Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbromhead | Hacker News Reader

By the same logic (and our hiring experiences), Australians are also cheap outside of Sydney and Melbourne.

Really? Our applicants came from Perth, Brissy and even Tasmania as well. In fact, the Sydney ones were cheaper. But we target people with around 5-10 years experience. I would say if x is the market value of a Singaporean developer, Australia is around 3x, the US 0.8x but this is hypothetical since we have yet to hire a Singaporean into the Haskell team (the language is pretty much unknown here).

I was looking at real estate in various Australian cities. There's a 3 bedroom house 1km from Bankstown station (not as bad as it used to be but still, no Kirribilli) that went for 750k AUD 2 months ago - imagine what that would buy in most US cities! Even moving to the suburbs isn't an option anymore.

> Even moving to the suburbs isn't an option anymore.

Sure it is. Just rent instead of buying. I pay less to rent a 3 bedroom house in Melbourne's inner suburbs than I did for a 3 bedroom unit in Irvine, CA. Granted buying a house in Australia is very expensive, but Aussies will learn soon enough the folly of not heeding the lessons of the property bubbles in the US, Ireland, Spain etc...

Oh, on that I agree, but it's hard to fight with an ingrained culture of ownership ("rent is dead money!") and cheap credit, and the income/price ratios have been consistent at least since the 80s according to people who bought back then (just like house prices in the US kept going up from WWII to 2007). Australian real estate, unlike much of the US, is also very desirable to a lot of foreigners, and all the government needs to do is lift restrictions on foreign ownership to keep the market afloat a few more years. Look at how central London prices have shot up with the influx of money from as far as Moscow or Qatar...

>we have yet to hire a Singaporean into the Haskell team (the language is pretty much unknown here).

There's a good chance that if I can recognize your company based on this sentence alone (and I can), it's not a very transferable skill.

Well, there's at least two of us (at least publicly) since last year :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com