December Overview

Numbers

Over December, the number of New Zealand IT jobs has dropped by about -50.2%.

A similar story in Australia, with the number of IT jobs dropping by about -41.08%.

Opinion

While some may have anticipated this downturn, I was caught off guard.

As the New Year's holidays come to a close, I think there may be some improvement in job opportunities. Many businesses may resume operations around the 8th, so let's keep an eye out for changes then.

Platform notes

I am pleased to announce the addition of data snapshot graphs to the updates page. This will provide a more clear overview of the data, making it easier for you to track progress and stay informed!

November Overview

Numbers

Over November, the number of New Zealand IT jobs has dropped by about -30.9%, while in Australia the drop is about -16%.

Opinion

Wow, not much good news this month, especially if you live in New Zealand. It looks like a bunch of infrastructure jobs have been lost too. This does not seem to bode well, given that the wider industry seems to be gravitating more than ever towards cloud solutions.

I am sure that the numbers will pick up though. It's just a matter of whether it is this year or the next.

As some have pointed out, the hardest hit by all of this will be new CS graduates, especially those focused on blockchain / ethereum tech.

In good news, IT exports are absolutely killing it in NZ. This year, NZ made 11 billion dollars in revenue with IT exports (https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2211/S00300/new-zealand-tech-exports-generated-nz115-billion-in-revenue-in-fy2022-up-91-on-the-previous-year.htm).

Auckland dominates, but Otago/Southand IT exports are up 26% in one year!

Here are the top IT companies in NZ:

Thanks so much to TIN for this information: https://tin100.com/2022-tin-report-pr/.

October Review

Welcome to your October jobs review!

Numbers

New Zealand

Over the last month, New Zealand jobs have been steady at a slight increase of +0.44%. Over the last 3 months, NZ jobs on Seek have declined by about -18%.

Australia

Australian jobs have performed far better than NZ, with an increase of +6.82% of jobs over the last month. Over the last 3 months, Australian job numbers have fallen by -11.08%.

Opinion

It is reassuring that job numbers haven't fallen significantly in NZ this month. They definitely fell last month (September, although I forgot to review it). Time will tell whether they will go up or down from here.

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are dominating IT jobs in the Pacific, which tracks with the current trend towards cloud in the wider industry.

It seems in the infra world, Azure and AWS have about 1/2 of the market each. AWS slightly higher in Australia, and Azure slightly higher in NZ. NZ is much more old-school, often preferring C# and Azure over JS & AWS systems.

Learning infra seems to be a good way to keep relevant in 2022. Personally, I'm trying to learn Azure.

I'm also trying to embrace legacy systems much more. It's very important to swallow your pride if you want to make that 💰. Legacy technology like PHP is clearly almost as highly in demand as JavaScript

Platform Notes

No updates this month in terms of platform. Just sitting back and letting the data roll in. We now have almost 5 months of data to compare.

In the future, I'm hoping to get job numbers by company into the dashboard. A number of companies list the same role 10 times for some reason, skewing the numbers.

September Update

Numbers

In the last month, NZ jobs are at -11%, and AU jobs are at -9.6%.

Over the last ~3 months, NZ jobs are at -18% and AU jobs are at -8.79%

Opinion

I would like to express my feelings on the NZ & AU job updates thusly

Sheeet is not good in the September NZ job market.

There is currently an understated & serious slow recession in the global economy overall, which shrinks all the non-greenback currency pools significantly.

There doesn't seem to be much downward movement in work from home jobs in NZ, but it seems likely to fall if such a bear job market continues. Some employers will have space to be in a position to take advantage of the excess.

I've been thinking that the fall could be because employers are posting jobs directly on LinkedIn instead of Seek, but I am not totally sure about that, and I certainly wouldn't count on it.

Developer Updates

Made some changes to the blog section. I've got some great feedback about the stacking graph -- I will change it one day I swear.

Am also looking to add Linkedin data to this as well.

August Updates

Numbers

In the last 30 days, NZ has had a slight increase of 2.67% in IT jobs based on the Seek dataset, while Australia has had a slightly higher increase of 5.16%.

Since data collection began on 19th of June 2022, NZ has had a 3.9% decrease in IT jobs, but Australia had a 0.58% increase in jobs.

Opinion

Despite the large tech layoffs in the United States and Europe due to the tech cooldown, the Pacific job market seems to be quite stable both in Australia and New Zealand. A slight decrease in NZ jobs is natural with so much unrest overseas.

The future of developers seems bright, especially those with experience. Tech shops seem to prefer more senior developers in bad times to reduce risk, which means that there should be a good market for experienced developers for some time. New developers may find it harder now, but with more stability in the market will come more opportunities.

Australia continues to hold great opportunities for NZ remote developers due to a favourable exchange rate and average wage.

First Post

This project is in its infancy. Loving building this thing, and look forward to sharing with you insights into the data once enough data comes through for me to do anything about it.

Thoughts

Getting insights into the IT industry is a bit of a black box. IT is split amongst so many different subfields, and it is sometimes hard to get the jobs impact of roles.

New technology is released every day (especially in the web space), and its one thing keeping on top of them, and its another to see the monetary demand of each technology and shortages in supply.

The IT industry has a lot of different jobs, and it's hard to know what's the best fit for you. A lot of tech is demeaned (e.g. PHP & Ruby) without a lot of thought to the fact that it's a great earner. I'm definitely guilty of this too.

At the same time, it's important to know that new technology takes a while to adopt, but if the technology is crushing its competition, then eventually it will likely be a popular hire in the industry.