[esja]

Hot off the press:

"They were building a Frankenstein’: how ASX’s blockchain unravelled" https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afr.com%2Fcompanie...

Some people are blaming "tech nerds" for having too much influence over the project. Really the problem was charlatans. If they had hired good tech people the blockchain concept would have been binned years ago.

Another win for the Australian tech scene. Optus, Medibank Private, ASX... just embarrassing.

[gonzo41]

You get what you pay for. Australian companies operate like they live on an island, which is not far from the facts. Except for those pesky fibre optic cables, So getting pwned by Russian hackers still seems otherworldly to them. Our markets are somewhat captive, and thus most companies can be kind of lazy in their approach to, well everything really. But IT's pretty bad. Hopefully it'll start getting better.

[thrown_22]

Tall poppy syndrome is terrible.

I've seen places which will rather hire 10 developers getting paid $80k a year than two developers getting paid $400k a year. You get what you pay for. The number of managers who will not hire someone getting paid more than them is astonishing.

[mrjin]

Why that is surprising? Mediocre people in leadership for sure will hire people worse than themselves for obvious reasons:

1. Much less likely to challenge them.

2. Numbers look much better.

3. When things went south, there would be someone to blame.

[3np]

More commonly,

4. They are not great at assessing and contextualizing skill and experience

[thrown_22]

Because I've seen it even in places where the guy doing the hiring was the major share holder. He flat out told me that no one would pay a salary like what I was asking. It went downhill from there and he didn't take it well when I told him I was making more than that now and I figured this was going to be a relaxing year to wind down from my current position, hence why I was asking for less.

[legostormtroopr]

$80k is not a bad salary and I struggle to think of any Australian dev salary that is close to $400k.

Additionally, with good leadership 10 x $80k would almost certainly outperform 2 x $400k developers.

[ekidd]

Trading systems are complex distributed systems. They need extremely high reliability and low latency, on enormous transaction volume.

There are lots of complex failure modes in a system like this, and minimizing them is an advanced skill. The learning curve for a competent generalist senior engineer to get good at these kinds of problems is significant. Designing and implementing a national securities exchange is a big deal.

This is a place where you want either experienced developers who have worked on other stock exchanges, or at least FAANG engineers who've worked on systems with analogous challenges. This is not a place you want to skimp on salary.

[thrown_22]

You want HFT experts because this is the definition of an HFT system. Those salaries even in Australia start at $200k for a junior developer and go upwards quite quickly.

Of course OP thinks that $80k is a good salary for a developer so that ought to tell you how competent she is.

[mimon]

$80k was my starting salary in Sydney, as a grad, almost 15 years ago. It is not even close to competitive in today's market.

[gonzo41]

It's the ASX, in Sydney. 80K is not nearly enough for that work.

[__d]

Plenty of $400k+ salaries in fintech in Sydney ...

[thrown_22]

Go get those tall poppies.

[urthor]

...You can have a project with exceptional engineers working on the domain specific language, or concurrency features in Haskell/Scala.

Individual engineers are not necessarily talkative types.

They don't necessarily have the ability to influence feature creep in the boardroom.

[esja]

I'm mainly referring to the technical leadership.