10 ms·

'New Zealand wants you': the problem with tech at the edge of the world

81 points by ninguem2 8y ago

pseingatl 8y ago
Of course, if you're working in New Zealand you'll have to obey U.S. laws; the NZ government will violate its own laws to seize your property at the behest of a foreign government without due process of any kind. If you don't believe me, ask Kim Dotcom. No thank you.
- te_chris 8y ago
  Snore. Yes, KDC was a farce. You’re just scaremongering though.
- rapsey 8y ago
  Grow up. If you think the US can't strong-arm other countries in its sphere of influence you aren't living in reality.
  - YawningAngel 8y ago
    I think the egregious aspect of this is that there's no evidence they had to strong-arm the NZ government much at all.
    - Freeboots 8y ago
      Although the initial raid/ arrest was absurd, the NZ courts denied extradition for years. Also that was the previous government, famous for licking us dick
chriselles 8y ago
I’m in NZ, and involved in the startup community down here. Great people, great vibe. There’s a long history of Innovation down here at the bottom of the planet. The best example is David Downs book “#8 Rewired” which gives examples of great NZ Innovations such as: Disposable hypodermic syringe Manned flight(disputed) Jet boat Nanotube Freeze dried coffee(sorry) DNA discovery Splitting the atom(Rutherford) DNA double helix(Wilkins, the DNA Ringo Starr) Unfortunaly, outside of Xero(Cloud Accounting) there isn’t much of that awesome innovation scaling down here. Discovery yes, scaling not so much.
- a_bonobo 8y ago
  While these things were discovered by kiwis, their place of discovery was the UK or the US. Wilkins did his discoveries at Kings College, Rutherford worked at the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, Pickering worked on manned flight in the US (California, Jet Propulsion Lab). I don't think you can use that as an example for innovation in NZ
  - chriselles 8y ago
    My bad! I should have separated NZ Innovations from NZ Innovators, or been a bit more clear about it. #8 Rewired is chicken full of NZ innovations. Unfortunately, I’m away from home and my copy. The electric stock fence comes to mind. Here’s a link: http://www.no8rewired.kiwi/nz-inventions/ http://www.no8rewired.kiwi/nz-inventions/ Some really good ones as well as cringeworthy ones(Martin Jet Pack).
- rebelnz 8y ago
  One of the most underated software produced in NZ is Serato - pretty much changed the DJing game.
  - Freeboots 8y ago
    Yeah serato is huge
  - marssaxman 8y ago
    Funny you mention that - I've recently been tempted to send them my resume.
- Freeboots 8y ago
  We've got rocketlabs, does that count? It's not homegrown but it's based in nz. Also flying taxis, lol
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    Rocketlab is homegrown, it's just owned by Americans now. All the design and most of the build (except the engine, due to American rules) is done in NZ.
xupybd 8y ago
I’m in New Zealand. My friends are really struggling to get work here. Employers here are really tough on Chinese developers. Immigration is even tougher. I think our government needs to address these issues if we want more skilled workers.
- doktrin 8y ago
  > Employees here are really tough on Chinese developers. Immigration is even tougher Can you elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
  - ponzored 8y ago
    In New Zealand and Australia Indian and Chinese workers are essentially seen as replaceable due to the huge numbers of them migrating to both countries (those countries make up the #1 and #2 sources of migrants respectively). The whole point of the migration schemes are to get workers for cheap and to put downwards pressure on wages. A very high skill level is not really required, and big companies will just throw bodies at jobs and rotate out anyone who can't make the cut. The IT contracting shops there are called 'body shops' for this very reason.
    - iagovar 8y ago
      Exactly the same situation in Spain, except not even foreign workers are needed to put donward pressure on wages...
    - monkeycantype 8y ago
      There many Indian Australian and Asian Australian developers, but there are also has many Indian and Chinese citizens working in Australia, employed by large contracting firms like TCS, on contacts under _Indian_ labor laws, with worse entitlements and in more vulnerable negotiating positions than their Australia co-workers. Some of these people are very highly skilled, they also get rotated out as they are useful for establishing teams with new clients. I work with many people who who have asked me, and others, to help lobby on there behalf to stay in their jobs, because they have been told by their contracting company that they will be moved, and if they refuse, their contract contains provisions that could force require them quit and pay back the previous three months pay. I struggle to believe this is legal under Australian law, but I am close to one developer who did this and chose to pay back three months pay rather than speak to a lawyer.
gadders 8y ago
Lovely place. I just wish they would hurry up and invent those hypersonic jets that people have been promising for 20 years so it was only a 2 hour flight away.
madaxe_again 8y ago
They have a really odd way to attract tech talent.... I exited my startup in the uk two years ago, successfully, leaving a successful and growing technology business behind. I have several ideas which I am prepared to self-fund up to £0.5M, and want a good environment in which to start a new business. I know coders in NZ, and they’re a talented bunch, we began to hatch a plan. In short, the NZ gov’t don’t want it. They either want more money invested up front (much, much more), a VC to be involved (not at that stage yet by a long shot), or for me to buy a new property in NZ for > $2,000,000. Apparently having built a business with £10M turnover from nothing isn’t sufficiently good enough entrepreneurship for me to pass. I’m now looking elsewhere - which is a shame, as I love NZ for many reasons, from the people to the nature, to the family I have there. I’m trying very hard not to be bitter about the repeated rejections, as it’s not fair to tar a nation on the basis of immigration bureaucrats. I’m certainly disappointed - the idea was for a service that NZ needs, that I hit upon while travelling there after my exit for a few months. All they will attract will be satellite startups owned by megacorporations, as this appears to be how the bars are set.
- avip 8y ago
  Not to advocate NZ, but you should consider any immigration plan is fraud averse first.
- cs02rm0 8y ago
  Maybe the property is the route to go - can it be commercial? Remote hires not an option? Tech startups seem to be hard to get people to take seriously, however solid the foundation. I've done a lot of consultancy for a UK company whose entire strategy has stalled for years because they can't/won't invest in building out a rewrite of their flagship product. I've offered to build it out for zero up front cost, just cut me in on a slice of the pie if it sells. They won't even consider it, haven't even begun to discuss the size of the slice and have turned down other contractors trying to make the same offer previously. I'm not sure how the risk could be lower and in the meantime their competitors are booming. And they're not government employees.
- dwightgunning 8y ago
  This is lame though to be fair to NZ I've come across similar requirements in other countries too. Over the years I've happened to be invited to discussions with policy makers in both The Netherlands (2013) and Australia (2016) and as far as I know they came up with similar policies. Further back I recall taking a look at Germany (~2012) and it was also onerous. The main takeaway I had was that constructing a set of fair requirements that can be effectively assessed/enforced is nigh impossible. Entrepreneurs should be vocal and advocate for changes that improve the system but ultimately play the cards that are dealt and stay focussed on the company mission.
tzfld 8y ago
>Two guys in a garage Is this urban legend still taken seriously? I mean, it was a thing 40 years ago, but now there is hardly anyone "with nothing to lose" that can reach anywhere without a good amount of luck.
- janlaureys 8y ago
  Probably just that guy who made Flappy Bird I guess.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Pretty sure luck was a requisite 40 years ago too. But it does seem harder to imagine low-hanging fruit is as common now as it was then.
- chillydawg 8y ago
  I started my current thing in my garage, with my cofounder. I loved that garage.
- jlebrech 8y ago
  it's one guy and a standing desk now
  - TomK32 8y ago
    that's me :D
- adventured 8y ago
  I'm one guy in a home office starting up a new company. The garage would be a terrible alternative. Been doing it this way since 1996. It's just as much fun as it was then, when you've landed on something that excites you. There's still a vast amount of land to explore.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Also who can afford a garage these days?
- Negitivefrags 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Mashimo 8y ago
Just today we learned that one of our architects will leave our firm. His old employer made him an offer he can't refuse: 1 year oversees deployment in New Zealand with wife and kids. Sounds hella nice to be honest.
johankmagnusson 8y ago
Why not reverse the immigration process? Instead of doing tremendous amounts of paper work after which the system takes a guess if you will be able to contribute to the country, run that process backwards instead and lower the threshold for IT professionals to enter NZ significantly and then they get to prove their worth. Start with a very rudimentary initial screening and after say a 2 year trial period have a selection process based on what the person in question has accomplished. That way people get to prove themselves and what the can contribute with instead. If you don't contribute, i.e. receive social welfare or similar, you're out. If you contribute by performing in the labour market, start an at least moderately successful business or similar you're in. I don't understand why all immigration systems don't work like this...
- viraptor 8y ago
  I think this could get a bit cruel in a few ways. - Who measures the performance and how? How is it scaled to compare a contractor for corps and a dev at a tiny startup? - Who decides what's the fault of the employer vs employee? If you're either fired or quit due to terrible mismanagement, why wouldn't you use whatever welfare you can while looking for a new job? - And if you want to get someone out of the country, how do you do that? Where exactly do you send them if they ran out of money and have no support network?
- modernerd 8y ago
  This is essentially how freedom of movement in Europe works. As an EU citizen I was able to move to another EU country, rent a flat, and then within 3 months had to prove that I had income to pay tax/social contributions. On passing that interview you get residency rights and continued access to public services and healthcare; I am still a “guest”, but can effectively stay indefinitely as long as I keep contributing and don't break the law. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-eu-freedom-movement https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-eu-fr...
- avip 8y ago
  That would likely violate equality before the law. It won't pass legal (and rightfully so IMO).
101km 8y ago
Wellington is like a smaller (and much more windy) San Francisco. Having just finished driving 12,000km tip-to-tip, that might be the one spot that's dense enough to amount to something. I can't emphasize enough how rural the rest of this country is. New Zealand is a victim of its success in tourism. Everything is geared towards that. Imagine living somewhere like Denver, CO but with SF prices and depressed software salaries. It's a wonderful place but even with all things being equal bureaucracy wise (and they aren't), the list of places ahead of Wellington is two miles long.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  Wellington is the most beautiful city I’ve ever lived in, maybe the most beautiful city I’ve been to, and it’s where we assumed we’d be living when my wife and I moved to NZ some years ago. We spent 9 months before giving up and moving to Auckland. The winter was miserable. I’d never considered wind to be something that could make me so miserable in a place. Kiwis joke that New Zealand starts at the Bombay Hills (the Bombay Hills are just south of Auckland, and so serve as a demarcation between Auckland and the far north and the rest of NZ). I wanted to love Wellington, but I ended up feeling much happier in Auckland.
HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
Shit salaries, overpriced housing, and everything is expensive. Seriously, if you're American name me the last thing you just purchased and I can guarantee it will be at least 25% more expensive here, sometimes double. If you're an American you'd be crazy to come here unless you've already made your money.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  I spent a couple of years in the UK and then moved back to sunny Dunedin. That first grocery shop tore me a new one, it was at least double the price.
- dvtv75 8y ago
  > Shit salaries, overpriced housing, and everything is expensive You're not kidding. A decade ago I looked at buying Autodesk Maya. It was $US3999 if I were in the US, so how much was it from the local reseller in NZ? $NZ13,000, just because it could be. At the time, that was enough to make a deposit on a house. A group of us started calling it "the New Zealand tax," because we noticed that almost every price for an imported good was 2.5x what it would cost to purchase, ship from another country, and pay tax - often more. HDMI cables were $40, and my friend from Dick Smith (roughly equivalent to Fry's) told me they bought them for $5.
adventured 8y ago
> The government believes that 40% of jobs will go [to AI] within the next ten years. I think its going to be a lot faster than that. It's going to be a lot slower than that. Ten years from now AI will barely have made a dent in the existing job market in the developed world. Maybe in 30 years 10-15% of existing jobs will have been replaced by AI. That's an optimistic outcome. The AI jobs predictions are hilariously wrong. Ten years is a short amount of time, they have the impact time scale wrong as is typical in tech predictions (making the mistake of shuttling the impact far too close to the present).
- AITechy 8y ago
  I think they don't count the numbers the way you do, to rig the statistics they seems to count jobs that are done by machines and wil be done in the future by AI to.
peterburkimsher 8y ago
I'm trying to get a job in New Zealand right now. In 2012 I was there on Working Holiday, and did a summer job writing control systems code for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare in Auckland. By 2014 I'd visited a few more countries and shortlisted destinations: New Zealand (Skilled Migrant Category), Canada (Express Entry), or Australia (subclass 186). Now I'm trying to apply, but most listings on Seek require already having the "right to live and work in this location". I need the job to get the work visa. I sent many applications, without success. I updated my LinkedIn, rewrote my résumé several times based on conflicting advice, and asked a recruiter to help - but still no interviews. I posted several side projects here on Hacker News, but they didn't reach the front page. My current contract making microSD cards for OSE in Taiwan lasts until the end of the year, but I can leave earlier. Please contact me if you have any idea about immigration-friendly employers, recruiters, websites - anything helps.
- hackerman12345 8y ago
  Mentioning your citizenship might help, certain countries look for certain groups (e.g. they have a satellite team in ___ where you speak the language, bonus!).
  - peterburkimsher 8y ago
    It's really complicated to explain where I'm from. My passport is British. I was born in Switzerland. My parents live in France. (My dad worked at CERN, if you've been to Geneva you'll understand). I went to university in the UK, exchange programme in Santa Barbara. I did summer jobs in LA, Switzerland, Taipei, Vancouver, Auckland, Korea, China, and India. I decided I like NZ and Canada the most. I need 3 years prior continuous relevant work experience to get the visa. So I came back to Taiwan to do that. Now I have the academic and work qualifications needed. I really want to stay and settle down. I don't have a "home" to go back to. If I live with my parents, I'm unable to marry or have kids. Those kids would be stateless because I'm a citizen by descent and can't pass on citizenship. NZ's Skilled Migrant Category can get me Permanent Resident status in 2 years (the fastest). That's my plan, but I need a job to help me do that.
pixelbash 8y ago
I work out of a very small studio in Auckland mostly building ecom (cofounder/dev). The reality is NZ is such a tiny market that is has a really funny quality to it (and some really odd stuff in places like an unspoken pay invoices on the 20th of the month rule). Two degrees of separation is the running joke here because just about anyone you hear about has met someone you know. We are doing an increasing amount of overseas work because in many ways it’s just easier, asides from Skyping at odd hours of the day. I’d love for NZ to be the next Tech hub, but I fear the culture just isn’t there yet. It’s easy to start a company here but it’s very hard to locally source materials or tools at anything like competitive prices thanks to the 100% markup almost any importer puts on anything (if you can get it at all). Software at least doesn’t have that barrier, good developers here are generally very busy. That’s good I guess.
- aunty_helen 8y ago
  > Two degrees of separation is the running joke Funny you should say that, the Jrump devs are friends of a friend of mine. To add to your comment, after several years of going to a regional conference I've got to know so many of the crowd from working with them directly that I struggle to make it around the trade stands. One of the consequences of this is you can't burn bridges as word will get around (like in a village). > 100% markup almost any importer puts on anything This is a big negative of living here, people actually expect to pay a lot and will be suspicious of cheap things. It's a shame that it's often cheaper to buy something from the US/UK. Often you can get things (including shipping) at 50% the cost from overseas.
  - hackerman12345 8y ago
    I'd understand if it's actually something that is locally made but it's pretty annoying when a place like Brazil charges 100% markup tax on something like a video game console, video card, or what not. It surely makes it difficult for locals to afford computers.
utdemir 8y ago
One and a half years ago I migrated to New Zealand from Turkey. * It was almost my first time abroad, my English wasn't great, and I was new to the culture. However I was amazed that how welcoming and patient people were. I hear the opposite from my friends living in Europe and US. * I found a job while in Turkey, and the company sponsored me for the visa; and since they were an accredited employer the visa process was painless. * Job variety is definitely small. I think it is not that hard to find _a_ job since there's usually demand for IT; however they are all pretty similar to each other(big finance/telco companies). If you have a specific interest (FP/Haskell and smaller companies in my case) it would be hard to find a job you like. * Rent is expensive. Almost every one of my single friends flatshare, but I was able to find a one bedroom flat to live with my partner. I pay about 40% of my salary to the rent. * However I do not think living expenses are too much. Our weekly shopping are usually cheaper compared to Turkey relative to the income. And most of the stuff we like to do for fun is usually cheap or free. * People are nice. The city feels safe. Nature is great, lots of great hikes just an hour drive from the city center. Overall; I can not compare with Europe or US since I've never been there, but I'm glad I am here now. And moving here was not that hard, so I think it has everything it needs to be a Tech hub, other than momentum.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  Are you in Auckland with that kind of rent?
  - utdemir 8y ago
    Yes, I live very close to Auckland city centre.
    - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
      Thought about living anywhere else? Wellington/Christchurch and Dunedin all have fairly decent IT scenes.
      - utdemir 8y ago
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I left New Zealand for Australia about 9 months ago, and have no plans on moving back to NZ for at least half a decade. I love New Zealand and I think it's an amazing country. I really miss it, and if I ever had kids, I'd want to raise them in NZ. But the money and the jobs just aren't there. I doubled my wages by moving to Melbourne from Wellington and cost of living is roughly the same. It took me 2 weeks from when I started looking for a job to getting an offer. My salary went from NZ$42k + 3% super and no bonus to AU$75k (NZ$80k) + 9.5% super + bonus. I'm sure I could've landed a better paying job here too, but I was living off my credit card so I took the first job that gave me an offer. In New Zealand there just weren't many options for someone with 2 years of experience. There's a chronic shortage of senior positions, but for mid level positions, especially if you don't want to work with .NET or Java, there just aren't jobs available. There were about 5 open positions nationwide for a Ruby on Rails dev with 2 or 3 years experience when I was looking to move on from my job, before deciding to jump ship to Australia. In Melbourne, there were so many positions I was qualified for that I didn't even bother applying for most of them. I had recruiters ringing me every morning with new positions that I was perfectly suited for. If you're trying to start a company, don't expect a lot of investment. Most startups in NZ bootstrap or get investment from family and friends. There just isn't a culture of venture capital in NZ. It seems like a very normal trajectory for an NZ tech startup is to get enough funding and growth that they can migrate to California. Xero is quite unique in that it stayed in NZ, although it's now listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The lack of investment in startups is a cultural thing I think, and ties right in with tall poppy syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome. Our humility is both a source of national pride and also something that holds us back as a country. Of course, not everyone wants to start a unicorn, and that's fine, but someone needs to. It does lead to a very different startup culture. There isn't that rapid growth in companies that you see in the USA, because there's less investment. The startup I worked for had been around for 3 or 4 years and only had 8 employees, the lack of manpower (especially developers) really held the company back. The business idea was solid, we made decent sales, but we were severely undercapitalised. Most startups, due to the investment situation are one or two person shops. The tech startup scene is weird too, at least in Wellington, as it's so small. It's like this little incestuous community, full of gossip about different people and companies. I actually found it got quite catty at times. It's a crying shame that I felt I had to leave (although money was only part of the reason), but like fuck I'm going to work for $20 an hour when I can jump on a plane and 4 hours later be earning double. NZ is a beautiful country let down by a low wage economy.

81 points by ninguem2 8y ago

Of course, if you're working in New Zealand you'll have to obey U.S. laws; the NZ government will violate its own laws to seize your property at the behest of a foreign government without due process of any kind. If you don't believe me, ask Kim Dotcom. No thank you.

te_chris 8y ago
Snore. Yes, KDC was a farce. You’re just scaremongering though.
rapsey 8y ago
Grow up. If you think the US can't strong-arm other countries in its sphere of influence you aren't living in reality.
- YawningAngel 8y ago
  I think the egregious aspect of this is that there's no evidence they had to strong-arm the NZ government much at all.
  - Freeboots 8y ago
    Although the initial raid/ arrest was absurd, the NZ courts denied extradition for years. Also that was the previous government, famous for licking us dick

chriselles 8y ago

I’m in NZ, and involved in the startup community down here. Great people, great vibe. There’s a long history of Innovation down here at the bottom of the planet. The best example is David Downs book “#8 Rewired” which gives examples of great NZ Innovations such as: Disposable hypodermic syringe Manned flight(disputed) Jet boat Nanotube Freeze dried coffee(sorry) DNA discovery Splitting the atom(Rutherford) DNA double helix(Wilkins, the DNA Ringo Starr) Unfortunaly, outside of Xero(Cloud Accounting) there isn’t much of that awesome innovation scaling down here. Discovery yes, scaling not so much.

a_bonobo 8y ago
While these things were discovered by kiwis, their place of discovery was the UK or the US. Wilkins did his discoveries at Kings College, Rutherford worked at the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, Pickering worked on manned flight in the US (California, Jet Propulsion Lab). I don't think you can use that as an example for innovation in NZ
- chriselles 8y ago
  My bad! I should have separated NZ Innovations from NZ Innovators, or been a bit more clear about it. #8 Rewired is chicken full of NZ innovations. Unfortunately, I’m away from home and my copy. The electric stock fence comes to mind. Here’s a link: http://www.no8rewired.kiwi/nz-inventions/ http://www.no8rewired.kiwi/nz-inventions/ Some really good ones as well as cringeworthy ones(Martin Jet Pack).
rebelnz 8y ago
One of the most underated software produced in NZ is Serato - pretty much changed the DJing game.
- Freeboots 8y ago
  Yeah serato is huge
- marssaxman 8y ago
  Funny you mention that - I've recently been tempted to send them my resume.
Freeboots 8y ago
We've got rocketlabs, does that count? It's not homegrown but it's based in nz. Also flying taxis, lol
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  Rocketlab is homegrown, it's just owned by Americans now. All the design and most of the build (except the engine, due to American rules) is done in NZ.

xupybd 8y ago

I’m in New Zealand. My friends are really struggling to get work here. Employers here are really tough on Chinese developers. Immigration is even tougher. I think our government needs to address these issues if we want more skilled workers.

doktrin 8y ago
> Employees here are really tough on Chinese developers. Immigration is even tougher Can you elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
- ponzored 8y ago
  In New Zealand and Australia Indian and Chinese workers are essentially seen as replaceable due to the huge numbers of them migrating to both countries (those countries make up the #1 and #2 sources of migrants respectively). The whole point of the migration schemes are to get workers for cheap and to put downwards pressure on wages. A very high skill level is not really required, and big companies will just throw bodies at jobs and rotate out anyone who can't make the cut. The IT contracting shops there are called 'body shops' for this very reason.
  - iagovar 8y ago
    Exactly the same situation in Spain, except not even foreign workers are needed to put donward pressure on wages...
  - monkeycantype 8y ago
    There many Indian Australian and Asian Australian developers, but there are also has many Indian and Chinese citizens working in Australia, employed by large contracting firms like TCS, on contacts under _Indian_ labor laws, with worse entitlements and in more vulnerable negotiating positions than their Australia co-workers. Some of these people are very highly skilled, they also get rotated out as they are useful for establishing teams with new clients. I work with many people who who have asked me, and others, to help lobby on there behalf to stay in their jobs, because they have been told by their contracting company that they will be moved, and if they refuse, their contract contains provisions that could force require them quit and pay back the previous three months pay. I struggle to believe this is legal under Australian law, but I am close to one developer who did this and chose to pay back three months pay rather than speak to a lawyer.

gadders 8y ago

Lovely place. I just wish they would hurry up and invent those hypersonic jets that people have been promising for 20 years so it was only a 2 hour flight away.

madaxe_again 8y ago

They have a really odd way to attract tech talent.... I exited my startup in the uk two years ago, successfully, leaving a successful and growing technology business behind. I have several ideas which I am prepared to self-fund up to £0.5M, and want a good environment in which to start a new business. I know coders in NZ, and they’re a talented bunch, we began to hatch a plan. In short, the NZ gov’t don’t want it. They either want more money invested up front (much, much more), a VC to be involved (not at that stage yet by a long shot), or for me to buy a new property in NZ for > $2,000,000. Apparently having built a business with £10M turnover from nothing isn’t sufficiently good enough entrepreneurship for me to pass. I’m now looking elsewhere - which is a shame, as I love NZ for many reasons, from the people to the nature, to the family I have there. I’m trying very hard not to be bitter about the repeated rejections, as it’s not fair to tar a nation on the basis of immigration bureaucrats. I’m certainly disappointed - the idea was for a service that NZ needs, that I hit upon while travelling there after my exit for a few months. All they will attract will be satellite startups owned by megacorporations, as this appears to be how the bars are set.

avip 8y ago
Not to advocate NZ, but you should consider any immigration plan is fraud averse first.
cs02rm0 8y ago
Maybe the property is the route to go - can it be commercial? Remote hires not an option? Tech startups seem to be hard to get people to take seriously, however solid the foundation. I've done a lot of consultancy for a UK company whose entire strategy has stalled for years because they can't/won't invest in building out a rewrite of their flagship product. I've offered to build it out for zero up front cost, just cut me in on a slice of the pie if it sells. They won't even consider it, haven't even begun to discuss the size of the slice and have turned down other contractors trying to make the same offer previously. I'm not sure how the risk could be lower and in the meantime their competitors are booming. And they're not government employees.
dwightgunning 8y ago
This is lame though to be fair to NZ I've come across similar requirements in other countries too. Over the years I've happened to be invited to discussions with policy makers in both The Netherlands (2013) and Australia (2016) and as far as I know they came up with similar policies. Further back I recall taking a look at Germany (~2012) and it was also onerous. The main takeaway I had was that constructing a set of fair requirements that can be effectively assessed/enforced is nigh impossible. Entrepreneurs should be vocal and advocate for changes that improve the system but ultimately play the cards that are dealt and stay focussed on the company mission.

tzfld 8y ago

>Two guys in a garage Is this urban legend still taken seriously? I mean, it was a thing 40 years ago, but now there is hardly anyone "with nothing to lose" that can reach anywhere without a good amount of luck.

janlaureys 8y ago
Probably just that guy who made Flappy Bird I guess.
CalRobert 8y ago
Pretty sure luck was a requisite 40 years ago too. But it does seem harder to imagine low-hanging fruit is as common now as it was then.
chillydawg 8y ago
I started my current thing in my garage, with my cofounder. I loved that garage.
jlebrech 8y ago
it's one guy and a standing desk now
- TomK32 8y ago
  that's me :D
adventured 8y ago
I'm one guy in a home office starting up a new company. The garage would be a terrible alternative. Been doing it this way since 1996. It's just as much fun as it was then, when you've landed on something that excites you. There's still a vast amount of land to explore.
kalleboo 8y ago
Also who can afford a garage these days?
Negitivefrags 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Mashimo 8y ago

Just today we learned that one of our architects will leave our firm. His old employer made him an offer he can't refuse: 1 year oversees deployment in New Zealand with wife and kids. Sounds hella nice to be honest.

johankmagnusson 8y ago

Why not reverse the immigration process? Instead of doing tremendous amounts of paper work after which the system takes a guess if you will be able to contribute to the country, run that process backwards instead and lower the threshold for IT professionals to enter NZ significantly and then they get to prove their worth. Start with a very rudimentary initial screening and after say a 2 year trial period have a selection process based on what the person in question has accomplished. That way people get to prove themselves and what the can contribute with instead. If you don't contribute, i.e. receive social welfare or similar, you're out. If you contribute by performing in the labour market, start an at least moderately successful business or similar you're in. I don't understand why all immigration systems don't work like this...

viraptor 8y ago
I think this could get a bit cruel in a few ways. - Who measures the performance and how? How is it scaled to compare a contractor for corps and a dev at a tiny startup? - Who decides what's the fault of the employer vs employee? If you're either fired or quit due to terrible mismanagement, why wouldn't you use whatever welfare you can while looking for a new job? - And if you want to get someone out of the country, how do you do that? Where exactly do you send them if they ran out of money and have no support network?
modernerd 8y ago
This is essentially how freedom of movement in Europe works. As an EU citizen I was able to move to another EU country, rent a flat, and then within 3 months had to prove that I had income to pay tax/social contributions. On passing that interview you get residency rights and continued access to public services and healthcare; I am still a “guest”, but can effectively stay indefinitely as long as I keep contributing and don't break the law. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-eu-freedom-movement https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/what-eu-fr...
avip 8y ago
That would likely violate equality before the law. It won't pass legal (and rightfully so IMO).

101km 8y ago

Wellington is like a smaller (and much more windy) San Francisco. Having just finished driving 12,000km tip-to-tip, that might be the one spot that's dense enough to amount to something. I can't emphasize enough how rural the rest of this country is. New Zealand is a victim of its success in tourism. Everything is geared towards that. Imagine living somewhere like Denver, CO but with SF prices and depressed software salaries. It's a wonderful place but even with all things being equal bureaucracy wise (and they aren't), the list of places ahead of Wellington is two miles long.

peatmoss 8y ago
Wellington is the most beautiful city I’ve ever lived in, maybe the most beautiful city I’ve been to, and it’s where we assumed we’d be living when my wife and I moved to NZ some years ago. We spent 9 months before giving up and moving to Auckland. The winter was miserable. I’d never considered wind to be something that could make me so miserable in a place. Kiwis joke that New Zealand starts at the Bombay Hills (the Bombay Hills are just south of Auckland, and so serve as a demarcation between Auckland and the far north and the rest of NZ). I wanted to love Wellington, but I ended up feeling much happier in Auckland.

HumanDrivenDev 8y ago

Shit salaries, overpriced housing, and everything is expensive. Seriously, if you're American name me the last thing you just purchased and I can guarantee it will be at least 25% more expensive here, sometimes double. If you're an American you'd be crazy to come here unless you've already made your money.

ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
I spent a couple of years in the UK and then moved back to sunny Dunedin. That first grocery shop tore me a new one, it was at least double the price.
dvtv75 8y ago
> Shit salaries, overpriced housing, and everything is expensive You're not kidding. A decade ago I looked at buying Autodesk Maya. It was $US3999 if I were in the US, so how much was it from the local reseller in NZ? $NZ13,000, just because it could be. At the time, that was enough to make a deposit on a house. A group of us started calling it "the New Zealand tax," because we noticed that almost every price for an imported good was 2.5x what it would cost to purchase, ship from another country, and pay tax - often more. HDMI cables were $40, and my friend from Dick Smith (roughly equivalent to Fry's) told me they bought them for $5.

adventured 8y ago

> The government believes that 40% of jobs will go [to AI] within the next ten years. I think its going to be a lot faster than that. It's going to be a lot slower than that. Ten years from now AI will barely have made a dent in the existing job market in the developed world. Maybe in 30 years 10-15% of existing jobs will have been replaced by AI. That's an optimistic outcome. The AI jobs predictions are hilariously wrong. Ten years is a short amount of time, they have the impact time scale wrong as is typical in tech predictions (making the mistake of shuttling the impact far too close to the present).

AITechy 8y ago
I think they don't count the numbers the way you do, to rig the statistics they seems to count jobs that are done by machines and wil be done in the future by AI to.

peterburkimsher 8y ago

I'm trying to get a job in New Zealand right now. In 2012 I was there on Working Holiday, and did a summer job writing control systems code for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare in Auckland. By 2014 I'd visited a few more countries and shortlisted destinations: New Zealand (Skilled Migrant Category), Canada (Express Entry), or Australia (subclass 186). Now I'm trying to apply, but most listings on Seek require already having the "right to live and work in this location". I need the job to get the work visa. I sent many applications, without success. I updated my LinkedIn, rewrote my résumé several times based on conflicting advice, and asked a recruiter to help - but still no interviews. I posted several side projects here on Hacker News, but they didn't reach the front page. My current contract making microSD cards for OSE in Taiwan lasts until the end of the year, but I can leave earlier. Please contact me if you have any idea about immigration-friendly employers, recruiters, websites - anything helps.

hackerman12345 8y ago
Mentioning your citizenship might help, certain countries look for certain groups (e.g. they have a satellite team in ___ where you speak the language, bonus!).
- peterburkimsher 8y ago
  It's really complicated to explain where I'm from. My passport is British. I was born in Switzerland. My parents live in France. (My dad worked at CERN, if you've been to Geneva you'll understand). I went to university in the UK, exchange programme in Santa Barbara. I did summer jobs in LA, Switzerland, Taipei, Vancouver, Auckland, Korea, China, and India. I decided I like NZ and Canada the most. I need 3 years prior continuous relevant work experience to get the visa. So I came back to Taiwan to do that. Now I have the academic and work qualifications needed. I really want to stay and settle down. I don't have a "home" to go back to. If I live with my parents, I'm unable to marry or have kids. Those kids would be stateless because I'm a citizen by descent and can't pass on citizenship. NZ's Skilled Migrant Category can get me Permanent Resident status in 2 years (the fastest). That's my plan, but I need a job to help me do that.

pixelbash 8y ago

I work out of a very small studio in Auckland mostly building ecom (cofounder/dev). The reality is NZ is such a tiny market that is has a really funny quality to it (and some really odd stuff in places like an unspoken pay invoices on the 20th of the month rule). Two degrees of separation is the running joke here because just about anyone you hear about has met someone you know. We are doing an increasing amount of overseas work because in many ways it’s just easier, asides from Skyping at odd hours of the day. I’d love for NZ to be the next Tech hub, but I fear the culture just isn’t there yet. It’s easy to start a company here but it’s very hard to locally source materials or tools at anything like competitive prices thanks to the 100% markup almost any importer puts on anything (if you can get it at all). Software at least doesn’t have that barrier, good developers here are generally very busy. That’s good I guess.

aunty_helen 8y ago
> Two degrees of separation is the running joke Funny you should say that, the Jrump devs are friends of a friend of mine. To add to your comment, after several years of going to a regional conference I've got to know so many of the crowd from working with them directly that I struggle to make it around the trade stands. One of the consequences of this is you can't burn bridges as word will get around (like in a village). > 100% markup almost any importer puts on anything This is a big negative of living here, people actually expect to pay a lot and will be suspicious of cheap things. It's a shame that it's often cheaper to buy something from the US/UK. Often you can get things (including shipping) at 50% the cost from overseas.
- hackerman12345 8y ago
  I'd understand if it's actually something that is locally made but it's pretty annoying when a place like Brazil charges 100% markup tax on something like a video game console, video card, or what not. It surely makes it difficult for locals to afford computers.

utdemir 8y ago

One and a half years ago I migrated to New Zealand from Turkey. * It was almost my first time abroad, my English wasn't great, and I was new to the culture. However I was amazed that how welcoming and patient people were. I hear the opposite from my friends living in Europe and US. * I found a job while in Turkey, and the company sponsored me for the visa; and since they were an accredited employer the visa process was painless. * Job variety is definitely small. I think it is not that hard to find _a_ job since there's usually demand for IT; however they are all pretty similar to each other(big finance/telco companies). If you have a specific interest (FP/Haskell and smaller companies in my case) it would be hard to find a job you like. * Rent is expensive. Almost every one of my single friends flatshare, but I was able to find a one bedroom flat to live with my partner. I pay about 40% of my salary to the rent. * However I do not think living expenses are too much. Our weekly shopping are usually cheaper compared to Turkey relative to the income. And most of the stuff we like to do for fun is usually cheap or free. * People are nice. The city feels safe. Nature is great, lots of great hikes just an hour drive from the city center. Overall; I can not compare with Europe or US since I've never been there, but I'm glad I am here now. And moving here was not that hard, so I think it has everything it needs to be a Tech hub, other than momentum.

ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
Are you in Auckland with that kind of rent?
- utdemir 8y ago
  Yes, I live very close to Auckland city centre.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
    Thought about living anywhere else? Wellington/Christchurch and Dunedin all have fairly decent IT scenes.
    - utdemir 8y ago

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I left New Zealand for Australia about 9 months ago, and have no plans on moving back to NZ for at least half a decade. I love New Zealand and I think it's an amazing country. I really miss it, and if I ever had kids, I'd want to raise them in NZ. But the money and the jobs just aren't there. I doubled my wages by moving to Melbourne from Wellington and cost of living is roughly the same. It took me 2 weeks from when I started looking for a job to getting an offer. My salary went from NZ$42k + 3% super and no bonus to AU$75k (NZ$80k) + 9.5% super + bonus. I'm sure I could've landed a better paying job here too, but I was living off my credit card so I took the first job that gave me an offer. In New Zealand there just weren't many options for someone with 2 years of experience. There's a chronic shortage of senior positions, but for mid level positions, especially if you don't want to work with .NET or Java, there just aren't jobs available. There were about 5 open positions nationwide for a Ruby on Rails dev with 2 or 3 years experience when I was looking to move on from my job, before deciding to jump ship to Australia. In Melbourne, there were so many positions I was qualified for that I didn't even bother applying for most of them. I had recruiters ringing me every morning with new positions that I was perfectly suited for. If you're trying to start a company, don't expect a lot of investment. Most startups in NZ bootstrap or get investment from family and friends. There just isn't a culture of venture capital in NZ. It seems like a very normal trajectory for an NZ tech startup is to get enough funding and growth that they can migrate to California. Xero is quite unique in that it stayed in NZ, although it's now listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The lack of investment in startups is a cultural thing I think, and ties right in with tall poppy syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome. Our humility is both a source of national pride and also something that holds us back as a country. Of course, not everyone wants to start a unicorn, and that's fine, but someone needs to. It does lead to a very different startup culture. There isn't that rapid growth in companies that you see in the USA, because there's less investment. The startup I worked for had been around for 3 or 4 years and only had 8 employees, the lack of manpower (especially developers) really held the company back. The business idea was solid, we made decent sales, but we were severely undercapitalised. Most startups, due to the investment situation are one or two person shops. The tech startup scene is weird too, at least in Wellington, as it's so small. It's like this little incestuous community, full of gossip about different people and companies. I actually found it got quite catty at times. It's a crying shame that I felt I had to leave (although money was only part of the reason), but like fuck I'm going to work for $20 an hour when I can jump on a plane and 4 hours later be earning double. NZ is a beautiful country let down by a low wage economy.