Our Dev Update for January 2021 is here – learn about what’s hot in the market as well as what skills and frameworks you should watch out for in the dev space.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Liam Potter:
– New year new growth for the Newy dev market. We are two weeks into 2021 and it’s already shaping up to be a big year. So let’s have a bit of a chat about it.
Okay so let’s look into about the last month or so of activity. So we’ve got the date periods of the 15th of December to the 15th of January, we’ve got 38 jobs posted in that period, which represents a decrease of nine on the last period we looked at which was the November period, a decrease of really 20% month on month considering the last week of December, first week of January is an absolute write-off.
That’s still really solid numbers. And if we look at year on year, it’s absolutely a significant growth based on where we were at in early 2020. Really just indicates how desperate the market is for good Dev talent in Newcastle at the moment. Normally we would have seen a pretty significant drop. I would have expected realistically maybe 20 roles to be posted in the same time period. So to see the amount that we have seen it’s absolutely a sign that the market has not slowed down. And in truth in 2021 will not slow down I expect. Most of these roles where sort of the mid senior a bit of lead stuff, but mostly mid senior level not too much in the grad junior category.
We saw a lot of that in sort of October a little bit in November, but very much in this time period it’s a lot of, I guess, urgent growth based hiring where they need somebody to hit the ground quickly. Junior and grad hiring a bit more of a longterm play and you don’t expect them to be able to effectively contribute to a code base for a decent amount of time. And as such, it’s not as urgent of a hiring need especially during this time period where you’ve got a lot of big players trying to hire up quite quickly.
I’d expect the junior grad level stuff to pick back up in the next few months, but for now stay posted I’d say it’ll pick up sort of March, April ish. The fact of the matter is Newcastle’s Dev market we’re still not seeing the pipeline that we need to really, to quell demand locally. Companies realistically, they have to look at alternate options to pick up talent.
It’s not as easy as chucking an ad up. It’s not as easy as just calling up the most recent graduates at the uni. You have to look outside the, I guess the local pool and what that manifests itself into for the most part in Newcastle is either hiring remote employees or looking at the sponsorship route. So let’s look at those a little bit.
Okay firstly, let’s talk about the remote piece. Everyone really got forced into it in 2020 in some way shape or form, mostly in the form of fully remote, everyone working from home, having to scramble, to buy desks and chairs and monitors and stuff but really everyone at this point, I think that works in tech has some exposure or experience to working in that sort of setup. There’s no shortage of remote resources both domestically and internationally that provide companies with the ability to really, get hands on keyboards and contributions to the code base pretty quickly and pretty flexibly.
The fact of the matter is not too many companies in Newcastle have explored it. A lot of the bigger players and an increasing amount of sort of remote first entities in Newcastle have been adopting that sort of approach. But it’s definitely far from the norm at present. In truth most remote Devs that I’ve spoken to are really really quite good. It’s just that they prefer working from their own space but they don’t want to live in a big city. Maybe they think Newcastle’s too big, but in truth they’re usually really incredibly talented. So there’s a definite benefit to looking external to the Hunter for those sorts of resources. That being said pretty significant cultural challenges with shifting to a remote first workforce.
You’ve got to be really trusting of your employees. And as much as I’d like to say that every company is a utopia where everyone is immediately trusting the reality is you’ve going to be pretty well drilled well set up company to have that sort of setup and for it to function effectively. Moving away from that sort of traditional office setting look, it’s scary. Those sorts of norms have existed for centuries realistically at this point and to move away from something as traditional and such an institution in Western life it’s definitely a big call but more and more companies are doing it. They’re reaping the rewards, so it’s definitely worth exploring.
On that note I’d say definitely worth looking at our most recent Community Spotlight episode with Lachy Gray from Yarno they’ve been working fully remotely since day dot and he’s recently moved to Newcastle from Sydney so he was paying Sydney lifestyle prices but at the end of the day, working from home so he didn’t particularly need to and he spoke quite well about the rewards. And I guess the benefits that Yarno has experienced by being a remote first company. And the other one that I mentioned, sponsorship. Sponsorship it’s a super super complex field. It’s to do with immigration and border control in Australia.
Of course it’s complex as a result in truth, I think a lot of organisations have really written it off as something worth exploring just because they kind of put it in the too hard basket. It costs money, that’s obviously something you’ve got to consider. If you’re a company that doesn’t have the ability to splash out on that sort of thing it’s not an option, if you don’t have the time to dedicate to it it’s not option I completely understand why people don’t explore it but the reality is there’s some unreal developers especially in the capital cities. So Sydney, Melbourne and to a lesser extent, Brisbane, that can absolutely add value to an organisation.
They’ve just got to deal with the visa limitations that exist. That usually manifests in sponsorship, which is three to five grand generally. There’s also a bunch of visas that exist within that visa ecosystem, I guess that really do a lot of favours for Newcastle companies. The 491 visa from memory has a regional modifier in it. That essentially means if you’re not a company with a base in Sydney or Melbourne, it provides the candidate with a pretty solid pathway to permanent residency. So a lot of good developers really sort of exploring that 491 option, meaning that they come up here to Newcastle, they live and work here I think three to five years is the timeframe. Three to five years out of a developer, that’s plenty of time for them to add value into your company. There are a few companies in Newcastle that have hopped onto the sponsorship train in the last year or so in response to need for pretty rapid growth. The fact of the matter is Newcastle market’s only so big.
You can only pull from so many sources until it becomes a bottleneck. Sponsorships a really good way to improve that process and really widen your talent pool out. Yeah, it’s a bit daunting to begin with, but look the companies that have embraced it, that have gone to the effort to build out their abilities in that realm. They’ve hired some incredible developers people that are absolutely adding value to their business really doing great things for them. So I definitely think it’s worth exploring if you’re a company that needs to grow relatively rapidly and maybe isn’t finding the success that you think you would immediately find in the Newcastle market. If you want to know a bit more about that stuff, we have a decent amount of knowledge about that whole process by all means have a chat to us, have a chat to me, but more importantly there’s a whole world of migration agents out there that can assist in that whole process. They can handhold you through it make it as simple as it can be. So I definitely recommend speaking to them.
Anyway lets keep the first one of 2021 pretty short and sweet for everyone’s sake. Overarchingly, market looks good. It looks like it’s going to be a really big year. I’d like to think that it’s going to be a really big year anyway, really good sign so far. Salaries looked to be on their way up a bit more especially sort of senior level, lead level. Starting to see a bit more creep up with that, which is really cool because that means we’re starting to access I guess the top 5%, especially within the capital cities. If you want to know a bit more about the market? If you want to know a bit more about sort of salary trends if you’re new to Newcastle and want to get a bit of a handle on who’s who in the zoo, please by all means reach out, phone call, email, LinkedIn, whatever you want to do. Always happy to have a chat. Until next time. Happy new year.
Hope it’s been good so far. And I hope that you have a good rest of your January. See you.
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