Unless you are a Data engineer, or React Developer a career move to Australia is career suicide. Just go to LinkedIn and search the variety of jobs and salaries across all of Australia compared to the UK, it doesn't even come close. Salaries are one thing but it's also the variety off work that depresses me more. NZ would be even worse.
I came to Australia and had a good four years but now want to leave after the honeymoon period has worn off. I see all my UK friends doing nice interesting work and I'm stuck doing Python ETL sorry big data / data engineering as that's the demand that pays the bills. My partner is Aussie and want's to stay in Australia so I have some tough choices ahead, career or accept the Australia job market and stay with my partner. I know a few developer immigrants in Australia and they all seem to be over it work wise, COVID and not being to leave Australia to see family has been a big decision changer for most of them.
All my old UK friends and colleagues are now contracting. It seems full time salaries are low in the UK but if you are a contractor things are reasonably ok.Haven't been keeping in touch much but I think there's been recent IR35 changes so not sure how that's changed the contracting landscape. On the lower salaries it does look like they are now higher than when I left a few years ago but when you compare to USA it is still night and day.
I see lots of frontend React jobs, bunch of NodeJS jobs then lots of Python/Spark jobs. Full-time probably around $150-160k average or contracting $1k a day.
Outside of that I see C# or Java using Spring Boot for < $150k but the companies themselfs are a bit meh, fairly non descriptive and closer to the $120k mark than $150.
I don't mind Java but the stuff out here I have done and used is so meh, Spring for everything when there's so much more than Spring. Java 17 was released last week and half the places have only just started using 11.
Even a lot of the cloud/devops stuff here it seems way behind what I was doing a decade ago in the UK.
Recently I've been asking myself maybe I just got lucky and had some good jobs in the UK for forward thinking companies using cloud from the early days at large scale, and my first 4 years in AU I also got lucky before the work changed, so maybe that's poisoned my views. But then I speak to other friends/collages in AU who are not from AU and they express the same problems as me, the choice of jobs isn't great and they feel bit of a step back from what they have done before. I also know people who have left AU completely because of feeling the same.
When i do speak to friends in the UK who careers where lagging behind mine and I was moving way ahead off it seems they're jobs gone from strength to strength where as I get paid a fairly good salary, 30% more than average speaking to recruiters but doing the least interesting, least rewarding work of my life and feeling like the career has gone backwards as now my options are Python/Javascript or take a significant paycut to use some tech I enjoy for a company culture I enjoy.
The more interesting work I have seen has always been overseas companies opening up in AU.
I think this may be a matter of different expectations.
When I moved to Sydney 3 years ago and picked up a job within a week writing JavaScript at $130k + super (£80k then, £70k now the exchange rates have shifted a bit), I was very happy to be paid >2.5x what I'd been earning in the UK.
If you're already on $180k + super (£95k), then you're already extremely well paid almost anywhere outside the USA.
Regarding technologies: JavaScript/Python/C#/Java, well, you've just listed the most common programming languages that everyone uses everywhere? If you want to do Clojure or F# or something exotic then you probably want a Fintech.
I share your pain about Spring though. Life's too short for that nonsense.
> The more interesting work I have seen has always been overseas companies opening up in AU.
That is where I ended up. But now I'm a Django developer which I suspect isn't what you mean by interesting.
I might be reading more into you brief analysis than I should, but one interpretation I could make from what you just said is:
- there’s a bunch of companies that are using technologies that are a decade or more old, doing work that seems like it was maybe relevant and exciting a decade ago, and they are paying toward the lower end of the market
- there are companies using newer technologies/more modern problems, paying more
Maybe the solution here is to reskill/reposition yourself to be able to work for the companies that interest you? There’s quite a few companies doing very interesting things in AU these days. Admittedly the salaries aren’t close to the Bay Area, especially if you want a very early stage startup, but IMO there’s no shortage of exciting opportunities. If you want to optimise for income though you’re probably going to have to make a compromise somewhere.
Don't get me wrong I like paying with technologies, especially keeping up to date. In fact as a consultant that's why I'm brought in, to deliver the new thing the org doesn't yet have experience with. My list and breadth of experience is more than most from the CV's i've seen and the roles I perform going in as a consultant to some very large company's. In most cases up until recently due to job market shift I've been an early user. I've worked across frontend, backend and platform/devops for large flagship brand names and at a smaller scale and i've worked across all three in depth not just touching on them
The re-skilling for me to get employment with a good salary/maintain current salary from my point of view is to do what I was doing 10-15 years ago as a junior. So it's not re-skilling, I know and use/have used these things, it's lowering my expectations on the type of work i'm doing. Meanwhile I'm still on some UK agencies dial lists and there's a bunch of jobs i'd snap up and say yes to instantly. Same for jobs I see in the EU and US. Remote is an option but the timezones are pretty bad for AU, I have a friend who has ended up working overnight for a US company.
What would be an interesting role for you? There must be some companies in Sydney using Rust/Golang or similar if Python ETL isn't what you like doing.
No Rust, I’ve been looking and would be excited to do some rust professionally.
I have seen a few GoLang jobs, they have mainly been Devops tooling/platform support roles and a 30% paycut, I could be interested for the right company. Devops often comes with the unadvertised salary reduction, on call duties. Not against on call but every time the deal has been worse than not being on call.
Kotlin I’d be interested in, seen a few odd jobs but closer to 35% pay cut. I thought they would be more Kotlin usage than there currently is.
Modern Java I could be interested in with the caveat no Spring boot. I haven’t really seen this, and the Java roles seem to be the lower end of the market outside of specialised roles in banks which isn’t an atmosphere I’d like to work in due to how hard it is to get things done and being a people management game. That’s my current life, multi billion dollar city org where easy things become hard things for no obvious reason.
Scala, I would enjoy but it doesn’t exist. It’s only listed on roles next to Python and Spark as bait. It was reasonably popular here in 2014 being the largest tech meetup held at Atlassian. The people I know writing Scala are now doing it remotely. There is a crm who use it in Melbourne I’m actually following up, then there’s Rupert Murdoch owned orgs REA, Foxtel, etc i’d rather not work for and didn’t get a good impression when I have spoke to.
Haskell I would love but would say I’m beginner.
My specialties are cloud, micro services, devops, devops without Python except for small scripts and definitely no Ansible. I don’t mind devops, I’ve been setting Kafka clusters and writing Kafka apps up for the past few years but all the devops roles I see use ansible and it’s a pore choice in my opinion and from the programming side Spring have their own Kafka library which is a no go for my sanity. Spark / data engineering stuff I’ve just landed in, I get by but not an interest of mine especially as most of it I think has the if all you have is an hammer everything looks like a nail.
My ideal job would be working for a product company, on a product that has value you can invest yourself in and perform many roles. I miss working in a good product company with a valuable service. As long as I’m not writing NodeJs / massive amount of Python I wouldn’t be to fussed.
I did a couple of years at Atlassian, for a period that was really enjoyable until change of manager’s and direction etc.
I might have to refresh my leet code and give Canva a shot although that looks like a 40% paycut as most of the startups here do trading on name.
Salary right now seems a big factor for me, I’m on just under $200k AUD inc super, I’d move no questions asked for 10-15% in that range but 30-40% I have to have job satisfaction to move. I’m well aware my salary is way in to the upper end for AU although some will be on more. At the same time the paycut seems significant. Not complaining, I won’t go without food either way but it’s the predicament I am in. First world problems.
In the next 12 months I’ve been lucky enough to get in to a position to semi retire and then do 3-6 month contracts to tie me by and look at a career outside software.
Sounds like you've got a great range of experience, both broad and in-depth so I imagine you can pretty much pick and choose your job offers/contract gigs. I'm also wondering what a career outside of software might look like in the future - if you have any initial ideas I'd be interested to hear them.
I moved to Sydney at the end of 2018, have been working mostly with Python for the best part of 10 years (previously in the UK) and also have landed in data engineering. I also still do some web dev and act as a tech lead. I don't mind the data side of things and I get to work with (Azure|AWS|GCP) and their various data-realated technologies on a daily basis. I haven't worked with Kafka as nowhere I've worked has had a need for it so far, but having said that I've also done stuff with Kubernetes which was probably overkill too in retrospect.
I know they have slightly different use cases but if you don't like Ansible, have you used Terraform? Hashicorp have started to dominate in some areas of DevOps tooling and as you know it has a lot of traction, although I can't think of many companies using it in anger in Australia off the top of my head.
I don't work here so this isn't an ad for the company, but this is an example Java job description I saw recently https://www.todaysplan.com.au/jobs/ No mention of Spring which is a bonus for you, but I imagine there'd be a pay cut from what you're on now. I've heard some Canberra-based jobs pay relatively well but the average could be skewed by some of the high paying government jobs.
> Java 17 was released last week and half the places have only just started using 11
That's not Australia, that's just Java. Most companies who bet on Java 10 years ago did so because it was a stable and conservative platform; they were not going to accelerate their development practices just because the vendor started telling them to.
Most friends and colleagues in Java shops are all in the same boat: they're barely done migrating from 8 to 11 and they don't really know when they'll move further (although it should be easier). Maybe they have the occasional greenfield project on a newer release, but the bread and butter is always on the old workhorses.
The difference between Aus and NZ is night and day... there's so much more choice for interesting work in Aus. However I think that's changing; in just ~2 years there seems to have been a huge increase in tech startups in NZ, due to VC finally arriving. I think there are easily 4x more NLP startups than before.
I came to Australia and had a good four years but now want to leave after the honeymoon period has worn off. I see all my UK friends doing nice interesting work and I'm stuck doing Python ETL sorry big data / data engineering as that's the demand that pays the bills. My partner is Aussie and want's to stay in Australia so I have some tough choices ahead, career or accept the Australia job market and stay with my partner. I know a few developer immigrants in Australia and they all seem to be over it work wise, COVID and not being to leave Australia to see family has been a big decision changer for most of them.
All my old UK friends and colleagues are now contracting. It seems full time salaries are low in the UK but if you are a contractor things are reasonably ok.Haven't been keeping in touch much but I think there's been recent IR35 changes so not sure how that's changed the contracting landscape. On the lower salaries it does look like they are now higher than when I left a few years ago but when you compare to USA it is still night and day.