[brianwillis]

10 years as a Software Developer here. Based in Wellington, New Zealand.

1. Change jobs more often. The only way to be paid market rates is to change jobs when your market value increases. Your employer has a strong financial incentive to keep you working as long as possible at your current rate.

2. Move into management quickly. I've heard it's different in other parts of the world, but where I am being a developer limits your career. In every software company the people who are the most influential, and the best paid, are in management or sales.

3. Be more aggressive about getting side projects finished and getting them out into the world. Like many developers, I've got a bunch of half baked ideas on my hard drive that could make decent open source contributions, side businesses, and there might even be a worthwhile startup buried in there somewhere. When all your publicly visible code is your employer's intellectual property, it makes it harder to sell yourself.

[nedwin]

What's the market like for a software engineer in Wellington? Was in town a few weeks ago and loved every minute. Raglan Roast has got to be one of my top 5 coffee joints of all time!

[brianwillis]

It exists, and demand for talented people outstrips supply. I find recruiting new people for my team to be tough. Literally had a candidate fail at FizzBuzz yesterday.

If you're on the Microsoft stack then Xero and Trade Me are the most obvious choices. Mobile development and Ruby on Rails are somewhat popular. Wellington is a government town, so there's a fair amount of work maintaining legacy platforms if that's your thing.

Quality of life is decent. Good weather most of the time, better traffic management and city planning than Auckland, good food and coffee. The place feels like it has a personality.

You will not be paid well compared to Australians and Americans. The cost of living is lower than in those places, but still high relative to salaries. Food is expensive, housing is expensive, broadband is expensive and somewhat slow, anything you want to import will have to travel a long way which raises the price, and all purchases have 15% GST.

[robbs]

Weta Digital is hiring. We have developers working on many different projects ranging from webapps to simulations to renderers and more.

https://www.wetafx.co.nz/jobs

[theviajerock]

All the positions are onsite?

[robbs]

Yes, in the Miramar suburb of Wellington.

[frontendbeauty]

> In every software company the people who are the most influential, and the best paid, are in management or sales.

I don't think that's necessarily true in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc. have parallel career tracks for individual contributor vs manager, with equal salary bands. I'm earning way more as a high-level IC than mid-leveled managers.

[broodbucket]

Excuse my ignorance, IC?

[patio11]

"Individual contributor", as opposed to management. i.e. for a software engineer, someone who ships code for a living rather than shipping Gantt charts/emails.