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Where are you moving to and what is your skillset? Our staff are in both London and NZ, so I feel somewhat qualified to comment. The NZ market is very idiosync

Where are you moving to and what is your skillset? Our staff are in both London and NZ, so I feel somewhat qualified to comment. The NZ market is very idiosyncratic and different to London. The differences made it difficult to maintain a small development team remotely so now we just have a few people working from their homes rather than an office. Your comment on .NET or Java makes it sound like you don't have either of those skillsets and indeed you will find it harder to get work without those. Compared to London my observations: - Microsoft stack has a very heavy adoption in NZ - heavy concentration of govt. work in Wellington, and particularly in a few consultancies like Datacom - we found it very difficult to find people who knew anything about DevOps 4-5 years ago - there are clusters of tech-only companies around different areas but most jobs are less pure tech and support functions for other businesses, with all the limitations that usually means for tech specialists, which generally limit options with NZs smaller company size - half the salary is not my experience unless you're going from front-office IB type Dev into a small private company. I'd say 75% was more accurate, but the lifestyle is attractive

moving2nz 8y ago
I'm interested in moving to Wellington (but would consider Dunedin). I realize Auckland is probably the best place career wise but am not particularly keen on it. Interesting you describe the NZ market as idiosyncratic - I'm guessing it's not like European or North American cities then? I didn't get a chance to go to any tech meetups or such when I was last there (2017) so couldn't get a "feel" for what the market might be like. I don't have any .NET experience but am using Java in my current job and am comfortable with it. 75% salary sounds reasonable considering the lifestyle tradeoff, I'd been figuring 50% as most of the software development jobs on trademe.co.nz at a glance seemed to be distributed between NZD$60k to NZD$120k, tops. Things like internet and food seem overly expensive in NZ compared to London though and rent isn't noticeably cheaper either, so I'd guess even a 25% pay cut may incur a bigger lifestyle dent than it would in London. EDIT: my skillset in terms of languages is roughly, in order of familiarity: Python, Java, Go, Javascript. I used to be a Django developer and now do more general backend work.

moving2nz 8y ago

I'm interested in moving to Wellington (but would consider Dunedin). I realize Auckland is probably the best place career wise but am not particularly keen on it. Interesting you describe the NZ market as idiosyncratic - I'm guessing it's not like European or North American cities then? I didn't get a chance to go to any tech meetups or such when I was last there (2017) so couldn't get a "feel" for what the market might be like. I don't have any .NET experience but am using Java in my current job and am comfortable with it. 75% salary sounds reasonable considering the lifestyle tradeoff, I'd been figuring 50% as most of the software development jobs on trademe.co.nz at a glance seemed to be distributed between NZD$60k to NZD$120k, tops. Things like internet and food seem overly expensive in NZ compared to London though and rent isn't noticeably cheaper either, so I'd guess even a 25% pay cut may incur a bigger lifestyle dent than it would in London. EDIT: my skillset in terms of languages is roughly, in order of familiarity: Python, Java, Go, Javascript. I used to be a Django developer and now do more general backend work.