Wages for local NZ companies are mostly bad. In spite of that, we are breeding more and more successful companies for reasons I can only guess at. You have a much better chance of finding interesting work than used to be the case.
But the untold story of tech work in NZ is that working remotely for good wages is rapidly getting easier. I started the Mozilla NZ office in 2007 and we were paid adequately, because back then HR didn't have a firm "local cost of labour" policy. Since then I've seen friends find remote work at other companies to get paid a lot more than they would locally for the same job. Zapier is a good one. We can all see that remote work is trending steeply upward in general; it doesn't always translate into location-insensitive pay policies, but sometimes it does.
But the untold story of tech work in NZ is that working remotely for good wages is rapidly getting easier. I started the Mozilla NZ office in 2007 and we were paid adequately, because back then HR didn't have a firm "local cost of labour" policy. Since then I've seen friends find remote work at other companies to get paid a lot more than they would locally for the same job. Zapier is a good one. We can all see that remote work is trending steeply upward in general; it doesn't always translate into location-insensitive pay policies, but sometimes it does.