
Software company's response to Australian government abolishing migrant visas - razodactyl
https://www.rexsoftware.com/abolishing-457-visa-open-letter-malcolm-turnbull/
======
yakult
They should just replace the whole shebang with 'pay us $x to get a visa, $y
for PR, $z for citizenship'.

Company wants to hire from overseas? Fine, they can figure out how to split
the cost between company and employee, with zero government involvement. Rich
people from the US seeking doomsday shelter? A few million dollars, a clean
criminal record and less than 48 hours in the queue. Much easier than the
current system.

~~~
mkj
A business investment visa already is that.

~~~
yakult
No, a business investment visa is an invitation to come over and set up a
minimum viable, likely-not-profitable 'business' for the duration it takes to
satisfy requirements. The government gets peanuts out of it, the 'investors'
waste years of their lives playing pretend.

It's a shit show. Much better to just charge cash, speed up the processing and
let in those who actually think they can make money despite the steep cost of
entry. And if they fail anyway - reserve a small portion of the ticket price
to put them on the dole.

------
vacri
> _I am sad when I look into the eyes of my staff on 457 or working holiday
> visas .... How do I ask them to help us do our small but proud part in
> sustaining Australia’s economic growth and providing more jobs for
> Australians and other immigrants?_

I know that this part is _entirely_ rhetorical, but the thought of a boss in
tech coming over and trying to inspire me to do my work 'for the good of the
country' is just too amusing. :)

------
nnd
Just to make sure, the skilled point-based migration system is still in place
in Australia? I.e. can you obtain a work visa and travel to the country to
find a job there?

------
hive_mind
On the bright side, India could benefit immensely from less brain drain.

~~~
NTDF9
They already are. Amazon, Linkedin, Microsoft, Uber etc have offices there,
paying top talent to the tune of $60-$80/year.

For comparison, this is more than median tech salaries in London and cost of
living in India is peanuts.

------
EduardoBautista
Can someone give me some context here? So now it's impossible to hire foreign
workers?

~~~
lysp
Companies are only meant to use the visa to fill a need/gap where there are no
local workers to fill a job.

The minimum wage for the visa is $40,000 USD ($53k AUD).

What companies are doing however, is hiring foreign workers (typically from
India for IT based roles) and paying them $40k rather than the local average
wage of $75-100k.

They are using the visa as a method to decrease wage costs to almost half of
what a local worker would cost.

I believe companies are complaining as there is a possibility that there will
be less access to cheap foreign labour and they'll have to start paying true
costs for workers.

~~~
sanswork
I'm guessing you haven't had to try and hire devs in Australia before if cost
of developers is what you think the main problem is.

~~~
empressplay
I've recently had a pretty good look at the Melbourne software dev market and
there are seemingly plenty of senior devs looking for work, companies here
appear to have the "pick of the litter" when hiring.

Maybe you're just in the wrong part of Australia?

~~~
ZvG_Bonjwa
Melbourne is a positive outlier and not at all representative of the rest of
Australia. Finding senior devs in Brisbane is an insanely arduous process and
its not uncommon to see positions take 6+ months to fill (at least at the
places I've worked at). Even when companies start throwing money around like
crazy, the talent just isn't there.

I've heard that Sydney isn't so great either. Once devs hit seniority they run
along to join a hip Melbournian startup, get gobbled up by Atlassian, or just
migrate to Silicon Valley.

~~~
hiram112
So what's the salary you're offering for this _unfillable_ position, and
what's the average price of a home there?

------
jamhan
Oh please. Spare us the pearl clutching. I'm willing to bet that if I filed a
freedom of information act on this company's 457 applications that 1) there
was little or no attempt to find a suitable candidate in the local market and
2) the 457s they did get have some relationship to employees already at the
company.

The 457 visa was a government program that was being exploited, and quite
obviously too, for quite some time, just like any government program
eventually will be. For another recent example, look at what happened to the
child care subsidy program. Government programs can serve a good purpose if
they are well regulated and audited but comically and sadly for citizens they
never are.

I just wonder if the 457 reforms would have taken so long if the Commonwealth
Public Service had outsourced their IT to some South Asian consultancy and
discovered that suddenly and mysteriously there were not enough skilled
Australian IT workers to support them in Canberra (and elsewhere) and rather
rapidly offices were filled with 457s. But this is exactly what large
corporations in the private sector have done.

In IT and other sectors (notably health), companies are using 457s to save on
employee salaries, pure and and simple. I have knowledge of assistants in
medical practices being told to accept the lower salaries that their 457 co-
workers are on or lose their jobs.

Oh, and it really annoys me what Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes keeps
on saying. How about you invest in training locals instead of whinging all the
time about not being able to import people?

BTW, I'm a UNSW CompSci graduate, 40+, have a lot of international experience,
can operate at the technical and business level, speak a couple of languages,
and after my last (5-year) contract ended I spent 2+ fruitless years searching
for more IT work, while conspicuously the suburb I used to work in (with
telcos, Cisco and software companies) filled with people from certain
demographics. Despite all my experience, I didn't get invited to a single
interview. Not one. Ageism and 457s killed the job market for people like me.

~~~
sanswork
Atlassian hires tons of graduates.

> I spent 2+ fruitless years searching for more IT work, >I didn't get invited
> to a single interview

If you didn't get a single interview in two years of looking either you are
vastly overestimating your capabilities compared to your CV or your CV is
junk. How many different CVs did you try during that time? What are you
skilled in? You say IT work but are you a programmer, ops, support? What are
you business skills like? How does ageism factor in when you didn't even make
it to the interviews for them to be able to tell your age?

~~~
jamhan
Are you really that obtuse? I write my CV. It has 20+ years of experience plus
degree from my University. Simple math not your strong point perhaps?

~~~
sanswork
If you have 20+ years of experience on your CV it's a shit CV. Why would
anyone hiring care what you were doing over 20 years ago?

I'm wondering what else was wrong with it that you didn't get a single
response in 2 years of trying. Were you including unique cover letters? Where
were you finding the jobs you were applying to? Did you try going through a
recruiter?

~~~
jamhan
And now we get to the crux of the matter. I wonder how old you are? Why is it
that in IT broad long-term experience is considered irrelevant? If you have
not done _exactly_ that something in the past six months you might as well not
exist. I love the conversations with recruiters/companies that go something
like this:

Them: I see you you used technologies X,Y,Z in your last job. Me: Yes, and <I
explain in further detail what that entailed> Them: Did you use <some
tangential A-framework> with technology-X at all? Me: No, I used B-framework
because reasons. Them: You are dead to us.

BTW, I find it puzzling you are focusing specifically on my perceived failure
in the job market rather than the topic of the original post.

~~~
sanswork
I'm in my mid-30s and I don't care how old you are I've worked with many
excellent programmers in their 50s and 60s and learned tons from all of them.

Broad long-term experience isn't considered irrelevant it's just not needed on
a CV. If you haven't done it in the past 5 years you're probably just not that
skilled at it anymore and if you have it's already on the CV in the newer
role.

Are you just imagining those conversations because you said in 2 years you
never made it to the interview stage.

You are blaming your failure on the topic of the original post so it is
relevant.

~~~
jamhan
I was talking about actual in-the-flesh interviews, which are the only ones
that count in the end. Recruiters/companies often do phone "interviews" or
"pre-screenings" or whatever and those were the "conversations" I was
referring to. So now you've called me a liar as well as having called my CVs
"shit". What a pleasant co-worker you must be.

Edit: On that note, perhaps you could post somewhere an anonymised version of
your CV so we can all benefit from the pinnacle of CV design.

~~~
sanswork
So you've had interviews?

You shouldn't be so defensive of your CV but I apologize if I was rude. Plenty
of mine were shit over the years too. I've had to read thousands over the
years and discuss them with others so I have some idea of what turns hiring
managers off. There is no need for that much history on a CV regardless of
your age. You want your CV to tell the hiring person you can do the job. A
full listing of all your work history doesn't do that it just adds pages to
the print out that aren't going to be read and will probably annoy the person
for having to scroll through them all since I assume you include other
information at the end. 20+ year old educational qualifications don't do that.
5 years outside of uni you should drop it unless you have some particularly
special and amazing qualification. Tell them if they ask.

I haven't needed a CV for like a decade now but rest assured my last one was
pretty shit too.

