I lived and worked as a dev in Seattle for 8 years before moving to Sydney. I want nothing more than for Australia to have a thriving tech scene but I haven’t seen much progress in that area since I moved here 5 years ago. I still love it and have no plans to go back. I just wish there was more opportunity here and not so much constant pressure to move back to the US for increased salary and challenge.
Funny. I lived in Seattle for 5 years before I moved to Sydney, where I lived for 5 years. That was a different era though, tech wasn't the industry it is now and the internet still felt new. I moved down in 2003 and my American accent helped me land a job I wasn't qualified for (having self taught myself some php and java in Seattle, mostly working as a bartender though). In 2005 I started a small software shop with some friends. Back then (2003) the Ruby user's group was too small to get a reservation at a pub so we'd have to partner up with the Smalltalk guys. Rails came out a year or so later and that changed.
I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane.
Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.
I just don’t see _as much_ self-directed ambition or obsession? Going to a meetup in Seattle or SF in the early 2010s there were serious obsessives. Masters of domains like Go or JavaScript and someone from Sequoia at the Startup Weekend. Always flocks of folks looking to start their next business. That same bug just never hit here?
This I find weird, surely there are people who can sense opportunities unlockable by tech and Australia is not at all easier or any less expensive than the U.S., I still can’t quite put my finger on it. For me there’s still a magical cultural element to a place like SF, and to an extent – Seattle, when it comes to creating new opportunities.
Two factors I think: (1) obsessives have a higher likelihood to follow their obsession into immigration-a factor which works to the advantage of certain parts of the US, to the detriment of most of the rest of the world; (2) Australian investors tend to have a more risk-averse attitude, they will offer less money and demand a bigger stake for it, many of them will prefer later stage startups to the truly early stage ones
Lots of factors involved, some more regulatory others more cultural. One is that Australia’s property market has been so hot for so long it sucks up a lot of investment; the US market, while recently being quite hot as well, has historically been much more mixed (the US had a big price drop around the time of the GFC, Australia saw some declines but they were a lot smaller). Another is the US legal system tends to be more borrower-friendly in bankruptcy, foreclosures, etc, making people more willing to take out loans to fund their business ideas
Australia in some ways is the opposite of the US. Too much regulation and not enough effort to help people start businesses. It really needs to change and they’re missing a big opportunity to make the start up scene better. Just as long as we don’t do it while throwing out sensible regulations.
