Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nigel_bree 377 days 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.
1 comments
teruakohatu 377 days 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.

link
nigel_bree 377 days 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.

link