I can confirm this is the case when my organisation advertises roles they get inundated with applications.

But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand.

I the past year I have turned down an unsolicited job offer and I am also aware of two or three roles in two organisations that are not being advertised for due to lack of available talent.

New Zealand has a *lot* of potential, but this potential eventually ends up in Australia, London or the USA.

Countries should aspired to be an anode, not a cathode.

The politicians [1] I have spoken to about this issue generally don't consider it to be a pressing matter and are happy for New Zealand firms to move the HQ overseas if they are employing kiwis locally, in much the same way US firms might open an office in Asia to take advantage of lower wages.

[1] One nice thing about New Zealand is that you can get face to face time with a Member of Parliament easily, and Cabinet Minister if you are persistent.

I worked in the nz tech startup market for 8 years before moving overseas. To say nz tech is a tiny market is an understatement, when the population of the country is the size of most cities, there’s just that not that many opportunities.

It does mean for many people the only way for career growth is to go elsewhere. When I left nz my salary 3x’d.

The opportunity here is that there is many talented tech workers who choose to stay in NZ for lifestyle reasons. Foreign companies can compete so easily on salaries, it’s easy to just buy the top of the market for half the price. You will need local recruitment help though to find them.

The time zones are rough, you need to be a company that’s embraced async working, and are able to give a team a clear brief and just let them do it. But the hiring opportunities are there.

Switzerland has something similar these days (UBS-CS merger, big tech layoffs, too expensive local workforce)

I applied to 39 jobs (mostly through LinkedIn)

Out of which 29 in Switzerland, the rest mainly fully remote in Europe and US.

I got in total around 6 companies' 20-something interviews. Exactly ONE interview ouf of those was in Switzerland. Crazy

(I might just not be enough for this competitive market, I know. Eventually I ended up with a consulting job within the EU, obviously for lower daily rate, which is fine)

Fun thing is, the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly

Tbf, NZ had been in a recession until this past quarter, and NZ was never that hot of a tech hub compared to a number of hubs in Australia, let alone the rest of APAC.

And this article appears to be about the immigrant Chinese community in NZ, who would probably be at a further disadvantage as they would require additional sponsorship from employers.

How does Grinding Gear Games (who makes Path of Exile) do it? Is it only because they have Tencent funding?

They seem to have a couple of openings... https://grindinggear.com/?page=careers

I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.

We are heading back to New Zealand soon and the situation does seem pretty grim from what I hear from friends. Ideally, we’d like to settle down in NZ but it’s looking like we may end up in Australia instead.

According to a study promoted by Financial Times, it's a known downside of this one weird effect

https://archive.ph/YjX1w

> "When an employer was initially interested, they often backed out once they realised I was based in Beijing."

Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.

Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?

Everyone in New Zealand is struggling unless you've been there for 10-20+ years (when you could still afford a house) or you're an immigrant who sold a house in your home country and thus you can afford a house.

The average wage in NZ is NZ$61k and the average house price is NZ$908k. This is absolutely unsustainable.

This same pattern is playing out to various degrees in Australia, the UK, pretty much anywhere in Europe (certainly Western Europe), Scandanavia any any large city in the US.

And as far as I can tell there's absolutely no serious political opposition to any of this happening in any of these countries. None. Your political choices are between the extreme neoliberalism with lots of racism and the slightly milder neoliberalism with slightly less overt racism.

This is all capitalism working as intended. Every part of this is a series of intentional policy changes designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the ultra-wealthy. Housing is being hoarded and artifically constrained in supply. People are being loaded up with student debt, medical debt and mortgage debt where we careen ever closer to the South Asian brick kilns.

The framing of this story right from the start is disingenuous. The Microsoft job losses are explicitly reported as "part of a broader strategy to streamline operations and accelerate its AI initiatives." Immediately followed by reporting that Health NZ (rebranded from Te Whatu Ora) is cutting a third of its IT staff. The implication being that it's the same reason.

It's not. The current NZ government is working through the "Starve the Beast" strategy; intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".

RNZ's service to the right wing side of the political spectrum hasn't saved them though, they're having funding cut too [0].

[0] https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360698953/funding-cut-rnz-m...

That is everywhere including Australia.

I did an interview the other day, the roles had like hundreds of applications. The naked truth is that if you don't know recruiters, you are fcked!!

Why???

1. Big companies have fired people by the thousands. Many from which were hired during COVID gold era but the market now shrank;

2. The IT market has way too many high skilled folks from those big techs, some John Doe also;

3. Many places have adopted AI tools so unless your resume looks exactly that it is looking for, you are automatically denied;

4. Many roles are a mess, the role is DevOps but somehow the role descriptions is for a Network Engineer, go figure;

5. Social problems like hiring people based on weird ideology like wokeness and not based on skill and experience. You won't get in no matter how good you are and to be honest, you don't wanna be in such toxic culture anyway so a win-win.

6. Ghosted, very hard to avoid this.

7. AI: This is affecting more developers in some way. You cannot have or trust AI to manage infra/network yet.

I could go on and on, in short words, companies can afford to do whatever now. During COVID, my last two jobs required one interview only and I was in, now?? 4 interviews and you are ghosted.

Don't waste your time applying for jobs online, instead, focus on recruiters that hire folks based in your experience. The recruiter that got me at my current job ( I know him for 3 years now) is the same one that got me an interview with that company with hundreds of applications within days not even weeks.

But still, there are two major problems you cannot avoid:

1. Companies can afford to wait, if you don't have experience on every single goddamn thing, it makes it very hard to get in. 3-4 interviews are the new normal now. It is becoming normal now to require you to know everything if you are within DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps space.

2. Ghosted: Some recruiters themselves are just dogsh*t, they ghost you, others have no experience at all, just scripted so you will just waste time; Companies ghost you while trying to find the perfect candidate after you have 4 interviews. Yup, 4 interviews, the company disappeared only to show up a month later saying they found somebody better :) Online applications is even worse (AI, your name it)

If you wanna somehow find a job, hunt recruiters, not job. Have a decent resume that doesn't look a kids homework haha

You will stress less, you will avoid applying for a 100 places where 99% of them will never read your application. Let him/her do their thing.

35 ??? Holy crap!

I guess the reasons I left New Zealand more than 35 years ago are still true.