’s just to support their aus servers. There really isn’t that many foreign companies outsourcing support to NZ.
kavalg · 1d ago
How does it compare to e.g. Eastern Europe? What is the typical salary of a senior developer or architect in NZ?
sitharus · 23h ago
Depending on skillset $150k-$230k is common. You do have to balance this against the cost of living though, we definitely don’t have Eastern Europe’s cost of living advantage.
kavalg · 16h ago
Assuming $ is NZD and you are quoting net, yearly income, then it is 1.5-2.5 times higher than Eastern Europe wages according to statistics in my environment. Unfortunately, cost of living has increased substantially here as well. For example, a decent (but not spacious) 2-bedroom apartment is in the range of EUR 300k-500k already.
dzhiurgis · 22h ago
That's contracting rate and not sure how common anymore.
kmarc · 1d ago
Switzerland has something similar these days (UBS-CS merger, big tech layoffs, too expensive local workforce)
I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)
Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.
I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy
(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)
Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
FirmwareBurner · 23h ago
I remember reading around here about how many companies in Switzerland like Roche, offshore a lot of mid-tier tech jobs (like web dev) out to places like Poland due to much better performance/cost. IIRC, Acronis also has most of their devs in Bulgaria now. I also remember reading a few years ago an interview with a Swisscom exec about offshoring their devops jobs to the Netherlands on the claim they can't find local devops talent.
Now I'm not in Switzerland and even I'm not buying that reason at face value, but it's clear that offshoring is an issue in most high-CoL countries in the post WFH era as a lot of tech jobs became more of a commodity in the post ZIRP era. So I can imagine the jobs not moving out of Switzerland are those "management" type of jobs where the job itself is having coffee and networking with the other managers on how to further reduce costs and increase profits while relocating engineering jobs to cheaper countries.
Due to this, it seems that Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
>the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
This explains some of the absurd arguments I often hear from delulu googlers on this board and how out of touch they are with the real world. The sad thing is they have little introspection to realize it and would rather die on their hill.
kmarc · 22h ago
To your main point: it feels like CH is losing a lot of "in-house" knowledge and mostly the managerial / leader positions are growing here. This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho), and there are many startups that eventually make some noise. But classical business will suffer a lot from off-shoring literally any real knowledge and know how that is normally needed to create a product. As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".
And then some more anecdata:
I happened to be part of Acronis during the time when they tried helping escape all the Engineers in Moscow to Bulgaria. (I have stories, yes, I was in the HQ in Moscow too). The engineers, who made Acronis (the product) were always in Bulgaria for the past 5+ years, so that one is not like the other examples.
I also ended up working for a small banking startup, 20 of us tried to do business on the regional banking sphere. I left during the time when the company was inflated with 40+ offshore (Balkans) engineers.
To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
FirmwareBurner · 22h ago
>This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho)
Yeah, but those positions require highly specialized knowledge and are therefore very niche. Say you're an unemployed tech worker, how would one get such a job without a PhD in the field? You can't. What do you do when most new positions in your area of expertise have been shipped abroad?
>As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".
I doubt they don't know anymore, but they just don't bother since it's a generic drug in the race to the bottom that Switzerland can't and doesn't want to take part in.
>To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
I think you misunderstood me. I never said googles are clueless about tech, but about life in general, especially the life of those not earning 200k+.
Because living in a coddled bubble of 200k+ wages in Zurich would make one highly out of touch with the reality of most average people in Switzerland and moreso in the rest of the world, and you see this in their comments and arguments on HN. They just can't empathize or understand that your reality on the ground is different than theirs.
Even without knowing the unemployment system in Switzerland or in any other country, how the hell can you expect to receive 200K+ in unemployment benefits? That's just so entitled and out of touch, it's insane. Unemployment benefits are never a payment of 100% of your salary to continue the Googler lifestyle, but a smaller basic safety net to cover your vital expenses till you find another job. That's just common sense everywhere.
kmarc · 21h ago
You didn't say they are clueless but I did :-)
Also, I'm not saying that it's great to have these high performant researcher-founded startups, my point is simply that because of these, the "numbers" don't look too bad.
BTW, In Switzerland "you get 80% of your last salary", as most of the people heard from this or that. Obviously this is not the entire story (it is capped, it's not necessary 80%, etc etc) - some people think, oh I made 250k, therefore I'm entitled to 200k now. With that said, in a very optimal case, here you can get around 150k as unemployment benefit, which is still enormously high compared to other countries.
suzzer99 · 16h ago
In California, you get $450 USD per week max. In other parts of the US it's less.
ponector · 21h ago
>> Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
Market there is much better than in western countries, but I see projects are pushed from Poland further to the Asia. UBS is laying off thousands there, moving projects to the Indian office.
kmarc · 12h ago
While that's true, UBS also canceled some Filipino contracts. I guess UBS just sucks in general and has to cut costs a lot, these days.
ponector · 7h ago
They had $1.7bn net profit for Q1 2025. It's good for bottom line in short term to outsource to the cheapest location. Also they have tons of internal project which does not need any quality at all. Could get a bunch of students in the cheapest location for such things.
derelicta · 19h ago
I know a trade unionist who tried to talk ex Googlers into bargaining for a compensation package after getting laid off, but many were absolutely clueless about any of that. They had no plans and didn't even want to collaborate with unions. Unfortunately, STEM folks still see themselves as above regular workers and thus incorrectly perceive themselves as shielded from capitalists wrath and mood swings.
solardev · 23h ago
How does Grinding Gear Games (who makes Path of Exile) do it? Is it only because they have Tencent funding?
I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.
creakingstairs · 1d ago
We are heading back to New Zealand soon and the situation does seem pretty grim from what I hear from friends. Ideally, we’d like to settle down in NZ but it’s looking like we may end up in Australia instead.
jp0d · 1d ago
To be honest, we Australians aren't doing so well either. But you're correct, it's a comparatively bigger economy. There are more opportunities. But we've hundreds if not thousands applying for the same job.
apatheticonion · 1d ago
As a kiwi living in Australia and working for mini FANG, the thought of moving to Southeast Asia and living off savings for a couple of years in the hope that I might wait out this jobs/rental crisis has crossed my mind.
gyomu · 1d ago
Not necessarily a bad plan per se, but don’t forget to take into account the fact that this jobs/rental crisis might be due to deep systemic+geopolitical issues that are only going to get worse and that we might not be going back to the abundance of the 2010s anytime soon.
Finding yourself in an even worse job market 5 years from now is a very real possibility.
Gigachad · 23h ago
I think it is alleviating slowly. In Melbourne at least, rent seems to have peaked already. The state government has done great work in overruling councils to get more housing built faster. And it seems to be working.
h4kunamata · 23h ago
To be honest, the perfect solution and you have a high chance of finding something there that makes you happy.
Housing there is more affordable also but not for long, people are buying insane houses there coz cost "nothing".
If this is something that you already considered and have enough saving to do so, personally, I would start looking for what can I do over there job wise to avoid using all my savings and screw it, I am off.
No matter how small is the income coz you will need to start from the bottom, I am getting tired of IT, too much drama, all the time, if living in Asia doing something completely different but that pays the bills and that I am happy with, I wouldn't come back.
Australia within the last 11 years went to shit big time, and it is getting worse by the day.
I have considered the same, I think it might be a little to late for me now, who knows.
FirmwareBurner · 20h ago
> Australia within the last 11 years went to shit big time, and it is getting worse by the day.
Most major wester economies did the same in past 11 years: stagnating wages, exploding CoL. Life was good 11 years ago when salaries were great and housing still abundant and affordable to buy but this isn't the case anymore.
If you expect an improvement, moving anywhere there right now would be like jumping from a lake to a pond.
brabel · 19h ago
Housing in Australia was not affordable at all 11 years ago! Perhaps 20 years ago yeah… but I mean, compared to almost anywhere else, salaries for the average folk are great even when you compensate for that. Only the top tier is underpaid if you compare with the USA, much like Europe.
mvdtnz · 12h ago
It's so funny to me how you Australians have no idea how fortunate you are. You've been born into one of the luckiest places on earth and never stop moaning about it. When I lived there all anyone ever did was bitch and moan while pulling in huge salaries, soaking in some of the best weather on earth and knowing their country's immense mineral wealth and isolated status would always be a security blanket.
Truly some of the most fortunate, least deserving people on the planet. I am thankful I can get my special category visa and when my parents eventually pass away I will set my roots down in Australia. Despite all of the Australians.
I'm interested where in SE Asia you think you can can just barge in, buy a property and live. It might pay to actually look into what it takes to do that legally, it might not be as simple as you think.
petesergeant · 1d ago
Or move to SE Asia and work remotely? Some killer coworking spots out there
FlyingSnake · 1d ago
What is a MiniFANG?
abraae · 1d ago
In Aus could be Atlassian
miffy900 · 1d ago
Or it could be Canva, which is Australia-based.
bigfatkitten · 1d ago
AU market isn’t too crash hot either, at the moment.
jemmyw · 1d ago
There are quite a few remote work opportunities around with US and AU companies. It might not be what you're looking for, but it seems to work pretty well with an NZ lifestyle.
prmoustache · 23h ago
Maybe I am badly informed but last time I heard about NZ, it was said that there is very little unemployment and you could switch job in a matter of week. Which leads to my question: wouldn't you just consider doing something else?
While I am happy working in IT right now, there are a number of other professional activities I could see myself learning.
davesmylie · 23h ago
This was true a few years back. Probably not been the case for at least the last 18 months.
Curious what other professions you'd pursue?
dzhiurgis · 22h ago
> wouldn't you just consider doing something else
So instead of 150k which just barely can get you mortgage you go for 50k?
prmoustache · 10h ago
I am just...asking. Are people outside of IT not able to have a comfortable life there and all living in misery? I am in a way different country probably but there are lots of people living with a third or a quarter of my current salary in the same city I live and while none of us is considered rich, they are not in total misery and seem to be relatively comfortable as long as they manage their expense wisely. People here don't seem to need to buy/consume whatever thing or service is deemed new/cool/trendy like in more "consumption focused countries". I don't know about NZ but here we enjoy spending most of our non working hours outside.
I moved nearly 6 years ago from one very wealthy country to another much less wealthy. I chose a job with a 3 times lower salary. While I miss parts of my life in that previous country and understand my retirement will be lower, I still find a lot of positives in that life change for various other reasons.
When you move from one country to another, reaching the maximun salary you can obtain is not necessarily the most important parameter/goal.
te_chris · 1d ago
10 years in the UK and counting. We often think about going back but it’s hard to square it all.
FirmwareBurner · 20h ago
London?
mvdtnz · 12h ago
It's a cycle, like always. It'll bounce back.
alephnerd · 1d ago
Tbf, NZ had been in a recession until this past quarter, and NZ was never that hot of a tech hub compared to a number of hubs in Australia, let alone the rest of APAC.
And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
latentsea · 1d ago
> And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
Not only do they require sponsorship, but as part of the application process for sponsoring I think they're required to prove or make a case that they couldn't find any local talent to fill the position.
I have worked on teams in NZ that had people where the company sponsored their visas, so it does happen.
Nekhrimah · 1d ago
The framing of this story right from the start is disingenuous. The Microsoft job losses are explicitly reported as "part of a broader strategy to streamline operations and accelerate its AI initiatives." Immediately followed by reporting that Health NZ (rebranded from Te Whatu Ora) is cutting a third of its IT staff. The implication being that it's the same reason.
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
NHS is the National Health Service in the UK and this book was Co-Authored by the Minister for Health of the UK (before he got that post).
It details this strategy clearly.
const_cast · 5h ago
Right-wing party platforms aren't a conspiracy theory, it's literally their platform.
"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
prmoustache · 23h ago
It is no conspiracy theory to simply observe what is happening whenever a right wing government leads a country long enough: the public services are enshittified to the point they lose any support from the population which justify them to partly or completely replace them with the false idea that competition among private companies will lead to better service.
dzhiurgis · 22h ago
> enshittified
Please read its meaning.
suzzer99 · 16h ago
Words evolve. I thought it resonated and made sense here.
jpalawaga · 1d ago
A source that what? That says Right wing/small government parties generally tend to make the government smaller by privatizing services?
There’s no conspiracy theory, it’s literally their MO.
mvdtnz · 12h ago
> It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
rstuart4133 · 7h ago
> the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
The NZ external debt has been about about the same rate for a decade [0]. External debt has increased at about 2% per year, and the rate has been consistent under both the right and the left.
It's weird - the right consistently pushes "we are better economic managers than the left". There is stuff all evidence for either side being better managers. When the right pushes up debt, it seems to be by giving away tax breaks, usually to the rich. When the left pushes up debt seems to be by spending more, usually on the poor.
It's not the outright debt it's the acceleration in spending. It was completely unsustainable. We are borrowing in order to fund our day to day activities, which is definitionally precarious.
According to your posting history you don't even live in New Zealand. I doubt you have the first clue what is going on here.
If the article is correct there is nothing special about what happened in NZ. It says the "sea of red ink" was driven by COVID spending. The same thing happened happened everywhere, regardless of which side was in power. Those NZ COVID spending measures almost certainly were legislated to expire in a few years, just like everywhere else. But yes, it left NZ with increased government debt, again just like everywhere else.
You Kiwi's aren't as special as it seems you think you are. That was my point really - fiscal responsibility is always a right wing talking point. And completely true to form, the current right wing NZ government delivered tax cuts in their last budget. They say it was funded by the sort of spending reductions we are discussing here. I see those tax cuts benefited the poor rather than the rich. Colour me impressed.
gsf_emergency · 1d ago
According to a study promoted by Financial Times, it's a known downside of this one weird effect
NZ's business culture is very different from that of the US (which that FT article from the weekend was about). IMO, it's much more scelrotic and makes Australia's old boy's club look dynamic.
gsf_emergency · 1d ago
I'm saying it's due to NZs very clean air and water compared to even OZ, did you even click
(Don't get me started on BRICS)
alephnerd · 1d ago
I read it this weekend. It was dumb then, and it's dumb now. Correlation does not imply causation - this is taught in the first week of high school statistics.
The significant amount of superfund sites also confounds with mass industry, which can make the epigenetic theory moot.
gsf_emergency · 1d ago
It makes a falsifiable prediction tho: compared to the other BRICS China is gonna tank
blitzar · 1d ago
> compared to the other BRICS China is gonna tank
I recall these predictions 10-15 years ago. Since then, for all the advantages every other country had compared to the China, the other BRICS have gone nowhere relatively speaking.
wordofx · 1d ago
China is lucky that it can print money and fudge some numbers.
blitzar · 23h ago
Every country can and does
wordofx · 22h ago
lol no they don’t.
blitzar · 18h ago
Obviously every central bank in the world, and certainly every BRICS central bank can and does print money. 08, numerous EM crisis, COVID etc. Not like people are shy about it.
As for "fudging some numbers" - economic data is all surveys and samples. Methodologies are "revised" regularly ostensibly to "better capture the reality". You have the subtle ones like inflation baskets (CPI), and survey for manufacturing or services (PMI) and the less subtle ones like 2015 India redoing their GDP methodology and finding an extra 1.5% a year down the back of the sofa.
It doesn't exactly take a deep dive into the field to see it is not limited to BRICS either.
alephnerd · 1d ago
Ever heard of an RCT?
gsf_emergency · 1d ago
Defo not heard of one that tests national economies :)
hcfman · 1d ago
35 ??? Holy crap!
I guess the reasons I left New Zealand more than 35 years ago are still true.
latentsea · 23h ago
This 35 thing referred to in the article is a phenomenon present in the Chinese tech market, not the NZ one. There's no such thing in the NZ one, and I pity the Chinese with their 996 and curse of 35. What an awfully structured tech industry they have. NZ is in general much better, but there is definitely fewer positions lately.
h4kunamata · 1d ago
That is everywhere including Australia.
I did an interview the other day, the roles had like hundreds of applications.
The naked truth is that if you don't know recruiters, you are fcked!!
Why???
1. Big companies have fired people by the thousands. Many from which were hired during COVID gold era but the market now shrank;
2. The IT market has way too many high skilled folks from those big techs, some John Doe also;
3. Many places have adopted AI tools so unless your resume looks exactly that it is looking for, you are automatically denied;
4. Many roles are a mess, the role is DevOps but somehow the role descriptions is for a Network Engineer, go figure;
5. Social problems like hiring people based on weird ideology like wokeness and not based on skill and experience. You won't get in no matter how good you are and to be honest, you don't wanna be in such toxic culture anyway so a win-win.
6. Ghosted, very hard to avoid this.
7. AI: This is affecting more developers in some way. You cannot have or trust AI to manage infra/network yet.
I could go on and on, in short words, companies can afford to do whatever now.
During COVID, my last two jobs required one interview only and I was in, now??
4 interviews and you are ghosted.
Don't waste your time applying for jobs online, instead, focus on recruiters that hire folks based in your experience.
The recruiter that got me at my current job ( I know him for 3 years now) is the same one that got me an interview with that company with hundreds of applications within days not even weeks.
But still, there are two major problems you cannot avoid:
1. Companies can afford to wait, if you don't have experience on every single goddamn thing, it makes it very hard to get in. 3-4 interviews are the new normal now.
It is becoming normal now to require you to know everything if you are within DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps space.
2. Ghosted: Some recruiters themselves are just dogsh*t, they ghost you, others have no experience at all, just scripted so you will just waste time;
Companies ghost you while trying to find the perfect candidate after you have 4 interviews.
Yup, 4 interviews, the company disappeared only to show up a month later saying they found somebody better :)
Online applications is even worse (AI, your name it)
If you wanna somehow find a job, hunt recruiters, not job.
Have a decent resume that doesn't look a kids homework haha
You will stress less, you will avoid applying for a 100 places where 99% of them will never read your application. Let him/her do their thing.
HenryBemis · 23h ago
> "When an employer was initially interested, they often backed out once they realised I was based in Beijing."
Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.
Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?
janstice · 23h ago
Or rather; the candidate didn’t have a visa, the employer would need to jump through a bunch of hoops, then a multi-month wait, OR can just hire one of the many on-shore candidates available on the market.
I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.
decimalenough · 23h ago
This is not specific to China, any foreigner's application will likewise end up in the bin. (Australians are excepted, because they have reciprocal work rights.)
Few companies want to go through the uncertain and expensive hassle of sponsoring visas, waiting for them to relocate etc unless they really have no other options.
jmyeet · 1d ago
Everyone in New Zealand is struggling unless you've been there for 10-20+ years (when you could still afford a house) or you're an immigrant who sold a house in your home country and thus you can afford a house.
The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.
This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.
And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.
This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.
energy123 · 1d ago
It's got little to do with the ultra-wealthy, who have their wealth in equity. The problem is the upper middle class who have their wealth in land. They are 30% of the population and command election outcomes against anyone who tries to change the status quo. To them, the housing crisis is a housing bonanza and they plan on keeping it that way.
I also take issue with buzzword "neoliberal", as if leftists would be any better with their rent control, NIMBY tendencies, and ideological hostility to supply-side policy (see Dean Preston in US, Zohran Mamdani in US, Adrian Ramsay in UK, Chandler-Mather in AU). In my estimation, they would be worse than any "abundance neoliberal", who at least have Austin, Texas as a successful case study they can point to, and who have ideas that make logical sense. The problem is not their policy ideas but the political reality they exist in where they're constrained in what they can do by a politically active plurality (landowners) that wish to persist the status quo.
bjornsing · 1d ago
There’s some truth to that, but I think it’s even broader. Here in Sweden there’s a widely understood term (”bostadskarriär”) that roughly translates to ”housing career” and refers to building wealth through home ownership. It’s often more important to your financial success than your actual career, even for the working class.
All this is due to regulations of course. In Sweden its a combination of tax rules, laws around borrowing, zoning regulations and construction standards that has kept the gravy train rolling.
It’s a bit hard to see how it could continue though. Feels like it could come crashing down at any point. On the other hand: I’ve had that feeling for 15 years.
EDIT: Monetary policy is the big one actually.
Workaccount2 · 1d ago
Thank you
So tired of people talking about the housing crisis as if megacorp is the one buying all the houses to drive up prices. Yes, commenter, they do buy homes, but by far the single biggest player is regular people. They both are getting rich of the system and voting to keep it in place.
Even worse though...houses are still being sold at these insane prices. There are still fresh dual income high earning non immigrant non billionairs childs non megacorp investor regular people still coming up with the money.
I don't know whats worse, never being able to afford a house or seeing people you know (or thought you knew) somehow getting into one. And then voting down any build out initiative that would weaken their investment.
wordofx · 1d ago
NZ did too little too late. There’s a bunch of Chinese who bought a lot… a LOT of houses in NZ. It’s one way of transferring money out of China is to use it for business. And they don’t need to leave China to do it. That was stopped but too late when they own 100s of houses.
jmyeet · 19h ago
First, the very idea of the "middle class" is capitalist propaganda. It's meant to divide the working class. It serves no other purpose. It serves to be aspirational for people to participate in a system they won't benefit from while allowing the slightly well off to blame the less well off for their own circumstances.
Second, the voters are absolutely complicit in this sytem because they think they're benefitting. But they're not. The ultra-wealthy are reaping the rewards.
Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.
So then you think "maybe I need to own multiple properties" but you're barely better off.
As for the rest, you're confusing a whole bunch of different things. "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics, designed to make status quo Democrats somehow feel good about being indistinguishable from Republicans.
Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed. For one, trust leftists would abolish private property (as distinct from personal property). You get to own your house. You just don't get to hoard land.
I do partially agree about Texas though. Texas's property tax system, at least up until recent years, is significantly better than California's (as one example). In Texas, seniors can defer property tax increases until their death (when they'll be collected from the estate) giving people a choice to downsize or not. In California, you can inherit preferential property tax rates because the voters voted in Prop 13 that allows Disney to pay property tax rates set in the 1960s on the backs of seniors not getting kicked out of their homes.
I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is. If you support the hoarding of private property and are pro-capitalist then, by definition, you're a neoliberal. That's definitional, not a perjorative.
energy123 · 18h ago
> Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.
I agree with you on this.
> Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed.
That may be your interpretation of the underlying philosophy, but in practice, leftist politicians turn out to be more NIMBY than center-left liberal politicians. I'm not so interested in No True Scotsman type appeals on this point.
> "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics
It's laughable to equate "social democracy and targeted industrial policy but with less red tape when you try to build something" with Reaganite policies.
> I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is.
The deployment of the word "neoliberal" is almost always a slur and a misunderstanding. People use it as a catch-all category to mean "status quo thing I don't like", wrongly bundling up heterogeneous things that are vastly different. It's the left's version of "uniparty". A thought-terminating rhetorical device, not to be used in any serious analysis.
jmyeet · 17h ago
I suspect you might be confusing "leftism" with "liberalism with progressive aesthetics". This isn't a "No True Scotsman" type situation. If one supports private property, one is definitionally not a leftist. People love to call themselves "progressive" (moreso than "leftist", which has nasty socialist overtones; thank you Red Scare) because it makes them sound and feel tolerant and caring. But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics.
The leftist solution to housing is social housing, meaning the government builds, maintains and supplies a significant percentage of the housing to ensure that everyone has a roof over their head. Vienna is an excellent example of this where the majority (61% IIRC) of all housing is "social housing". 50+ years ago the UK almost entirely got rid of landlords [1] and then along came Thatcher.
"Abundance" is indistinguishable from trickle down economics. The core tenet of "Abundance" is that if there is so much then everybody will get something, basically. How is that not trickle down economics [2]? "Abundance" doesn't challenge the status quo. It reinforces it. So Ezra Klein gets a ton of media and invited to all the good parties and allows liberals to feel good about supporting fundamentally right-wing policies.
And "red tape" here is just another way of saying "deregulation". The defining characteristics of neoliberalism are "free market capitalism" and "deregulation". I don't really care if people misuse "neoliberal". It still has meaning. It sounds like you just don't like being (correctly) labelled as such. That's really no different to people saying things like "the far Left" or "the radical left" about the Democrats, which is beyond laughable.
It's not trickle down economics because social democracy is not trickle down economics. Industrial policy is not trickle down economics. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not trickle down economics. Funding public goods is not trickle down economics. Taxing externalities is not trickle down economics. Subsidizing supply is not trickle down economics. This is the problem with the leftist worldview where everything is either "neoliberalism" or "not neoliberal ism". It's an overly coarse worldview that doesn't facilitate useful analysis, it impedes your ability to disambiguate between different things. If you think cutting bad regulations as part of the policy mix is by definition Reaganite and therefore bad, then you really need to reevaluate things because not all regulations are good by virtue of them being regulations!
"But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics."
I am talking about people like self styled socialist Dean Preston (the guy you linked, who is a NIMBY that made California's housing crisis worse) or the various Greens parties across the anglosphere who occupy the leftmost end of the political electorate. Whether we label them as leftists or not isn't a hill I'm going to die on. The point is that the leftmost end of the spectrum are more likely to be NIMBYs and have some very wacky and economically illiterate ideas about housing policy than the center left. And I'm someone who supports social housing as part of the mix like what Carney is planning for Canada.
jmyeet · 13h ago
Are you under the misconception that "Abundance" is social democracy? It isn't. It is a defense of the neoliberal status quo. It doesn't challenge authority or the economic order at all. It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation and more wealth hoarding. That's why it gets attention from the mainstream media and the Democratic Party's donors and power brokers. It's Democratic Reaganism. I cannot stress this enough.
Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. Private developers will not build enough housing to meaningfully reduce housing costs. The "free market" (which isn't real) will not solve this problem. It takes government intervention.
YIMBYism is well-intentioned and I'm all for more housing. My point is simply that it will not meaningfully solve the problem. I'm sorry if you're offended by the label "neoliberal" but objectively, if you believe that deregulation and capitalism will solve the housing crisis then you are definitionally and objectively a neoliberal.
I'm not sure what Greens you refer to. You might be talking about Jill Stein, who is 100% a grifter.
As for Carney, I had a look at the supposed plan [1] and I see a bunch of demand-side policies where the private development sector is being somehow tasked with lowering their own profits. Housing in Canada needs to be cheaper. That means existing house prices need to go down. Only government intervention in the market can make that happen.
You want to see what a leftist housing policy looks like? Try this:
1. Massively increase property taxes on investment properties;
2. Tax worldwide income of anyone who owns property in Canada meaning the "beneficial owner" (so no hiding behidn LLCs and trusts). Property without a declared beneficial owner simply revert to government ownership;
3. Give the government the right of first refusal to buy any foreclosed property. Use it to build up housing stock. Banks can eat the loss;
4. Homeowners can walk away from properties that are underwater. They revert to government ownership as if they'd been foreclosed on. Again, banks eat the loss if there is one. The previous owners get to stay on essentially a perpetual lease paying affordable rent to the government;
5. A lot of development policies require a certain percentage to be "affordable" housing. There are a lot of games played with this. Ownership of all affordable units goes to the government. The government pays for these. If the price isn't agreeable, the property simply doesn't get approval to be built.
This would tank the property market. As it should. The goal should be for the Canadian government to own 30-50% of all housing units within 10-15 years.
You seem to be mixing up democratic socialism, which is against capitalism, with social democracy, a more mainstream center-left prescription playing out in various European countries that Ezra subscribes to, which coexists with capitalism but is categorically not right wing or Reaganism. Ezra is basically "social democracy but where the good regulations are enhanced and the bad regulations are removed."
> It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation
We definitely need more deregulation of bad regulations and not of good regulations. Some regulations are bad and they need to be removed. This is the non-ideological position that evaluates each regulation on its own merits. Not the ideologically possessed position that clusters every single regulation in a monolithic tent and says "deregulate it all because regulations are bad" or "maintain them all because deregulation is bad".
> Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices.
And you are basing this assertion on what economic theory or what empirical research?
Compare rental inflation in San Francisco which has effectively outlawed private construction with Austin Texas where construction is more deregulated and housing starts are allowed to track demand.
Get a dataset of American cities, do a scatter plot of rental inflation on the x-axis against the change in per capita housing starts on the y-axis and observe the high R-squared.
It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.
I am not against a land tax and social housing as added measures but the inability to accept the efficacy of supply-side policies on purely ideological grounds will mean left-wing politicians like Dean Preston will continue to do more harm than good whenever they gain power. They don't know how damaging they are because they fail to grasp the basic facts of housing economics because accepting those facts violates the dishonest shibboleths they need to hold to (developers always bad, capital always bad, regulations always good, economics isn't real).
jmyeet · 12h ago
Like I said in an earlier comment, there are things about the Texas property tax system I like. But we can't really compare Texas housing to the Bay Area. Texas is flat with low-value land in all directions. The Bay Area is incredibly space-constrained in an earthquake zone.
I'm not defending the largely single-family home zoning of SF here. I'm simply saying that any affordability you get in Austin (which itself isn't really that affordable) is mostly by spreading in all directions, something simply not possible in SF.
If regulation was the core problem, wouldn't Houston [1] defy housing price trends having no zoning regulation? It does not (eg Austin [2]).
> It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.
No, they don't. I'm sorry but you are uninformed here. You are either confusing liberal policies with leftist policies or simply haven't seen a leftist policy or you're confusing opposition to deregulation as being a NIMBY and not understanding why.
I'm sorry but rent control is what we need lest you want more occupied housing.
reactordev · 1d ago
So what you’re really saying is NZ is for sale…
hcfman · 1d ago
Yeah sure, didn't Peter Thiel buy a chunk of it ?
alephnerd · 1d ago
All countries are if you're VHNWI ($5-7M minimum) or on a skilled visa. Plenty of options open up for skilled visas with somewhat expedited naturalization.
wordofx · 1d ago
No. Most of Asia can’t be bought. Foreigners cannot own property in lots of Asian countries.
lotsofpulp · 1d ago
> Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy.
No, it is a transfer from those who don’t own land to those who already own land. Roughly correlates to young/poor/immigrant classes transferring wealth (or maintaining wealth disparity) to older/richer/beneficiary classes.
That is why it is politically popular. Low and flat land value tax rates have always enabled this, but their effects were temporarily masked by the population boom allowing a lot of upward movement in the lower (non land owning) classes due to broad economic growth.
petesergeant · 1d ago
> This is all capitalism working as intended
Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.
graemep · 1d ago
> Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.
Depends on whose intentions you mean. People who believe in free markets? Then not as intended. People who stand to benefit from rent seeking? Then as intended.
I would argue the second group are far more politically influential.
jmyeet · 19h ago
I suggest you read up on the history of capitalism, specifically the Inclosure Act [1]. The only difference between feudalism and capitalism is who is doing the rent-seeking.
We extend all of this to intellectual property too. It's rent-seeking all the way down [2]. Have you seen any of the documentaries (or the movie) about how Tetris came to be? Some enthusiasts in the USSR made it. The contribution of capitalism was just whole levels of sublicensing and distribution agreements.
Or maybe you think capitalism is responsible for innovation? Take drug research. Almost all novel compounds come of the education sector using government funding. The "innovation" here is for-profit companies marking that up 8000% and then lobbying for laws that forbid the government from negotiating prices or anyone from importing the same thing from overseas for 1% of the price. That's c apitalism.
Maybe you believe capitalism is about "free markets". First off, there's no such thing. Second, markets exist in every economic system and existed thousands of years before capitalism did.
I agree with 95% of what you said. The distinction between capitalism and free markets is very important - and most people conflate these two concepts which leads them to be manipulated.
The only thing I do not agree with you is a minor quibble - most of the communist economic systems actively destroyed free markets. The only exception may be Communist China.
abraae · 1d ago
Good rant but a bit of a simplification.
NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.
Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.
Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.
Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.
Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.
Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.
niemandhier · 1d ago
Currently in many countries the social contract stipulates that the majority of the population refrains from voting for a system that confiscates the wealth of the top 5% and in exchange their lives are bearable.
Trump promised to address the problems of low wage workers, and in many places jihadists style themselves as social reformers.
Since NZ does not have the luxury to blame it on refugees or neighbours, I don’t think it is sustainable.
markdown · 1d ago
> There's no god given right to affordable housing.
Sure, but if you take everything and leave nothing for the masses, sooner or later they'll make your life miserable too. Whether that happens with regular ole crime, or revolution, one way or another the scales will be balanced.
If you want a comfortable life in your mansion, you'd better make sure that your butler and doorman can afford comfortable homes of their own and a decent standard of living.
jamesblonde · 1d ago
Sounds exactly like Ireland of like 25 years ago.
jmyeet · 19h ago
You say it sucks but that's the reality. Why? It doesn't have to be this way.
Denying people shelter is violence.
We could end homelessness with a fraction of what we spend on the police and prisons. Yet we'd rather spend money on an increasingly militarized police force and the convict slavery system to protect property prices so Jeff Bezos can have $220 billion instead of $200 billion.
War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution. When people such as myself advocate for a decent basic standard of living at the expensive of the wealthy having slightly less, we're really trying stave off the guillotines.
eli_gottlieb · 1d ago
> There's no god given right to affordable housing.
There's also no god-given right to avoid a guillotine. These are all choices people make, and can make differently if given reason to do so.
But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.
I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.
New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.
Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.
The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.
[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.
Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or are interested in good people with hard skills - it's almost all very basic web dev. Pretty much all the veterans I know around my age are doing work beneath them to pay the bills or have switched out of development completely.
> Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent
In my experience it is incredibly hard to hire top-tier talent, but both of our experiences could simultaneously be true.
Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them?
I know of three excellent devs who are IMHO vastly unemployed. At least two of them would struggle to get through a corperate interview process. The other is happy with the chill job they have.
No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard development skills, and the tiny handful that do come up in public tend to be for very specialized verticals where they made hard demands on past experience in that niche area first and foremost over everything else.
> The other is happy with the chill job they have
I mean, I can't blame them for that - there are lots of toxic employers, ageism, credentialism, etc etc. If you're just going to be underemployed doing kiddie-level work anyway, better the devil you know, particularly if you have a family to take care of.
It's all just a big old mess of market failure, though. The problem isn't that the talent pool isn't there, it's that since there's no VC money around, the firms that _really_ need that talent can't pay what the hungrier younger people (who want more than anything else to get on the FAANG gravy train) want and the fantastically talented folks mostly can't earn any kind of premium remotely matching their business value and so make lifestyle choices it's hard to pry them out of.
Soap box - Analogies simply don't help. They invariably have some flaw and rarely aid in actual understanding as is the case with the anode/cathode reference. I know 100% of readers understand that countries want to attract talent, but <100% of people understand anode+cathode functions.
It gets worse when others attempt to build off the analogy and so it becomes flawed on top of flawed. At some point, semantic arguments begin, i.e. source of electrons, and now we're quite far from countries+talent.
STOP USING ANALOGIES
Pet peeve - soapbox is also used in an abstract way here, not better than the overuse of analogies. A whole century has since passed since people routinely stood on literal soapboxes.
Furthermore, and I was (am?) guilty of this myself, people often use analogies and other kinds of abstract speech to hide the fact that they have no idea what is going on, or they don't know how to express something. And then the responsibility to decode meaning is passed on to the listener.
The former is mostly a problem for a certain kind of concrete-thinking persons, and the former can be solved by picking a more universally understood analogy domain (like puppies). So analogies can be good, given the right audience and analogy domain.
In the specific context you're replying, however, I agree that any analogy would not add any useful information.
You can write a text that appeals to a small audience, but is understood by a big audience.
You can also write a text that would appeal to a big audience - but doesn't because no one understands it.
It's not hard to write a text that can be understood by a large audience. Using an analogy that only some people understand is counter productive as analogies are used exactly to allow the audience to illustrate the problem.
It does mean for many people the only way for career growth is to go elsewhere. When I left nz my salary 3x’d.
The opportunity here is that there is many talented tech workers who choose to stay in NZ for lifestyle reasons. Foreign companies can compete so easily on salaries, it’s easy to just buy the top of the market for half the price. You will need local recruitment help though to find them.
The time zones are rough, you need to be a company that’s embraced async working, and are able to give a team a clear brief and just let them do it. But the hiring opportunities are there.
* For some definitions of native. I've had to work as a translator for a Kiwi and an American, both native English speakers.
It's not always native English. It's always at least proficient enough, but a good chunk of the workers in the tech sector speak English as a second language. NZ has very diverse population.
I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)
Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.
I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy
(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)
Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
Now I'm not in Switzerland and even I'm not buying that reason at face value, but it's clear that offshoring is an issue in most high-CoL countries in the post WFH era as a lot of tech jobs became more of a commodity in the post ZIRP era. So I can imagine the jobs not moving out of Switzerland are those "management" type of jobs where the job itself is having coffee and networking with the other managers on how to further reduce costs and increase profits while relocating engineering jobs to cheaper countries.
Due to this, it seems that Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
>the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
This explains some of the absurd arguments I often hear from delulu googlers on this board and how out of touch they are with the real world. The sad thing is they have little introspection to realize it and would rather die on their hill.
And then some more anecdata:
I happened to be part of Acronis during the time when they tried helping escape all the Engineers in Moscow to Bulgaria. (I have stories, yes, I was in the HQ in Moscow too). The engineers, who made Acronis (the product) were always in Bulgaria for the past 5+ years, so that one is not like the other examples.
I also ended up working for a small banking startup, 20 of us tried to do business on the regional banking sphere. I left during the time when the company was inflated with 40+ offshore (Balkans) engineers.
To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
Yeah, but those positions require highly specialized knowledge and are therefore very niche. Say you're an unemployed tech worker, how would one get such a job without a PhD in the field? You can't. What do you do when most new positions in your area of expertise have been shipped abroad?
>As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".
I doubt they don't know anymore, but they just don't bother since it's a generic drug in the race to the bottom that Switzerland can't and doesn't want to take part in.
>To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
I think you misunderstood me. I never said googles are clueless about tech, but about life in general, especially the life of those not earning 200k+.
Because living in a coddled bubble of 200k+ wages in Zurich would make one highly out of touch with the reality of most average people in Switzerland and moreso in the rest of the world, and you see this in their comments and arguments on HN. They just can't empathize or understand that your reality on the ground is different than theirs.
Even without knowing the unemployment system in Switzerland or in any other country, how the hell can you expect to receive 200K+ in unemployment benefits? That's just so entitled and out of touch, it's insane. Unemployment benefits are never a payment of 100% of your salary to continue the Googler lifestyle, but a smaller basic safety net to cover your vital expenses till you find another job. That's just common sense everywhere.
Also, I'm not saying that it's great to have these high performant researcher-founded startups, my point is simply that because of these, the "numbers" don't look too bad.
BTW, In Switzerland "you get 80% of your last salary", as most of the people heard from this or that. Obviously this is not the entire story (it is capped, it's not necessary 80%, etc etc) - some people think, oh I made 250k, therefore I'm entitled to 200k now. With that said, in a very optimal case, here you can get around 150k as unemployment benefit, which is still enormously high compared to other countries.
Market there is much better than in western countries, but I see projects are pushed from Poland further to the Asia. UBS is laying off thousands there, moving projects to the Indian office.
They seem to have a couple of openings... https://grindinggear.com/?page=careers
I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.
Finding yourself in an even worse job market 5 years from now is a very real possibility.
Housing there is more affordable also but not for long, people are buying insane houses there coz cost "nothing".
If this is something that you already considered and have enough saving to do so, personally, I would start looking for what can I do over there job wise to avoid using all my savings and screw it, I am off. No matter how small is the income coz you will need to start from the bottom, I am getting tired of IT, too much drama, all the time, if living in Asia doing something completely different but that pays the bills and that I am happy with, I wouldn't come back. Australia within the last 11 years went to shit big time, and it is getting worse by the day.
I have considered the same, I think it might be a little to late for me now, who knows.
Most major wester economies did the same in past 11 years: stagnating wages, exploding CoL. Life was good 11 years ago when salaries were great and housing still abundant and affordable to buy but this isn't the case anymore.
If you expect an improvement, moving anywhere there right now would be like jumping from a lake to a pond.
Truly some of the most fortunate, least deserving people on the planet. I am thankful I can get my special category visa and when my parents eventually pass away I will set my roots down in Australia. Despite all of the Australians.
I'm interested where in SE Asia you think you can can just barge in, buy a property and live. It might pay to actually look into what it takes to do that legally, it might not be as simple as you think.
While I am happy working in IT right now, there are a number of other professional activities I could see myself learning.
Curious what other professions you'd pursue?
So instead of 150k which just barely can get you mortgage you go for 50k?
I moved nearly 6 years ago from one very wealthy country to another much less wealthy. I chose a job with a 3 times lower salary. While I miss parts of my life in that previous country and understand my retirement will be lower, I still find a lot of positives in that life change for various other reasons.
When you move from one country to another, reaching the maximun salary you can obtain is not necessarily the most important parameter/goal.
And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.
Not only do they require sponsorship, but as part of the application process for sponsoring I think they're required to prove or make a case that they couldn't find any local talent to fill the position.
I have worked on teams in NZ that had people where the company sponsored their visas, so it does happen.
It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].
[0] https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360698953/funding-cut-rnz-m...
Do you have a source for that or is it just a conspiracy theory?
NHS is the National Health Service in the UK and this book was Co-Authored by the Minister for Health of the UK (before he got that post).
It details this strategy clearly.
"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
Please read its meaning.
There’s no conspiracy theory, it’s literally their MO.
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
The NZ external debt has been about about the same rate for a decade [0]. External debt has increased at about 2% per year, and the rate has been consistent under both the right and the left.
It's weird - the right consistently pushes "we are better economic managers than the left". There is stuff all evidence for either side being better managers. When the right pushes up debt, it seems to be by giving away tax breaks, usually to the rich. When the left pushes up debt seems to be by spending more, usually on the poor.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/external-debt#:~:te... Settings: 10Y, Chg%.
According to your posting history you don't even live in New Zealand. I doubt you have the first clue what is going on here.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/08/willis-caught-between-the-...
If the article is correct there is nothing special about what happened in NZ. It says the "sea of red ink" was driven by COVID spending. The same thing happened happened everywhere, regardless of which side was in power. Those NZ COVID spending measures almost certainly were legislated to expire in a few years, just like everywhere else. But yes, it left NZ with increased government debt, again just like everywhere else.
You Kiwi's aren't as special as it seems you think you are. That was my point really - fiscal responsibility is always a right wing talking point. And completely true to form, the current right wing NZ government delivered tax cuts in their last budget. They say it was funded by the sort of spending reductions we are discussing here. I see those tax cuts benefited the poor rather than the rich. Colour me impressed.
https://archive.ph/YjX1w
(Don't get me started on BRICS)
The significant amount of superfund sites also confounds with mass industry, which can make the epigenetic theory moot.
I recall these predictions 10-15 years ago. Since then, for all the advantages every other country had compared to the China, the other BRICS have gone nowhere relatively speaking.
As for "fudging some numbers" - economic data is all surveys and samples. Methodologies are "revised" regularly ostensibly to "better capture the reality". You have the subtle ones like inflation baskets (CPI), and survey for manufacturing or services (PMI) and the less subtle ones like 2015 India redoing their GDP methodology and finding an extra 1.5% a year down the back of the sofa.
It doesn't exactly take a deep dive into the field to see it is not limited to BRICS either.
I guess the reasons I left New Zealand more than 35 years ago are still true.
I did an interview the other day, the roles had like hundreds of applications. The naked truth is that if you don't know recruiters, you are fcked!!
Why???
1. Big companies have fired people by the thousands. Many from which were hired during COVID gold era but the market now shrank;
2. The IT market has way too many high skilled folks from those big techs, some John Doe also;
3. Many places have adopted AI tools so unless your resume looks exactly that it is looking for, you are automatically denied;
4. Many roles are a mess, the role is DevOps but somehow the role descriptions is for a Network Engineer, go figure;
5. Social problems like hiring people based on weird ideology like wokeness and not based on skill and experience. You won't get in no matter how good you are and to be honest, you don't wanna be in such toxic culture anyway so a win-win.
6. Ghosted, very hard to avoid this.
7. AI: This is affecting more developers in some way. You cannot have or trust AI to manage infra/network yet.
I could go on and on, in short words, companies can afford to do whatever now. During COVID, my last two jobs required one interview only and I was in, now?? 4 interviews and you are ghosted.
Don't waste your time applying for jobs online, instead, focus on recruiters that hire folks based in your experience. The recruiter that got me at my current job ( I know him for 3 years now) is the same one that got me an interview with that company with hundreds of applications within days not even weeks.
But still, there are two major problems you cannot avoid:
1. Companies can afford to wait, if you don't have experience on every single goddamn thing, it makes it very hard to get in. 3-4 interviews are the new normal now. It is becoming normal now to require you to know everything if you are within DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps space.
2. Ghosted: Some recruiters themselves are just dogsh*t, they ghost you, others have no experience at all, just scripted so you will just waste time; Companies ghost you while trying to find the perfect candidate after you have 4 interviews. Yup, 4 interviews, the company disappeared only to show up a month later saying they found somebody better :) Online applications is even worse (AI, your name it)
If you wanna somehow find a job, hunt recruiters, not job. Have a decent resume that doesn't look a kids homework haha
You will stress less, you will avoid applying for a 100 places where 99% of them will never read your application. Let him/her do their thing.
Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.
Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?
I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.
The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.
This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.
And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.
This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.
I also take issue with buzzword "neoliberal", as if leftists would be any better with their rent control, NIMBY tendencies, and ideological hostility to supply-side policy (see Dean Preston in US, Zohran Mamdani in US, Adrian Ramsay in UK, Chandler-Mather in AU). In my estimation, they would be worse than any "abundance neoliberal", who at least have Austin, Texas as a successful case study they can point to, and who have ideas that make logical sense. The problem is not their policy ideas but the political reality they exist in where they're constrained in what they can do by a politically active plurality (landowners) that wish to persist the status quo.
All this is due to regulations of course. In Sweden its a combination of tax rules, laws around borrowing, zoning regulations and construction standards that has kept the gravy train rolling.
It’s a bit hard to see how it could continue though. Feels like it could come crashing down at any point. On the other hand: I’ve had that feeling for 15 years.
EDIT: Monetary policy is the big one actually.
So tired of people talking about the housing crisis as if megacorp is the one buying all the houses to drive up prices. Yes, commenter, they do buy homes, but by far the single biggest player is regular people. They both are getting rich of the system and voting to keep it in place.
Even worse though...houses are still being sold at these insane prices. There are still fresh dual income high earning non immigrant non billionairs childs non megacorp investor regular people still coming up with the money.
I don't know whats worse, never being able to afford a house or seeing people you know (or thought you knew) somehow getting into one. And then voting down any build out initiative that would weaken their investment.
Second, the voters are absolutely complicit in this sytem because they think they're benefitting. But they're not. The ultra-wealthy are reaping the rewards.
Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.
So then you think "maybe I need to own multiple properties" but you're barely better off.
As for the rest, you're confusing a whole bunch of different things. "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics, designed to make status quo Democrats somehow feel good about being indistinguishable from Republicans.
Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed. For one, trust leftists would abolish private property (as distinct from personal property). You get to own your house. You just don't get to hoard land.
I do partially agree about Texas though. Texas's property tax system, at least up until recent years, is significantly better than California's (as one example). In Texas, seniors can defer property tax increases until their death (when they'll be collected from the estate) giving people a choice to downsize or not. In California, you can inherit preferential property tax rates because the voters voted in Prop 13 that allows Disney to pay property tax rates set in the 1960s on the backs of seniors not getting kicked out of their homes.
I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is. If you support the hoarding of private property and are pro-capitalist then, by definition, you're a neoliberal. That's definitional, not a perjorative.
I agree with you on this.
> Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed.
That may be your interpretation of the underlying philosophy, but in practice, leftist politicians turn out to be more NIMBY than center-left liberal politicians. I'm not so interested in No True Scotsman type appeals on this point.
> "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics
It's laughable to equate "social democracy and targeted industrial policy but with less red tape when you try to build something" with Reaganite policies.
> I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is.
The deployment of the word "neoliberal" is almost always a slur and a misunderstanding. People use it as a catch-all category to mean "status quo thing I don't like", wrongly bundling up heterogeneous things that are vastly different. It's the left's version of "uniparty". A thought-terminating rhetorical device, not to be used in any serious analysis.
The leftist solution to housing is social housing, meaning the government builds, maintains and supplies a significant percentage of the housing to ensure that everyone has a roof over their head. Vienna is an excellent example of this where the majority (61% IIRC) of all housing is "social housing". 50+ years ago the UK almost entirely got rid of landlords [1] and then along came Thatcher.
"Abundance" is indistinguishable from trickle down economics. The core tenet of "Abundance" is that if there is so much then everybody will get something, basically. How is that not trickle down economics [2]? "Abundance" doesn't challenge the status quo. It reinforces it. So Ezra Klein gets a ton of media and invited to all the good parties and allows liberals to feel good about supporting fundamentally right-wing policies.
And "red tape" here is just another way of saying "deregulation". The defining characteristics of neoliberalism are "free market capitalism" and "deregulation". I don't really care if people misuse "neoliberal". It still has meaning. It sounds like you just don't like being (correctly) labelled as such. That's really no different to people saying things like "the far Left" or "the radical left" about the Democrats, which is beyond laughable.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...
[2]: https://www.deanprestonsf.com/blog/abundance
Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. Private developers will not build enough housing to meaningfully reduce housing costs. The "free market" (which isn't real) will not solve this problem. It takes government intervention.
YIMBYism is well-intentioned and I'm all for more housing. My point is simply that it will not meaningfully solve the problem. I'm sorry if you're offended by the label "neoliberal" but objectively, if you believe that deregulation and capitalism will solve the housing crisis then you are definitionally and objectively a neoliberal.
I'm not sure what Greens you refer to. You might be talking about Jill Stein, who is 100% a grifter.
As for Carney, I had a look at the supposed plan [1] and I see a bunch of demand-side policies where the private development sector is being somehow tasked with lowering their own profits. Housing in Canada needs to be cheaper. That means existing house prices need to go down. Only government intervention in the market can make that happen.
You want to see what a leftist housing policy looks like? Try this:
1. Massively increase property taxes on investment properties;
2. Tax worldwide income of anyone who owns property in Canada meaning the "beneficial owner" (so no hiding behidn LLCs and trusts). Property without a declared beneficial owner simply revert to government ownership;
3. Give the government the right of first refusal to buy any foreclosed property. Use it to build up housing stock. Banks can eat the loss;
4. Homeowners can walk away from properties that are underwater. They revert to government ownership as if they'd been foreclosed on. Again, banks eat the loss if there is one. The previous owners get to stay on essentially a perpetual lease paying affordable rent to the government;
5. A lot of development policies require a certain percentage to be "affordable" housing. There are a lot of games played with this. Ownership of all affordable units goes to the government. The government pays for these. If the price isn't agreeable, the property simply doesn't get approval to be built.
This would tank the property market. As it should. The goal should be for the Canadian government to own 30-50% of all housing units within 10-15 years.
[1]: https://economics.td.com/ca-federal-housing-plan
Compare rental inflation in San Francisco which has effectively outlawed private construction with Austin Texas where construction is more deregulated and housing starts are allowed to track demand.
Get a dataset of American cities, do a scatter plot of rental inflation on the x-axis against the change in per capita housing starts on the y-axis and observe the high R-squared.
It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.
I am not against a land tax and social housing as added measures but the inability to accept the efficacy of supply-side policies on purely ideological grounds will mean left-wing politicians like Dean Preston will continue to do more harm than good whenever they gain power. They don't know how damaging they are because they fail to grasp the basic facts of housing economics because accepting those facts violates the dishonest shibboleths they need to hold to (developers always bad, capital always bad, regulations always good, economics isn't real).
I'm not defending the largely single-family home zoning of SF here. I'm simply saying that any affordability you get in Austin (which itself isn't really that affordable) is mostly by spreading in all directions, something simply not possible in SF.
If regulation was the core problem, wouldn't Houston [1] defy housing price trends having no zoning regulation? It does not (eg Austin [2]).
> It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.
No, they don't. I'm sorry but you are uninformed here. You are either confusing liberal policies with leftist policies or simply haven't seen a leftist policy or you're confusing opposition to deregulation as being a NIMBY and not understanding why.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS26420Q
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q
No, it is a transfer from those who don’t own land to those who already own land. Roughly correlates to young/poor/immigrant classes transferring wealth (or maintaining wealth disparity) to older/richer/beneficiary classes.
That is why it is politically popular. Low and flat land value tax rates have always enabled this, but their effects were temporarily masked by the population boom allowing a lot of upward movement in the lower (non land owning) classes due to broad economic growth.
Supply constraint of housing by rent-seekers who have managed regulatory capture is absolutely not capitalism working as intended.
Depends on whose intentions you mean. People who believe in free markets? Then not as intended. People who stand to benefit from rent seeking? Then as intended.
I would argue the second group are far more politically influential.
We extend all of this to intellectual property too. It's rent-seeking all the way down [2]. Have you seen any of the documentaries (or the movie) about how Tetris came to be? Some enthusiasts in the USSR made it. The contribution of capitalism was just whole levels of sublicensing and distribution agreements.
Or maybe you think capitalism is responsible for innovation? Take drug research. Almost all novel compounds come of the education sector using government funding. The "innovation" here is for-profit companies marking that up 8000% and then lobbying for laws that forbid the government from negotiating prices or anyone from importing the same thing from overseas for 1% of the price. That's c apitalism.
Maybe you believe capitalism is about "free markets". First off, there's no such thing. Second, markets exist in every economic system and existed thousands of years before capitalism did.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
NZers love to go off and do their OE (overseas experience) typically in their early-mid twenties often in hubs like London. A kiwi in their 30s who hasn't lived and worked overseas is the odd one out at parties.
Many of those people do extremely well. I know several who made millions in banking and IT.
Then they come back to NZ when they have kids and put that money into housing. These are some of the people paying $3M for a house. Others are people who have inherited wealth from their parents who invested big in NZ property last century (e.g. boomers). Others are wealthy immigrants from UK, SA, US even.
Yes that sucks for the local who has only been earning $61K but it's reality.
Add to that a weird situation where there is no capital gains tax on housing, with all political parties too scared to address that giant elephant in the room, and NZ offering an awesome lifestyle in many ways except for salaries, and and you have a perfect recipe for high house prices.
Is it sustainable? My view is that it is (not in the sense sustainable == good, but in the sense sustainable == can keep going for a long time). There's no god given right to affordable housing. There was a period in the 1950s where there was prosperity for all, but looking back, that was the anomaly, not the current state of affairs.
Trump promised to address the problems of low wage workers, and in many places jihadists style themselves as social reformers.
Since NZ does not have the luxury to blame it on refugees or neighbours, I don’t think it is sustainable.
Sure, but if you take everything and leave nothing for the masses, sooner or later they'll make your life miserable too. Whether that happens with regular ole crime, or revolution, one way or another the scales will be balanced.
If you want a comfortable life in your mansion, you'd better make sure that your butler and doorman can afford comfortable homes of their own and a decent standard of living.
Denying people shelter is violence.
We could end homelessness with a fraction of what we spend on the police and prisons. Yet we'd rather spend money on an increasingly militarized police force and the convict slavery system to protect property prices so Jeff Bezos can have $220 billion instead of $200 billion.
War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution. When people such as myself advocate for a decent basic standard of living at the expensive of the wealthy having slightly less, we're really trying stave off the guillotines.
There's also no god-given right to avoid a guillotine. These are all choices people make, and can make differently if given reason to do so.