Comment by Innercode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Innercode | Hacker News Reader

While the US will always be dominant, there are some advantages for Australian Tech companies to take advantage of:

Cheaper tech teams with less competition. Australia has a lot of talent in the software space, but without the eye watering wage bills. Even in the most expensive cities of Sydney and Melbourne, software developers generally cost a lot less than in the Bay Area. You can get even better value if you can build your team outside of Sydney/Melbourne.

You can build more slowly, there is alot less pressure to build grow fast and fail type startups. While venture capital heavy startups are the most celebrated in the press, there are plenty of great smaller scale self/revenue funded startups that can build up over time. Most of our celebrated tech successes built their business models over a long time and focused on building a good business first.

There are also great incentives to keep the development team in Australia. As a pre revenue startup you can get over 43.5% of your development cost back through the R&D Tax Incentive. While its a tax incentive, the way that they designed it was to provide tax refunds to loss making companies. Plus there are other great grants/incentives you can also take advantage of. (disclaimer: I'm a consultant for software startups/companies in this area)

The best course of action is to take a global approach, don't limit yourself to selling or developing in only one location.

> Cheaper tech teams with less competition. Australia has a lot of talent in the software space, but without the eye watering wage bills.

Since you're referring to all of Australia - those advantages are all neutralized by choosing any of two dozen other US cities to start in. You get the advantages of the vast US market, other cities have far lower real estate costs than you see in most of Australia, you can choose states like Texas and Florida which have no income tax and large local talent pools, you can choose various cities based on their unique value propositions such as eg Pittsburgh due to Carnegie Mellon, or perhaps Denver Colorado due to lifestyle. You can also still choose Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC, Boston if you want to just step down one notch in cost on engineering salaries, while still being at a world-class level of talent (with each of those having their own distinct value propositions).

The US has 280 million people living outside of California and an economy 16 times the size of Australia that is now growing far faster than Australia.

You do gain something keeping the tech team in Australia which is Australians are much more “team” orientated than Americans. “Mateship” really is a thing here that means something. A tight team with focus will beat a group of talented individuals every time.

I think the real strength of Australians is our cheerful cynicism and laconic humour; these allow for honest appraisal. We are optimistic ("she'll be right"), but it is a different species from American optimism ("I'm going to build the impossible").

I work in NYC and my office has, at any time, between 5 and 10 Australians working there, out of ~100. It is a tremendous comfort to have that common sense of humour at hand. If I had my way we'd have a few more.

Australians tend to lack confidence on their own in the greater world, but when put together as a team they think they can beat everyone (and often do).

One thing we don't make is good managers of Americans - cynicism and laconic humour does not come across well with American employees.

I’d work for an Aussie, but my auxiliary national affiliation in New Zealand would mandate I give them some good natured grief :-)

I’d say it takes all kinds. I work with one Aussie who is a great manager, and she enjoys good rapport with everyone above and below as far as I can tell.

Kiwis and Aussies that I’ve known have had a tendency to project a feeling place inferiority which I think is rubbish. Everyone has imposter syndrome, but being from Aussie or NZ is no reason to feel inferior. Stand tall!

Yes there are good Aussie (and Kiwi) managers of Americans, just as a rule they tend to run into problems - the approaches that work with Australian employees can fail spectacularly with US employees.

Yes the Australian cultural cringe (the Kiwi version is even worse) is pretty terrible. The way to overcome it is work as a team. In a team Aussies/Kiwis really beleive they can beat the world. It is a very intersting cultural trait.

>One thing we don't make is good managers of Americans - cynicism and laconic humour does not come across well with American employees.

So how does cynicism come across to Americans? As a New Yorker by birth/upbringing/family, I often wonder if this is part of the gap between my family and "Americans".

According to Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, the USA and Australia have very similar cultures, although 'mateship' is not a dimension considered I will admit. :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio... https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/austral...

I would suggest that all national cultures value loyal friendship and working as a team. That said, 'mateship' has a sense of egalitarianism to it, and while Australia and the USA are egalitarian cultures, that is lacking in other nations, e.g., China.

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/austral...

Australia and the USA have deceptively similar cultures. On the surface we are very similiar, but there are a lot of important differences that can bite you on the backside when you least expect it. Group dynamics are probably one of the more important differences.

This is a great post. I'd like to add:

> You can get even better value if you can build your team outside of Sydney/Melbourne.

So much this, but talent outside the big cities is rare. I lived in Queensland for a while and would have taken a massive pay cut for any tech work... but there just isn't any. I knew more people working in Sydney (fly-in-fly-out) than working in local companies.

You can pick up uni students cheaply. They're grateful for relevant work.

I knew a few founders living cheap but pretty much all knew that moving to the US was an inevitability.

> focused on building a good business first

This is a massive plus of starting in Australia. The business has to make sense. Local funding sources aren't as willing to build perceived value and flip the company -- it's important to have a genuine sustainable business with customers and cashflow.

> 43.5% of your development cost back through the R&D Tax Incentive

Probably half of my lifetime earnings have been paid for with the R&D Tax Incentive and other grants. It's such a good deal that every incorporated company with a tech component should be trying to claim it.

I'm not grumpy or anything, but in Queensland, claiming government grants for tech companies is probably more lucrative than working in a tech company. There's an abundance of funding and a shortage of people able to use it.

> don't limit yourself to selling or developing in only one location

I forget who gave the talk, but it was from Muru-D at Co Spaces in the Gold Coast, and guy said (paraphrasing):

"New Zealanders have an advantage over Australians because they know from day one that they will have to sell overseas to make their company a success. Australia is big enough that you can fool yourself for a while, but it won't take long before you reach saturation and need to move anyway. Better to get it done sooner."

Where in Queensland? There is plenty of tech going on in Brisbane if you look for it... I suppose it depends on your specialisation though.

I lived in the Gold Coast for 18 months. I did weekly flights to Sydney and drove to Brisbane twice a week.

I didn't have good results looking for work in Brisbane. I could get a job, but not a job I wanted to do, and not for much money. I would've had to move to make the commute feasible, especially with the state of Brisbane parking prices.

I found it more convenient cheaper to travel to Sydney. Gold Coast airport is remarkably efficient and cheap. I met a lot of people doing the same thing; 5:15pm at Sydney Domestic is packed with workers commuting by air.

I live near Munich now and it's amazing to see so many big companies and so much opportunity in such a small place. There are literally hundreds of tech jobs available within 1km of my rural apartment. There are jobs ads on the buses and trains.

Your LinkedIn says you work on embedded systems. Perhaps that is just too niche for an industry the size of Brisbane’s? The frontend market isn’t great, but it does exist.

Just curious: what is some cool stuff happening in Brisbane these days? I grew up there but I moved away to find more interesting work a long time ago. It would be nice to hear about interesting things happen there nowadays.

Megaport is headquartered in Brisbane and we are hiring! Looking for senior and intermediate Java/Kotlin/Sacala devs

I moved from the Bay Area to Brisbane. The market is pretty sparse. Seems like Flight Centre, Suncorp, Virgin, TAB, and Auto and General are the big companies.

Console seem interesting, they were recently acquired by Macquarie. Console Connect and Rex are hiring.

I’ve met people trying to take advantage of lack of competition to set up dev offices. I talked with a well funded US startup who seems interesting.

We have dev offices for quite a few majors (Oracle, SAP, IBM, ToughtWorks, Boeing, Boeing Defense etc.), but lots of little interesting companies too.

I’m in Systems programming/electronics design - it’s probably a different story for a front end dev - I don’t think there’s much of that at all!

One little company I used to work for was in traffic systems, basically IoT/sensor networks before it was cool (all on private networks though!) and we developed a system that GPS tracked ambulances and fire engines, and predicted their likely path (destination was known) and ran interventions on traffic signals to both minimise travel time for the emergency vehicle and minimise disruption to other traffic. It’s a lot more effective than the dumb IR blaster systems used elsewhere. We also had a ramp system that staggered cars coming in down on-ramps near chokepoints that significantly increased highway flow and reduced nose-to-tail accidents (from the stop-start traffic) by something like 30%. I think they’re rolling out that tech now with some US cities departments of transport.

Now I work at a little company that makes class-leading satellite/microwave equipment, including maritime and road-vehicle satellite-tracking terminals, frequently up- and down-converters, etc.

There’s actually a surprising amount of microwave engineering, and lots of aviation/defence work (some in the city with Boeing Defense and some out in Ipswich at Amberley), as well as Virgin Australia being headquartered here.

That's great to hear about, thanks!

> So much this, but talent outside the big cities is rare. I lived in Queensland for a while and would have taken a massive pay cut for any tech work... but there just isn't any. I knew more people working in Sydney (fly-in-fly-out) than working in local companies.

This is what playing the long game is for. Take a lesson from Texas Instruments. The founders decided to start a tech company in North Texas, where there wasn't much talent. So they decided to grow their own: they started their own university with a strong focus on STEM subjects, located not too far from the corporate headquarters, and once it grew large enough, they turned it over to the state. To this day, the University of Texas at Dallas supplies TI with a lot of fresh grads, and Richardson, TX has grown up to be a large tech hub.

Of course, this takes a lot of time and a lot of money, but a particularly ambitious and rich team of founders can open a university on the outskirts of, say, Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and given enough time, they'll have people to feed their tech company and turn the area into a tech hub.

The trouble though is that UT-Dallas is still not a spectacular school, so the talent does not rank among the best. It's serviceable for what TI needs, but not the best. And few people will relocate to Dallas just to go UT-Dallas. TI may have gotten by with that level of talent in the past, but if you're a company that is pushing the boundaries, that level of talent may not be sufficient.

If you locate near an already great university in an already attractive city (e.g. UT-Austin), you can tap into a talent magnet that already draws people from around the world. Remember, the talent pool is now global and tech companies that aim from anything short of that would be depriving themselves.

Talent pool size is a real problem. To cite an example: for years, many French-speaking universities in Montreal had a hard time drawing global talent due to the language of instruction; on that basis alone they were less competitive than English-speaking universities in the same city (e.g. global English-speaking universities like McGill draw a from a larger and much more competitive pool of students from around the world) simply because their pool of students are constrained to French speakers. Just as an example: most Asian students will probably not bother to learn French, but many are already learning English in grade school. This means French-only universities lose out on the two biggest pools of engineering graduate students: those from India and those from China. To make things worse, French students from France rarely want to study in Quebec because most of them believe their own grande-ecoles to be better (there is also an element of French snobbery involved when it comes to Quebec).

Anyway, my sense is by setting up shop in a city that already draws global talent, the premium you pay in salaries over the long run is going to be far less than setting up your own university (considering how expensive it is to run a really good university). The payoff is much greater. University reputations are expensive and slow to build, and as can be seen in the UT-Dallas case, one is uncertain to succeed even with sizable investments.

p.s. of course, this argument breaks down if your company does not require a very high level talent.

That's an interesting quote on New Zealanders (I am from NZ, but live in SF).

My take on it is that places like NZ are great in that if you can make the jump internationally, you're highly likely to be extremely successful overseas as investing isn't really a thing and the market is so small. The downside is that any investors want more than a pound of flesh for dollar sums that would be seen as laughable in the valley. It's going to be interesting seeing how the sector does over the next ten years - and while it's been great seeing the success of Xero and Pushpay, I'm really excited about the current cohort coming through.

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