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Newy Dev Update: November 2020

4 Dec, 2020 | 08 mins 01 secs

Our Dev Update for November 2020 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:

– We’re touching distance from Christmas and the Newcastle software development market is yet to put on the brakes. Why is that? What’s going to happen next? Let’s find out on this episode of “The Newy Dev Update.”

Okay, let’s look at November. So, Seek job postings in November 47, which is incredible. So it’s an increase of 10 month-on-month. So October we had about 37 and I’d like to note that this is individual job postings rather than actual vacancies available. There are a lot of jobs that were posted that had you know, multiple vacancies available. I think the biggest I saw was seven for the one posting. So the actual true number of roles advertised on Seek was closer to 80 which is just awesome to see.

It really shows that Newcastle as a region seems to believe that COVID and sort of the, the associated economic effects really are in the rear view mirror. A lot of confidence in the market. A lot of people hiring, super aggressively, which is awesome to see. I wanna jump back to the discussion we had a few episodes ago, on sort of the cyclical nature of the Newcastle development market. Normally we’d see sort of November/December, we’d really start to see quite a significant decrease. And it just hasn’t happened this year. Obviously 2020, really not a normal year in every possible respect. And it’s definitely carried the trend on here. This is what we’d normally see with respect to job flow. This is, I guess, the BAU sort of graph that we’ve really seen between 2015 to 2019. And this is what 2020 looks like so far.

So as you can see, it’s just so far from the norm. The market really has been super unusual in the way it has fluctuated over the past sort of nine to ten months. Are we returning to normal? Probably not, but hey, we’ll see. You’re probably thinking, why is the market doing this? There’s obvious factors. There’s some not so obvious factors but they’re all sort of stemming from the same thing. So let’s go into that a little bit. So first is the continued effects from COVID-19. As you’d expect, COVID really decimated the market. Sort of February, March, April, and honestly sort of killed confidence between May till about August. August is when we started to see job flow return to something faintly resembling normal. And now we’re back to abnormal, but for a good reason.

A lot of the international organisations, a lot of publicly traded organisations really got smashed during COVID-19. You know, share prices got belted. Companies with head offices in maybe England or the US, obviously not having as good of a time as companies helmed in Australia. So their hiring outlooks were really really decimated. And it just meant that a lot of those companies didn’t put on the staff that they really would have expected to. Now that we’re towards the tail end of 2020 companies are a bit more confident with respect to hiring.

And a lot of these larger organisations that would normally have hired quite a bit, sort of towards the March/April area, are starting to hire again now. So we’re seeing really large amounts of hiring from those large corporate entities. A lot from the defence sector in Newcastle, especially. Next is the remote factor. We’ve spoken at length about people looking to get out of the capital cities, trying to move somewhere with a bit of a nicer quality of life without having to spend, $6 million on a house or whatever. Whatever the house prices are in Sydney nowadays. And that’s really driven a lot of market growth in Newcastle. A lot of remote friendly companies, a lot of remote first companies have been posting a lot of ads here. I remember seeing Jobadder posted a bunch recently and they’re fully remote friendly. Of course not going to immediately benefit the Newcastle development market specifically. But look, as we see people move out of the capital cities here, work remote roles, the likelihood that we can pick those people up for roles in Newcastle and sort of keep them, I guess, within the Newcastle development ecosystem, as it were. That’s always a good opportunity to have.

So the fact that we’ve got, I guess, theoretically bums in seats in Newcastle at all is a really good sign. For more with respect to, I guess, the move from a capital city to Newcastle the drivers behind that and sort of how people find that move. My most recent episode of “Community Spotlight” with Lachy from Yarno is an absolute cracker. So I really do recommend you have a look. Lastly, a really big component to accelerated growth in the hiring market for Newcastle has been the funding that we’ve seen a lot of sort of the, the startups and scale-ups locally receive in the last 12 months or so.

A few good examples. SwitchDin started the year, I think, six or seven million. And it sounds like they’re about to get some more from a government in Europe. Pegasus, 28 million, I believe, at the start of the year. So really big numbers being thrown around or thrown into companies in Newcastle. And a lot of that’s going directly to investing in their technical capability to grow their products going forward. Just quickly, hot areas for Newcastle development as far as role availability, let’s get the easy ones out of the way, frontend and .net. These are just eternally hot areas in Newcastle. I think personally on our books, we’ve got about 10 or 11 front end roles at the moment. And we’ve got about the same amount for .Net. So if you’re someone who works in those spaces, we’ve always got roles available for you. And they’re good roles, they’re paying well. A lot of flexibility involved as well. So if you are keen, absolutely reach out. A few surprise packages.

We’ve got a couple of React Native mobile roles which you know, not super common in Newcastle. We talked a few months ago about a really interesting increase in mobile role availability. That seems to have continued for now, less so in the pure native stuff as far as you know, Kotlin and Swift, that sort of thing. A bit more in the framework cross-platform stuff. So mostly React Native. We’ve seen a couple of flutter roles, but React Native seems to be sort of the the emerging king of that market here. Another one really interesting. I think we’ve got about 12 Python roles on at the moment. Python obviously very popular language in its own right. Various applications around, backend development, embedded development, data science.

It can do a lot of different things. Most of the roles in Newcastle that we’re seeing are for backend and embedded development. But look, if you’re a Python developer who wants to get your feet a bit more wet in that space, we’ve definitely got roles available for you. One last thing. We all know 2020 has been a pretty crap year by and large. And I think one of the biggest things that people have been missing is the sort of the face-to-face social element. It’s been really cool to see, in the last sort of couple of weeks, a bunch of the Newcastle community meet ups starting to kick back on with an on-premise element. And we had IXDA, I know Blast Furnace has been back on prem in various capacities for a bit now. We had Newcastle’s Cyber Security Group come back, which was awesome. And we’ve got I2N’s Events moving back to an on-prem format, which is great. Really exciting to see that sort of continued return to, I guess, normality for the meetup scene. And I really hope that continues into 2021.

My understanding is that the annual holiday trivia that that gets put on will be running sort of the mid point of December as well, which is really great to see. I know there was maybe some question marks as to whether that would be happening, but, that’s gonna be a really cool event. And I think a fairly accessible event as well. So if you’re at all interested in just kind of seeing people ’cause I know a lot of people haven’t physically seen each other within nine months, definitely keep your eyes peeled. Keep your ears open. ‘Cause I dare say, we’ll be posting about that one pretty soon. That’s probably about it for this episode of “The Newy Dev Update.” I dare say this is probably the last one for the year. ‘Cause I can’t imagine there’s gonna be heaps to report on for December.

If you wanna have a bit of a discussion on what we’ve talked about here. If you’re someone who’s looking to get into the Newcastle development market, maybe moving here from one of the capital cities, maybe you just graduated from uni. I know exams have just wrapped up, please reach out. My phone number’s here, email’s here, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, whatever you wanna do. I’m absolutely more than happy to come and get a coffee and a beer, as a lot of people can attest.

Cheers again for watching, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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