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This article is generalised rubbish. That's not to say there's a shortage of badly managed, over spending IT projects in Australia (either public or private) bu

This article is generalised rubbish. That's not to say there's a shortage of badly managed, over spending IT projects in Australia (either public or private) but I doubt it's worse here than UK, US, Denmark or where ever else. And to blame it on "Programmers" or siloed universities is about the laziest piece of analysis I've read in anything (including Trump tweets) for ages. There are real issues in IT generally is Aus, eg large orgs outsourcing all their dev work to large and small SI's, no in house capabilities for anything other than limited governance, a reluctance to take on and train grads and a million other things. Security is definitely something that needs to change. In my experience IT security has often been seen as a infrastructure job rather than a holistic practice that covers the life cycle of systems, but the first time I worked with a security dev team was a government org, which was great. They were much less about the firewalls, and much more focussed on good security practices, the poor application of which by devs were often demonstrated at fortnightly showcases where they would demo exploits in real time. Especially awesome was the time they dropped the entire "user" database table with some magic Hibernate exploit.

microcolonel 9y ago
>I doubt it's worse here than UK, US, Denmark or where ever else. Don't go lumping the U.S. in with the UK and Denmark, it's a completely different world.
bigger_cheese 9y ago
> "There are real issues in IT generally is Aus, eg large orgs outsourcing all their dev work to large and small SI's, no in house capabilities for anything other than limited governance, a reluctance to take on and train grads and a million other things. Security is definitely something that needs to change. In my experience IT security has often been seen as a infrastructure job rather than a holistic practice that covers the life cycle of systems" This is spot on I think. I work for an Australian private enterprise-ish organisation almost all of our IT is outsourced. The contract gets renewed every few years and goes to basically whomever is cheapest bidder which means offshore Indian/Malaysian etc support. As far as I can see cost is only consideration given to who gets the IT contract. And I'm pretty sure these outsourced workers are under pressures of their own the impression I've gotten from my limited dealings is they seem to be mostly focused on closing tickets - I'm guessing they have some kind of performance metric based on open tickets. Often if I report an issue ticket will get silently closed and I have to escalate several times before any action - This isn't really an environment that encourages "best practices" frustrating.
- sytringy05 9y ago
  I'm a consultant and my last 2 clients have been going through changing outsourced service providers because "The last guys were hopeless/too expensive/just liked arguing about contracts" or whatever. I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability. They do everything they can to give it to someone else and then pay companies like my employer $2k a day for me to sit here and write unit tests, ansible playbooks and no end of just bog standard dev jobs. In my case I'm meant to be mostly doing architecture rather than dev, but what good is the architecture when the actual systems and applications are not looked after properly?
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    To be fair, more and more companies these days are brining these capabilities in house as they realise that Digital needs to be a core-competency. But besides, the upside is that you can just go work for these consultancies anyway. Look at CommBank - its agencies, contracts and subcontractors all the way down, but those agencies are still hiring those people locally here. I have like three friends who are all working for Qantas via three different agencies.
    - Khaine 9y ago
      CommBank is probably a bad example, as they do all sorts of crazy things. In some areas, Infrastructure is outsourced to HP, Application management is shared between internal staff and consultancies. In others, its all in-house, and in others its a mix of independent contractors and internal staff. The Federal Government is a mixed bag. The larger agencies are required to comply with the Information Security Manual, which is a prescriptive set of controls from ASD. They mostly outsource infrastructure to a contractor and then either have in-source development or outsource it depending on the amount of development performed. For example, if they need to set up a new system as a once off, its probably outsourced. If its something that will continually be added to they will hire developers. Government departments struggle to get skilled staff who will work for government wages and pass a security clearance. They also lack a lot of knowledge around IT at upper levels. Additionally, when they budget for systems they are terrible about asking for additional CAPEX to reduce on-going OPEX. They usually undercut their budget, half implement a system and then rely on manual processes. The efficiency dividend and on-going cuts then eat into their ability to perform those manual processes.
Eridrus 9y ago
The fact that there is so little software work in Australia and that it pays much less means that about a third of my graduating class works in the US now, and it's not the mediocre folks. Most of the good folks who stayed went into PhD programs/NICTA.
- meric 9y ago
  I'm working in a company, so many of my colleagues were former-NICTA.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > there is so little software work in Australia Is this actually true? Maybe me and my friends have all been extremely fortunate, but none of us have ever had a trouble getting a job doing development and being paid well. Sure, there's a smaller amount of cool, hip, early-stage startups to go work at compared to... New York, but still there are loads of people hiring if all the recruiter spam is anything to go by.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but it seemed like the main companies in Sydney were Atlassian, Google and banks. And SF/NYC is exactly what I'm comparing it to. I mean, I live in NYC now and don't have any real desire to move back. Definitely interested in hearing about your experience though, what's the most interesting software stuff going on in Australia?
    - madeofpalk 9y ago
      I previously worked at Nine (their digital arm, formally known as Mi9) building their VOD platforms which was an amazing experience of great project with great developers and designers. Made friends there for life. Now, I'm at an airline (well, at a digital agency who are at an airline) working on their new inflight wifi product. It's pretty interesting, talking to all sorts of APIs onboard the plane, super optimising the site so its still fast to run over a satellite connection. Yeah, Sydney isn't San Francisco - that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Jobs still exists, but most of them are in stable companies. If you want that 'startup life', go move to SF.
girvo 9y ago
Agreed, and there's heaps of interesting work in Australia if you know where to find it. I'm working on commercialising (a restricted subset of semi-) homomorphic encryption, leveraging Hyperledger for some really interesting companies, and tbh getting paid really well to do so. Even outside of that, a lot of big important companies are starting to take security seriously here in Australia, which I think is a great thing :)

microcolonel 9y ago

>I doubt it's worse here than UK, US, Denmark or where ever else. Don't go lumping the U.S. in with the UK and Denmark, it's a completely different world.

bigger_cheese 9y ago

> "There are real issues in IT generally is Aus, eg large orgs outsourcing all their dev work to large and small SI's, no in house capabilities for anything other than limited governance, a reluctance to take on and train grads and a million other things. Security is definitely something that needs to change. In my experience IT security has often been seen as a infrastructure job rather than a holistic practice that covers the life cycle of systems" This is spot on I think. I work for an Australian private enterprise-ish organisation almost all of our IT is outsourced. The contract gets renewed every few years and goes to basically whomever is cheapest bidder which means offshore Indian/Malaysian etc support. As far as I can see cost is only consideration given to who gets the IT contract. And I'm pretty sure these outsourced workers are under pressures of their own the impression I've gotten from my limited dealings is they seem to be mostly focused on closing tickets - I'm guessing they have some kind of performance metric based on open tickets. Often if I report an issue ticket will get silently closed and I have to escalate several times before any action - This isn't really an environment that encourages "best practices" frustrating.

sytringy05 9y ago
I'm a consultant and my last 2 clients have been going through changing outsourced service providers because "The last guys were hopeless/too expensive/just liked arguing about contracts" or whatever. I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability. They do everything they can to give it to someone else and then pay companies like my employer $2k a day for me to sit here and write unit tests, ansible playbooks and no end of just bog standard dev jobs. In my case I'm meant to be mostly doing architecture rather than dev, but what good is the architecture when the actual systems and applications are not looked after properly?
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  To be fair, more and more companies these days are brining these capabilities in house as they realise that Digital needs to be a core-competency. But besides, the upside is that you can just go work for these consultancies anyway. Look at CommBank - its agencies, contracts and subcontractors all the way down, but those agencies are still hiring those people locally here. I have like three friends who are all working for Qantas via three different agencies.
  - Khaine 9y ago
    CommBank is probably a bad example, as they do all sorts of crazy things. In some areas, Infrastructure is outsourced to HP, Application management is shared between internal staff and consultancies. In others, its all in-house, and in others its a mix of independent contractors and internal staff. The Federal Government is a mixed bag. The larger agencies are required to comply with the Information Security Manual, which is a prescriptive set of controls from ASD. They mostly outsource infrastructure to a contractor and then either have in-source development or outsource it depending on the amount of development performed. For example, if they need to set up a new system as a once off, its probably outsourced. If its something that will continually be added to they will hire developers. Government departments struggle to get skilled staff who will work for government wages and pass a security clearance. They also lack a lot of knowledge around IT at upper levels. Additionally, when they budget for systems they are terrible about asking for additional CAPEX to reduce on-going OPEX. They usually undercut their budget, half implement a system and then rely on manual processes. The efficiency dividend and on-going cuts then eat into their ability to perform those manual processes.

Eridrus 9y ago

The fact that there is so little software work in Australia and that it pays much less means that about a third of my graduating class works in the US now, and it's not the mediocre folks. Most of the good folks who stayed went into PhD programs/NICTA.

meric 9y ago
I'm working in a company, so many of my colleagues were former-NICTA.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> there is so little software work in Australia Is this actually true? Maybe me and my friends have all been extremely fortunate, but none of us have ever had a trouble getting a job doing development and being paid well. Sure, there's a smaller amount of cool, hip, early-stage startups to go work at compared to... New York, but still there are loads of people hiring if all the recruiter spam is anything to go by.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but it seemed like the main companies in Sydney were Atlassian, Google and banks. And SF/NYC is exactly what I'm comparing it to. I mean, I live in NYC now and don't have any real desire to move back. Definitely interested in hearing about your experience though, what's the most interesting software stuff going on in Australia?
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    I previously worked at Nine (their digital arm, formally known as Mi9) building their VOD platforms which was an amazing experience of great project with great developers and designers. Made friends there for life. Now, I'm at an airline (well, at a digital agency who are at an airline) working on their new inflight wifi product. It's pretty interesting, talking to all sorts of APIs onboard the plane, super optimising the site so its still fast to run over a satellite connection. Yeah, Sydney isn't San Francisco - that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Jobs still exists, but most of them are in stable companies. If you want that 'startup life', go move to SF.

girvo 9y ago

Agreed, and there's heaps of interesting work in Australia if you know where to find it. I'm working on commercialising (a restricted subset of semi-) homomorphic encryption, leveraging Hyperledger for some really interesting companies, and tbh getting paid really well to do so. Even outside of that, a lot of big important companies are starting to take security seriously here in Australia, which I think is a great thing :)