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Our Dev Update for March 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.

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Transcription

Liam Potter:
Continued strong performance from the Newcastle, and honestly, the Australian development market means that salaries are going up, employees are having to offer more and more to secure the best talent. Are you doing enough? Let’s talk about it on this episode of “The Newy Dev Update.” Okay, so first off, let’s look at the state of the software development market when it comes to role volume in Newcastle. So we’re looking at the period the 15th of March to the 14th of April, we had 30 jobs posted, which I think is a decrease of one month-on-month.

Honestly, I wouldn’t look too much into that. That’s pretty steady. If I’m being blunt as well, Seek which is the metric we use for this, is becoming an increasingly unreliable way to source candidates. A Seek ad costs anywhere between $100 to $600 to post. The reality is you probably only get a candidate from it, one in three posts. As a result, the ROI on posting on platforms like that just simply isn’t there for a lot of people. As a result, people are looking at alternate sourcing methodologies, they’re posting on different Slack workspaces. They are looking through GitHubs. They’re doing word of mouth. They’re going to meetups, that sort of thing to try and find the talent that simply isn’t looking actively on Seek. They’re absolutely using agency recruiters as well. We have a bunch of roles on with a lot of clients that we haven’t historically worked with. And I think that’s a pretty good indicator as to the state of the market as it stands. When it’s all said and done, it’s really difficult at a consistent level to quantify role volume across a market, just because there’s a million different ways that people source. There are a bunch of roles that get filled that simply don’t get advertised externally. You know, someone just knows someone, they hire someone internally, that sort of thing. As a result we’ve been using Seek historically just as a good yardstick that people align with fairly well. They have good awareness of it. The reality is Seek as a metric might not be the most accurate one but it’s the best we can do. We’re not the Australian Bureau of Statistics here, unfortunately. So we’re running with what we can run with.

The big thing I want to cover in this episode is EVP, employee value proposition. It’s becoming increasingly important. And I think it’s a topic that a lot of people in Newcastle need to sort of wrap their head around. If we look at the market nationally, you’ve got Atlassian hiring something like a thousand devs at the moment, they’re on a pretty massive recruitment drive. A bunch of the big four banks are undergoing digital transformation. So you’ve got banks pretty much everywhere undergoing digital transformation really.

As a result of COVID, the market for software development for lack of a better word has nationalised and as a result the talent pool that exists is no longer, you know, one hour from your office, it’s the entire country or if you want to be a bit more specific within your time zone band. The blunt reality that means that in Newcastle, the developers that exist within this market now have an infinitesimal amount of opportunity available to them that they previously didn’t really have means that it’s increasingly incredibly difficult to source developers locally, retain developers locally. And as a result, employees are going to start to need to pull out a few more stops to really secure the best talent hold onto them for the foreseeable future. Historically, the EVP for the Newcastle market was that you could work a proper software development role with reasonable specialisation involved and live five minutes from the beach. You didn’t have to live in a capital city. You didn’t have to commute two hours each way and you didn’t have to sit in traffic, all of that sort of thing. That’s not a Newcastle specific benefit anymore, anyone can do that.

The reality is the commute is dying, especially within more technical fields, such as software development. Newcastle needs a new EVP as a general term. As a result a lot of companies are offering increased salaries. I’d say the salary banding for Newcastle has probably increased by about 10% in the last 18 months for software development. People are increasingly offering equity. They’re increasingly offering bonus schemes tied to individual performance and company performance as well. They’re offering option schemes, all that sort of stuff. They’re offering increase annual leave. They’re offering lunch at the office all these sorts of things, all these small benefits, the sweeteners that you need to lock people down and keep them there. If you’re a hiring manager who is maybe having a bit of trouble retaining talent at the moment, maybe having a bit of trouble securing talent in the first place I would urge you to really, really research EVP, try and get an understanding as to where you sit in that market.

If you’d like a bit of help with that we’d absolutely be happy to help. We’d love to have the conversation with you but more generally speaking I think Newcastle’s software development community is incredibly open, incredibly welcoming. I think if you reach out to a few figures that are in dev leadership or, you know, C level roles I’d imagine they’d be more than happy to, you know, go and grab a coffee, go and grab a beer, whatever.

On the flip side of that if you’re a software developer in a role that you might be not loving as much as you used to, maybe you’ve realised that there’s a whole wide world out there, honestly this is now the best time to have a look at like I said, salaries are equalising nationally. Absolutely means that salaries are improving in Newcastle companies that historically wouldn’t hire junior and mid-level are absolutely doing so now, there’s a lot of stuff out there. It’s absolutely a market that benefits the candidate at the moment more than it ever has.

So if you’re not a hundred percent happy with your role, honestly it’s the perfect time to look. Again we’d absolutely be happy to help out, feel free to reach out to myself or our new dev recruiter, Bronte. We’ve got good knowledge on the market. We can absolutely put you somewhere if you’re not a hundred percent happy. Just quickly, speaking of what we can offer, there’s a bunch of mid and senior and lead level roles available. We’ve got fullstack.net, backend.net So the C sharp and that sort of thing. We’ve got full stack JS. We’ve got pure frontend roles.

We’ve got mobile roles, both native and cross-platform we’ve got some embedded stuff available. There’s a bunch of interesting roles available in interesting companies that historically haven’t been super aggressive with their hiring pushes that are looking for the best people at the moment.

Everyone’s got a bit of money left over post COVID discretionary spending for businesses decreased pretty extensively during that period, everyone’s got a bit of money to burn and they’re trying to hire some good people for some interesting projects. So it’s a really good time to lock down something cool. Again, if you want to find out more, absolutely reach out to either myself or Bronte. For now, look, thank you so much for listening to this ep of “The Newy Dev Update.”

I’m sure I’ll see you at a meetup. I’m sure we’ll grab a coffee soon. Thanks heaps, bye.

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