IT workers struggling in New Zealand's tight job market
125 comments
·June 3, 2025teruakohatu
nigel_bree
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand
Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or are interested in good people with hard skills - it's almost all very basic web dev. Pretty much all the veterans I know around my age are doing work beneath them to pay the bills or have switched out of development completely.
teruakohatu
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand
> Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent
In my experience it is incredibly hard to hire top-tier talent, but both of our experiences could simultaneously be true.
Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them?
I know of three excellent devs who are IMHO vastly unemployed. At least two of them would struggle to get through a corperate interview process. The other is happy with the chill job they have.
nigel_bree
> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them?
No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard development skills, and the tiny handful that do come up in public tend to be for very specialized verticals where they made hard demands on past experience in that niche area first and foremost over everything else.
> The other is happy with the chill job they have
I mean, I can't blame them for that - there are lots of toxic employers, ageism, credentialism, etc etc. If you're just going to be underemployed doing kiddie-level work anyway, better the devil you know, particularly if you have a family to take care of.
It's all just a big old mess of market failure, though. The problem isn't that the talent pool isn't there, it's that since there's no VC money around, the firms that _really_ need that talent can't pay what the hungrier younger people (who want more than anything else to get on the FAANG gravy train) want and the fantastically talented folks mostly can't earn any kind of premium remotely matching their business value and so make lifestyle choices it's hard to pry them out of.
droopyEyelids
Hard to make it an electricity analogy, when the anode is actually the source of electrons! But i got your point and agree
irjustin
Such is my pet peeve.
Soap box - Analogies simply don't help. They invariably have some flaw and rarely aid in actual understanding as is the case with the anode/cathode reference. I know 100% of readers understand that countries want to attract talent, but <100% of people understand anode+cathode functions.
It gets worse when others attempt to build off the analogy and so it becomes flawed on top of flawed. At some point, semantic arguments begin, i.e. source of electrons, and now we're quite far from countries+talent.
STOP USING ANALOGIES
agubelu
Would you say that analogies are like a sink where meaning and intentionality is lost?
npteljes
I wholeheartedly agree. I have both a hard time to grasp when others are using analogies, especially when they use phrases that are wrong in the public consciousness, like "fish rots from the head" - no, fish rots from the softer places first, or from wherever, the head is not particular.
Pet peeve - soapbox is also used in an abstract way here, not better than the overuse of analogies. A whole century has since passed since people routinely stood on literal soapboxes.
Furthermore, and I was (am?) guilty of this myself, people often use analogies and other kinds of abstract speech to hide the fact that they have no idea what is going on, or they don't know how to express something. And then the responsibility to decode meaning is passed on to the listener.
phendrenad2
Okay you have two complaints about analogies: They're leaky abstractions (people get tripped up on the mismatch), and people don't understand the analogy domain (and miss the analogy entirely).
The former is mostly a problem for a certain kind of concrete-thinking persons, and the former can be solved by picking a more universally understood analogy domain (like puppies). So analogies can be good, given the right audience and analogy domain.
7bit
Analogies are a great tool to illustrate problems, to make the issue more accessible. So I don't think the issue is with analogies, but analogies that are far more complex that the issue he wants to illustrate.
In the specific context you're replying, however, I agree that any analogy would not add any useful information.
malux85
You're making a huge assumption yourself - that the goal of communication is to appeal to the greatest number of readers. This is not always true and often deliberately not always true.
JusticeJuice
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.
imadethis
Are there many people involved in follow the sun support or SRE roles there? I know my company only has an engineering presence in Aus and Japan because of the large coverage gap between the US west coast and the EU. Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.
* For some definitions of native. I've had to work as a translator for a Kiwi and an American, both native English speakers.
latentsea
> Seems like low wages + native English* could be a nice win for companies.
It's not always native English. It's always at least proficient enough, but a good chunk of the workers in the tech sector speak English as a second language. NZ has very diverse population.
JusticeJuice
I know that aws has a few reliability engineers in Wellington, but that’s just to support their aus servers. There really isn’t that many foreign companies outsourcing support to NZ.
te_chris
It's a slightly weird one, but Octopus Energy (UK) have setup a new utility in NZ and it also covers off-hours support.
kavalg
How does it compare to e.g. Eastern Europe? What is the typical salary of a senior developer or architect in NZ?
sitharus
Depending on skillset $150k-$230k is common. You do have to balance this against the cost of living though, we definitely don’t have Eastern Europe’s cost of living advantage.
kavalg
Assuming $ is NZD and you are quoting net, yearly income, then it is 1.5-2.5 times higher than Eastern Europe wages according to statistics in my environment. Unfortunately, cost of living has increased substantially here as well. For example, a decent (but not spacious) 2-bedroom apartment is in the range of EUR 300k-500k already.
dzhiurgis
That's contracting rate and not sure how common anymore.
kmarc
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
FirmwareBurner
I remember reading around here about how many companies in Switzerland like Roche, offshore a lot of mid-tier tech jobs (like web dev) out to places like Poland due to much better performance/cost. IIRC, Acronis also has most of their devs in Bulgaria now. I also remember reading a few years ago an interview with a Swisscom exec about offshoring their devops jobs to the Netherlands on the claim they can't find local devops talent.
Now I'm not in Switzerland and even I'm not buying that reason at face value, but it's clear that offshoring is an issue in most high-CoL countries in the post WFH era as a lot of tech jobs became more of a commodity in the post ZIRP era. So I can imagine the jobs not moving out of Switzerland are those "management" type of jobs where the job itself is having coffee and networking with the other managers on how to further reduce costs and increase profits while relocating engineering jobs to cheaper countries.
Due to this, it seems that Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
>the local "unemployment office" (RAV) told me they have to deal with clueless ex-googlers asking for 200k+ unemployment benefits, almost weekly
This explains some of the absurd arguments I often hear from delulu googlers on this board and how out of touch they are with the real world. The sad thing is they have little introspection to realize it and would rather die on their hill.
kmarc
To your main point: it feels like CH is losing a lot of "in-house" knowledge and mostly the managerial / leader positions are growing here. This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho), and there are many startups that eventually make some noise. But classical business will suffer a lot from off-shoring literally any real knowledge and know how that is normally needed to create a product. As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".
And then some more anecdata:
I happened to be part of Acronis during the time when they tried helping escape all the Engineers in Moscow to Bulgaria. (I have stories, yes, I was in the HQ in Moscow too). The engineers, who made Acronis (the product) were always in Bulgaria for the past 5+ years, so that one is not like the other examples.
I also ended up working for a small banking startup, 20 of us tried to do business on the regional banking sphere. I left during the time when the company was inflated with 40+ offshore (Balkans) engineers.
To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
FirmwareBurner
>This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho)
Yeah, but those positions require highly specialized knowledge and are therefore very niche. Say you're an unemployed tech worker, how would one get such a job without a PhD in the field? You can't. What do you do when most new positions in your area of expertise have been shipped abroad?
>As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".
I doubt they don't know anymore, but they just don't bother since it's a generic drug in the race to the bottom that Switzerland can't and doesn't want to take part in.
>To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
I think you misunderstood me. I never said googles are clueless about tech, but about life in general, especially the life of those not earning 200k+.
Because living in a coddled bubble of 200k+ wages in Zurich would make one highly out of touch with the reality of most average people in Switzerland and moreso in the rest of the world, and you see this in their comments and arguments on HN. They just can't empathize or understand that your reality on the ground is different than theirs.
Even without knowing the unemployment system in Switzerland or in any other country, how the hell can you expect to receive 200K+ in unemployment benefits? That's just so entitled and out of touch, it's insane. Unemployment benefits are never a payment of 100% of your salary to continue the Googler lifestyle, but a smaller basic safety net to cover your vital expenses till you find another job. That's just common sense everywhere.
ponector
>> Eastern Europe is one of the hottest places to be in tech right now.
Market there is much better than in western countries, but I see projects are pushed from Poland further to the Asia. UBS is laying off thousands there, moving projects to the Indian office.
kmarc
While that's true, UBS also canceled some Filipino contracts. I guess UBS just sucks in general and has to cut costs a lot, these days.
derelicta
I know a trade unionist who tried to talk ex Googlers into bargaining for a compensation package after getting laid off, but many were absolutely clueless about any of that. They had no plans and didn't even want to collaborate with unions. Unfortunately, STEM folks still see themselves as above regular workers and thus incorrectly perceive themselves as shielded from capitalists wrath and mood swings.
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solardev
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.
creakingstairs
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.
jp0d
To be honest, we Australians aren't doing so well either. But you're correct, it's a comparatively bigger economy. There are more opportunities. But we've hundreds if not thousands applying for the same job.
apatheticonion
As a kiwi living in Australia and working for mini FANG, the thought of moving to Southeast Asia and living off savings for a couple of years in the hope that I might wait out this jobs/rental crisis has crossed my mind.
gyomu
Not necessarily a bad plan per se, but don’t forget to take into account the fact that this jobs/rental crisis might be due to deep systemic+geopolitical issues that are only going to get worse and that we might not be going back to the abundance of the 2010s anytime soon.
Finding yourself in an even worse job market 5 years from now is a very real possibility.
Gigachad
I think it is alleviating slowly. In Melbourne at least, rent seems to have peaked already. The state government has done great work in overruling councils to get more housing built faster. And it seems to be working.
h4kunamata
To be honest, the perfect solution and you have a high chance of finding something there that makes you happy.
Housing there is more affordable also but not for long, people are buying insane houses there coz cost "nothing".
If this is something that you already considered and have enough saving to do so, personally, I would start looking for what can I do over there job wise to avoid using all my savings and screw it, I am off. No matter how small is the income coz you will need to start from the bottom, I am getting tired of IT, too much drama, all the time, if living in Asia doing something completely different but that pays the bills and that I am happy with, I wouldn't come back. Australia within the last 11 years went to shit big time, and it is getting worse by the day.
I have considered the same, I think it might be a little to late for me now, who knows.
FirmwareBurner
> Australia within the last 11 years went to shit big time, and it is getting worse by the day.
Most major wester economies did the same in past 11 years: stagnating wages, exploding CoL. Life was good 11 years ago when salaries were great and housing still abundant and affordable to buy but this isn't the case anymore.
If you expect an improvement, moving anywhere there right now would be like jumping from a lake to a pond.
mvdtnz
It's so funny to me how you Australians have no idea how fortunate you are. You've been born into one of the luckiest places on earth and never stop moaning about it. When I lived there all anyone ever did was bitch and moan while pulling in huge salaries, soaking in some of the best weather on earth and knowing their country's immense mineral wealth and isolated status would always be a security blanket.
Truly some of the most fortunate, least deserving people on the planet. I am thankful I can get my special category visa and when my parents eventually pass away I will set my roots down in Australia. Despite all of the Australians.
I'm interested where in SE Asia you think you can can just barge in, buy a property and live. It might pay to actually look into what it takes to do that legally, it might not be as simple as you think.
petesergeant
Or move to SE Asia and work remotely? Some killer coworking spots out there
bigfatkitten
AU market isn’t too crash hot either, at the moment.
jemmyw
There are quite a few remote work opportunities around with US and AU companies. It might not be what you're looking for, but it seems to work pretty well with an NZ lifestyle.
prmoustache
Maybe I am badly informed but last time I heard about NZ, it was said that there is very little unemployment and you could switch job in a matter of week. Which leads to my question: wouldn't you just consider doing something else?
While I am happy working in IT right now, there are a number of other professional activities I could see myself learning.
davesmylie
This was true a few years back. Probably not been the case for at least the last 18 months.
Curious what other professions you'd pursue?
dzhiurgis
> wouldn't you just consider doing something else
So instead of 150k which just barely can get you mortgage you go for 50k?
prmoustache
I am just...asking. Are people outside of IT not able to have a comfortable life there and all living in misery? I am in a way different country probably but there are lots of people living with a third or a quarter of my current salary in the same city I live and while none of us is considered rich, they are not in total misery and seem to be relatively comfortable as long as they manage their expense wisely. People here don't seem to need to buy/consume whatever thing or service is deemed new/cool/trendy like in more "consumption focused countries". I don't know about NZ but here we enjoy spending most of our non working hours outside.
I moved nearly 6 years ago from one very wealthy country to another much less wealthy. I chose a job with a 3 times lower salary. While I miss parts of my life in that previous country and understand my retirement will be lower, I still find a lot of positives in that life change for various other reasons.
When you move from one country to another, reaching the maximun salary you can obtain is not necessarily the most important parameter/goal.
te_chris
10 years in the UK and counting. We often think about going back but it’s hard to square it all.
mvdtnz
It's a cycle, like always. It'll bounce back.
alephnerd
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.
latentsea
> 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.
Not only do they require sponsorship, but as part of the application process for sponsoring I think they're required to prove or make a case that they couldn't find any local talent to fill the position.
I have worked on teams in NZ that had people where the company sponsored their visas, so it does happen.
Nekhrimah
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...
foxglacier
> intentionally underfunding ministries and services so they can be punished or sold off later for "underperforming".
Do you have a source for that or is it just a conspiracy theory?
dijit
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Dismantle-Easy-Steps-second/dp/...
NHS is the National Health Service in the UK and this book was Co-Authored by the Minister for Health of the UK (before he got that post).
It details this strategy clearly.
const_cast
Right-wing party platforms aren't a conspiracy theory, it's literally their platform.
"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
prmoustache
It is no conspiracy theory to simply observe what is happening whenever a right wing government leads a country long enough: the public services are enshittified to the point they lose any support from the population which justify them to partly or completely replace them with the false idea that competition among private companies will lead to better service.
dzhiurgis
> enshittified
Please read its meaning.
jpalawaga
A source that what? That says Right wing/small government parties generally tend to make the government smaller by privatizing services?
There’s no conspiracy theory, it’s literally their MO.
mvdtnz
> 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".
In case HN readers see this and take it too seriously, this is a left wing conspiracy theory. The government is making cutbacks because the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
rstuart4133
> the previous government spent money like it was going out of style and put our country in a very precarious position.
The NZ external debt has been about about the same rate for a decade [0]. External debt has increased at about 2% per year, and the rate has been consistent under both the right and the left.
It's weird - the right consistently pushes "we are better economic managers than the left". There is stuff all evidence for either side being better managers. When the right pushes up debt, it seems to be by giving away tax breaks, usually to the rich. When the left pushes up debt seems to be by spending more, usually on the poor.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/external-debt#:~:te... Settings: 10Y, Chg%.
mvdtnz
It's not the outright debt it's the acceleration in spending. It was completely unsustainable. We are borrowing in order to fund our day to day activities, which is definitionally precarious.
According to your posting history you don't even live in New Zealand. I doubt you have the first clue what is going on here.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/08/willis-caught-between-the-...
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gsf_emergency
According to a study promoted by Financial Times, it's a known downside of this one weird effect
alephnerd
NZ's business culture is very different from that of the US (which that FT article from the weekend was about). IMO, it's much more scelrotic and makes Australia's old boy's club look dynamic.
gsf_emergency
I'm saying it's due to NZs very clean air and water compared to even OZ, did you even click
(Don't get me started on BRICS)
alephnerd
I read it this weekend. It was dumb then, and it's dumb now. Correlation does not imply causation - this is taught in the first week of high school statistics.
The significant amount of superfund sites also confounds with mass industry, which can make the epigenetic theory moot.
h4kunamata
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.
hcfman
35 ??? Holy crap!
I guess the reasons I left New Zealand more than 35 years ago are still true.
latentsea
This 35 thing referred to in the article is a phenomenon present in the Chinese tech market, not the NZ one. There's no such thing in the NZ one, and I pity the Chinese with their 996 and curse of 35. What an awfully structured tech industry they have. NZ is in general much better, but there is definitely fewer positions lately.
HenryBemis
> "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?
janstice
Or rather; the candidate didn’t have a visa, the employer would need to jump through a bunch of hoops, then a multi-month wait, OR can just hire one of the many on-shore candidates available on the market.
I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.
decimalenough
This is not specific to China, any foreigner's application will likewise end up in the bin. (Australians are excepted, because they have reciprocal work rights.) Few companies want to go through the uncertain and expensive hassle of sponsoring visas, waiting for them to relocate etc unless they really have no other options.
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.