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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

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.

GlennS 5y ago
I had a really different experience. Sydney is full of jobs, and they're much higher paying than any I had in the UK. I never lived in London though.
- tiew9Vii 5y ago
  What are you doing out of curiosity? 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.
  - glenngillen 5y ago
    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.
    - tiew9Vii 5y ago
      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.
      - eldudebrother 5y ago
        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.
versteegen 5y ago
> NZ would be even worse. 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.

GlennS 5y ago

I had a really different experience. Sydney is full of jobs, and they're much higher paying than any I had in the UK. I never lived in London though.

tiew9Vii 5y ago
What are you doing out of curiosity? 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.
- glenngillen 5y ago
  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.
  - tiew9Vii 5y ago
    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.
    - eldudebrother 5y ago
      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.

versteegen 5y ago

> NZ would be even worse. 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.