As someone who graduated as a SWE from an NZ university; around 50% of my cohort moved over to Australia and around 20-30% somewhere else; I can count the number of friends I have left in the country on one hand (four year degree). NZ salaries are actually laughable compared to overseas where you're earning at least 25% more for the same work and a probably lower cost of living
As a Kiwi still living here I didn't feel like I was getting a fair deal until I started working remotely for a US company paying AU rates.
Making the move from an NZ employer to (essentially) an AU employer got me a ~40% pay rise.
I'm now afraid I've priced my self out of the NZ market and will have a rude landing if I'm forced back into the NZ market (you never know, things happen).
But it is frankly ridiculous how far NZ employers have their heads in the clouds. If remote work stays around and more US companies don't mind a few hours overlap with the West Coast timezone to get access to a native English speaking, Western culture, talent pool... well, I think those NZ employers will start banging the immigration drum a lot harder.
Yep, I'm priced out of the NZ market too, work remotely for a US remote only company who try to pay roughly equivalent salaries for equivalent positions.
When the recruiter told me the offered salary, I thought it was a typo, scam, or someone was smoking crack.
And the NZ software employers who cry the most about "a skills shortage" are ones that locals won't work for because they're known shit employers.
> I'm now afraid I've priced my self out of the NZ market and will have a rude landing if I'm forced back into the NZ market (you never know, things happen).
Just go contracting - I charge probably on the low end for my experience but take home almost 2.5x what I used to as a salaried worker for less time on the clock. As long as you keep a decent chunk of cash (which is easier since you're making more) then you can ride out short-term gaps between contracts. That being said, I haven't been without work for the six years I've been contracting so haven't had to dip into it yet.
The majority, perhaps even super-majority of the people I work with are immigrants. It's not a problem. The problem is that New Zealand employers are absolutely allergic to paying their staff; they are cruising on the idea that "New Zealand is a great place to live, it doesn't matter if you're paid less, the lifestyle benefits make up for it".
>The problem is that New Zealand employers are absolutely allergic to paying their staff; they are cruising on the idea that "New Zealand is a great place to live, it doesn't matter if you're paid less, the lifestyle benefits make up for it".
It's exactly the same in Austria (the one with schnitzel, not kangaroos). Employers will tell you, "you don't need more than 60k/year because the quality of life is so good, you know we keep winning most livable city in the world", to the point where I think the whole winning most livable city in the world is some paid BS advertising from Austria to sucker in foreigners willing to lowball themselves and fill in the so called "skill shortage", up until they move here and realize a house costs 1 million Euros, stuff is more expensive than in Germany while salaries are lower and then they fuck off.
There are places in NZ (Nelson for example) that semi-formalize this as the 'sunshine dividend' making up the balance of payment compared to other towns or cities.
i.e suggesting because a place has nice weather that you should be paid less.
There is a strong correlation that I noticed in Europe as well between a place begin nice to live with nice weather which tend to have lower pay while depressing places
with shit weather having higher pay.
Basically the nice cities with nice weather attract a lot of candidates meaning employers don't need to pay so much, while employers in cloudy, windy, rainy and depressing cities need to pay good because otherwise there's no reason to move there. It's just supply and demand.
I could get a nice pay bump by moving to Netherlands or the UK, but I really can't stomach the weather in that part of Europe, as someone who like going outside for walks in the sun. Sometimes there's more to life than counting more money, and life is too short to spend it living somewhere where you don't like just to accumulate money.
> I could get a nice pay bump by moving to Netherlands or the UK, but I really can't stomach the weather in that part of Europe, as someone who like going outside for walks in the sun. Sometimes there's more to life than counting more money
Weather is one of those intensely personal things. I am very much outside of the norm, especially when it comes to sun.
I've lived in Seattle my whole life and right now it is in the mid-80s and not a cloud in the sky; the whole week is predicted to be like this. The people I know have filtered, as they do every year, into two groups. One group is posting on social media about how they're out to "enjoy the sun" and "such marvelous weather". The other, like me, is sitting inside waiting for the grey to return. (Anecdotally to my friend group, people who move here tend to be in the first group; people who were born around here in the second.)
Which is to say, I would happily take a pay cut to get away from the sun so I suppose I'm glad the "gloomier" places tend to pay more.
>Weather is one of those intensely personal things [..] I've lived in Seattle my whole life
Of course it is, and if you grew up in a gloomy place your whole life you're used to it, but if you grew up in nice weather area it's tough to move somewhere depressing, and even people from depressing places want to live in nice weather places.
There's the scientific correlation between sun exposure, or at least seeing the sun with your eyes, not just bathing in it, and serotonin levels. Also people form northern gloomy places (at least in Europe) have higher suicide rates and consumption of antidepressants than the people living in the south despite the inverse correlation in wages.
So yeah, it seem like the sun and nice weather is better for your mental health than bigger wages.
> "you don't need more than 60k/year because the quality of life is so good, you know we keep winning most livable city in the world"
It would be amusing to see a list of "most livable city in the world". Vienna, Sydney, Auckland... they probably all win from slightly different orgs awarding.
Well, if all the unhappy people kill themselves then only the happy people remain, meaning your country is now the happiest. Does my logic scan to you?
Yup. NZ employers claim there is a labour shortage, but in almost all cases I think NZ has a serious lack of business management skills. Basic ideas like staff retention and margins seem to be completely foreign to a bunch of "business leaders".
I've heard that South Africans who can't make it to Australia directly use NZ as the stopover until, as you said, they can use the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement to move to Australia.
I wouldn't be surprised if their (and others') ultimate goal is the US. That's the case with Canada, where my understanding is that FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.
You don’t even need to do that. Once you have Residency (distinct from Permanent Residency and Citizenship - the one with the passport) you are allowed to start your own company which you can use to contract yourself out to Australian companies for annual amounts double those of a lot of NZ roles.
(My last role paid 240-250K NZD depending on exchange rate; the local role prior to that: 120K NZD)
Didn’t know about E3 visa route. Very interesting, thank you
1. It’s ProPublica - “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” Such a job is likely to appeal to someone who, despite the salary, is looking to make a wide social impact.
2. the job also states:
> This is a good faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.
3. It is not in NZ:
> This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is headquartered in New York, but we have offices across the country and will consider remote applicants.
They're still looking for a sucker. That's what they expect to pay someone coming into that role. They likely had the last sucker at that salary and hope to find another. It's possible you can expect to take a hit when going "social impact" roles, but who's willing to take $100k reduction just for that. Either that or they're inflating the title a lot and really just want a Sr. Dev. who again would be taking a salary hit at todays rates.
I just hired a couple of good guys around this salary. Especially if you hire remote, there’s no need to pay these types of roles $300k.
Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO. And frankly, for the lower level roles where remote is fine, it’s hard to ignore Eastern Europe.
Sorry guys, but these premiums were all about Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc trying to keep talent away from competitors. If you were making $500k to be a sysadmin, that’s probably a gravy train that will slow down.
These companies are all making multiples[1] of that in revenue per employee. An "average" employee making $200K/yr at Apple is not even capturing 10% of the "average" value he's bringing in. If anything, tech should be paying much more than it already is. The shareholders are getting away with murder.
I'm afraid that's not how employment markets work. As an employee you are in a competitive environment and worth what at least one employer is willing to pay you. How that relates to the value you generate for the employer is largely irrelevant in an employer's market and that is what we have today. If you want to price based on value then you might consider a different path that leads to more of a B2B relationship such as entrepreneurialism, contracting or freelancing. The traditional alternative would be something like unionisation and collective bargaining but I don't see that happening effectively for software developers any time soon.
Sysadmin is no longer a role because now every commit has a little bit of sysadmin rolled in.
The larger systems, AWS Batch, K8S, Fargate, etc... have all replaced sysadmin with specific commits in specific TF files. There's no longer a need for someone to "watch" for servers to go down or discs to run out of space if everything is using the appropriate service.
If you're unaware of this, of course you won't have a sysadmin job going forward. 8 9's is now guaranteed if you just choose anything but us-east-1
$250k is about right for a Principal "DevOps Enginner" for a company in a major city. Principal engineers are well paid, and SREs (what people often mean when they say DevOps eng) are often the highest paid engineers at a company.
You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.
What do you mean by "higher stack" here? SREs being highest paid is true for my anecdotal knowledge and what I've seen in salary surveys. I'd be interested in updating my understanding though.
Comp packages inclusive of benefits, but I also think that there is a point of self respect that just because you're doing something you love you shouldn't get taken for a ride at the end of the day. That's why the entire game development industry has such low pay compared to business developer counterparts. Those developers have been taken advantage of excessively.
IMO, jobs where you have some other incentives (moral or otherwise) should still pay market and expect some competition for thier roles because they're highly desirable not just because of some idealistic stance. At the end of the day, ideals aren't going to pay the bills.
As I've so fond of pointing out on HN "Principal" means two different things depending on the culture of the company. In SV/BigTech "Principal" is a step above Staff. In many other companies, however, it just means "non-junior employee"; these are the same companies that also have titles like "Lead Architect" and "Systems Administrator". Without context "Principal" is meaningless.
It's usually above senior but it can be below staff at equivalent companies. Check out levels.fyi for salary bands.
Principal at Microsoft is between senior & staff at Google. Principal at Amazon is directly above senior, but is generally higher than staff at Google. Principal at Roblox is about the same as Microsoft.
Right that's what I meant by "at the very least above senior". Within a given company principal is generally always higher than staff, but for companies that don't have staff, principal is generally always higher than senior.
My point was that I've never seen principal used to mean "non-junior employee" in the way that senior occasionally is.
'Principal' in a lot of NZ companies just replaced the term 'Team Lead' and generally just means the most 'senior' person in the team. Sometimes it's used as a way to justify a raise.
The scale of difference and difference of scale between New Zealand and the USA cannot be overstated. There really are not enough people in New Zealand to make the level of differentiation between a Senior, a Principal and a Staff engineer meaningful in the vast, vast majority of our industry.
The titles are basically pointless and just word salad. They're also used very differently company to company, although I don't think that's unique to this geography.
I think that's only true if you pretend the equity grant all vests in year one. In reality it takes some time, so you won't get that amount until after several years at the company.
I worked at MS for 3 years after undergrad, My first year was 221k, 180k, 191k and would've been ~185k for Y4 then 160k after cliff.
SSA is Special Stock Award given arbitrarily (M2s are not sure or have any say in who/how much to be given) but believed to be used for retention by HR. Annual stock refreshers for <L63 at Microsoft are in the range of 0-20k vesting over 5 years.
e: I know for a fact TC for a new hire in 2019 straight out of college with a BS was 250k, just because it doesn't match what you have seen doesn't make it wrong
So given the followups to this post, by "a" new hire you mean "one particular" new hire, not "a representative" new hire. Which, sure. There are highly sought-after candidates who get absolutely ridiculous offers in most markets. But the starting TC at MSFT is not at all "250K" under any normal interpretation.
(For context: I've seen new-grad-adjacent offers break 400K at FAANG for particularly in-demand candidates in the past, but I'm not going to claim that the starting pay at any company is 400K. It's not).
There are 100 pages of salaries for level 59 reported here. If you made $250k starting, you would be in the 99.5%-ile. So yeah, not common at all.
I don’t doubt that TC for some individual new hire you know was $250k but that is different from your claim about starting TC, you can easily look at the levels.fyi bands, and I know multiple people at Microsoft that are paid less than $200k out of college.
FWIW i was also paid $250k by MS out of college, but that is because I worked for a subsidiary. It is not the starting TC at MS proper.
You are in such poor faith that I am not going to keep responding. fwiw, assuming the definite is the standard native english way of interpreting that sentence.
You clearly have little to no experience with the diversity of Microsoft new hire compensation packages. That's ok, you aren't expected to. But when someone makes a claim that new hires "can make"[1] 200k+, and someone else backs it up with data from personal experience, don't come flinging your ignorance around and accuse others of acting in "bad faith". Instead, sit back and learn. Maybe ask a few questions.
And I'm a native english speaker. But I've never felt I had to stick to the "standard" way of doing things. You shouldn't either. Certainly not when reading text you can't be sure is pulled straight from Strunk's.
I just realized you might be getting so emotional about this because you claim you also made 250k straight out of college and want to feel superior in some way?
Yeah, in Michigan I really can't find anything over 165. Remote has me above that, but not too much.
There is wage fomo or insecurity that I am a sucker, but I do not dwell on that thought too much. Have to live with the cards in your hand at some point.
I’ve been on both sides of the compensation divide since 2020 - enterprise dev vs BigTech.
In the beginning of 2020 I was making $150K and entertaining offers making $165K as an experienced developer with cloud experience.
Then I fell into a role working at AWS ProServe making - a lot more working remotely.
I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a long term thing and that Amazon was going to Amazon.
I made my money, paid off debt, built savings, decreased my fixed expenses, built my network, learned a lot of soft skills and now I’m looking at very senior/team lead roles on the enterprise architect side making $170K - $185K. I’m actively interviewing and I am sure I will have something in two weeks (found opportunities based on my network at smaller companies).
On one hand, emotionally I have the same FOMO. But logically I know our expenses are $1000 less per month than they were 3 years ago and I moved and I’m also paying $700 less in taxes than I was then.
I wouldn't compare that to a position with a similar title at a tech company.
It's not uncommon for tech roles on non-tech/IT teams to have some title inflation so they can match compensation better based on the pay-scale of their business unit.
There's an excess of frauds. Large amounts of money will obviously attract them.
JFC, if you have "an idea for an app, bro", but you can't build the product, and you can't raise the honest VC necessary to build or acquire the team that builds the product, YOU DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT.
I don't know how these people get to go around without being challenged on the obvious fact that, for there to be seniors, there has to be someone training juniors. The level of hypocrisy and greed are beyond words, and the fact that every two-bit podcaster and reporter doesn't call these people out loudly and repeatedly is worse.
