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Why Australia must embrace the digital age
- Sir_Substance 12y agoWe're hearing the same narrative in this piece that we do in the US. I graduated last year (in Australia) with a degree in software engineering with first class honors and a year of employment already under my belt thanks to a nifty government opportunity that I mixed into my honors. I thought I was a scoop. It has taken me 12 months to find a job, and that job is not in Australia. Of the 7 friends I went through uni with (including myself) that completed, three found local jobs in their field, three founds jobs overseas and one took a PhD to duck and cover from the economy. When it's as difficult to find jobs in the country as it is to get them overseas, you can hardly froth over how it's a problem that Australian IT demand isn't being met because students aren't interested. Not our fault arseholes, maybe if you hired someone occasionally, people would consider it more of a career option. The reality is that the Australian IT industry is dead, dead, dead. There is no startup culture anywhere, almost every games company abandoned ship during the GFC, and big companies like Microsoft ship Australian graduates to the US rather then employing them here. The jobs that stay in Australia are two-faced. One of the guys I mentioned got a local job with HP, and a few months later he was handing out fliers at the job faire for the next years graduates. HP sure must value his technical expertise, and they aren't the only ones. Cisco was advertising for engineers (electrical, software, computer) for their graduate program. Upon further inspection, the first 6 months of their graduate program involved coursework in sales. COME ON. I did not do 4 years of university to hawk routers. Why is this shit happening? I don't know for sure, but it's clear something about the Australian environment is very hostile to IT business.