I love this guy's cynicism and no-bullshit attitude. As someone who lived in Melbourne and has suffered Deloitte's "technology" department, the frustration and anger is warranted.
Like everyone else, Australia has tech brain drain and loses its best software engineers to USA. But unlike almost everyone else it's a very rich country and so can still afford to spend billions of dollars training and deploying engineers who "haven't read one book" to quote-unquote 'solve' domestic and regional technology problems. It's a giant make-work program to keep people busy while property speculation and resource extraction drives GDP growth.
Author here! Firstly, thank you for the kind words.
And secondly, this is quickly becoming apparent. I'm trying to run sales in Australia, my whole network is here, etc, but most of our good leads are at American companies. I know some smart Australians, but there's less appetite for quality work here, because that would require changing things and that's too much risk for people who just want to tap out and retire.
I'm putting all my work and in-person sales time into Australia, and we're still walking away with American clients despite the timezone differences and other obstacles. In Australia, the line has thus far been "I know we should do better, but no one will ever approve spend when they just want to wait out the clock for a new job". This is probably common in the U.S too (it's common everywhere), but the line with American clients has more typically been "We need this done to a really high standard because we think it's competitive advantage - can you start tomorrow?"
Most of EU countries havr some kind of consultancy embedded deep into the their core financial and governments and other critical institutions. The EU commission is full of barely competent consultants developing some sort of applications.
Probably getting EY or Accenture to solve the problems is one of the key steps in becoming accepted as a 1st world country.
I get it, I live in Belgium and being a freelancer is truly the only way to make a more than decent wage(more or less silicon valley salary with 36 hours week). Problem is that is not really fair
Australia has amazing CS departments that produce more top talent computer scientists per capita than any other place I've seen.
They then export those engineers to the US and Europe and import people by the boat full who can't code their way out of a for loop with a map and compass.
I studied with some very cool people. One joined my consultancy, and the other won a million dollars in a machine learning competition before we graduated.
Unfortunately, yeah, we were all removed from the workforce in a conventional sense almost immediately. I run my own business and most of our clients are American, my co-founder became an executive within four years, and the last guy went into private consulting for the mining industry.
I know of a local business with a great engineering culture, and they told me that they've run forty in-person interviews to fill a single slot in the past. And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.
>And their team is really overloaded with Americans that immigrated to Australia for non-career reasons.
Which is ironic given how bad everything has gotten since the end of covid. From my circle of friends _everyone_ has left and I'm half way tempted to move to Switzerland to work for a competitor in the field who offer American salaries with European social services.
Like everyone else, Australia has tech brain drain and loses its best software engineers to USA. But unlike almost everyone else it's a very rich country and so can still afford to spend billions of dollars training and deploying engineers who "haven't read one book" to quote-unquote 'solve' domestic and regional technology problems. It's a giant make-work program to keep people busy while property speculation and resource extraction drives GDP growth.