Eh if you live in Aus construction gives tech a run for its money. Work everywhere, you can walk on-site and get >35p/hr with little to no experience. If your ticketed it's more like 80 per hour. Get yourself a abn a shovel and a drill and your off to the races.
NDIS work also pays similar to construction.
You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
I have two friends who work(ed) in the trades (plumbing and construction) and have talked about their experiences with me a lot, and you're not telling the full story here though. Sure the pay is good, but first of all it takes years of taking lessons, being subject to being ordered around and taken advantage of by more senior union members, tons of red tape and bureaucracy, and a lot of tests to actually move through the ranks, and you need to get training to do even base level stuff safely. So "just walk on site and get $35/hr" is kind of misleading. Moreover, the job takes a serious, serious toll on your health and body, far more than any office job would. So the pay might seem good at first, but you'll realize why it's that good pretty soon — and it's not just because of unions. The friend that was in construction got the fuck out of there literally as soon as she could, ran to get a white collar job even at a pay cut. My plumber friend is doing it because she failed out of trying to get a computer science degree, so she doesn't really have another career option, but believe you me, she would sell her soul to be able to do software instead of a trade if she could.
The grass might seem greener on the other side (like that "if architects had to work like programmers" article the other day), but there really isn't any industry that's as easy to work in and high paying as tech is. That might be a bubble that'll pop eventually (I suspect it might) but right now that's the reality.
What does tech pay in Australia? AU$80/hour = AU$160K/year which I think is ~US$110K/year. Big Tech TC starts at about $200K/year for straight out of college and quickly goes up to around $450K/year by mid-career. Plus you don't need to do physical labor or risk your health hauling stuff.
I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
Yeah there's bugger all of the work actually there though and the competition to get it is pretty high. I went through a bunch of interviews over the last year for a mix of systems engineer through to lvl1 support (beggars can't be choosers).
Most offers peaked at 85k. I did a half dozen interviews and had a few offers. Got a good mate who is a data analyst with a fair wack of experience, he struggles to find much available at 120k per annum let alone higher.
Job security in IT hasn't been great to me either. Prior to starting my own company I never had a role last >12 months due to some external factor deleting my job(e.g. company loses support contract). Meanwhile the whole time I've had constant offers to get back into construction. I'm not ticketed or anything I'm just reliable and turn up.
The lowish tech wages in Australia are in part explained by our economy being pretty unsophisticated. A data analyst (already of dubious utility at the best of times) is going to find getting work hard in a country with a population of 25M that moves very slowly and doesn't actually make anything. The same goes for most engineering roles. A lot of us just become glorified PMs.
IT is even worse, I work for a company that has >10K employees and we have 50 external IT staff which seems to be enough. The cattle side has won over in the "Pet vs cattle" analogy. After the initial setup, most SMEs will have a guy who comes in once a week.
My brother in law runs a small construction firm and said that his single hardest problem is finding decent reliable workers. The only reliable ones aren't decent (highschool dropouts with alcohol problems, couldn't be trusted to do act on their own initiative). The decent ones all think they can run their own construction company after a few months, so they disappear, never to succeed, because they don't realise how much more there is to running a company (particularly construction).
and you're not doing fly-in, fly-out to remote mining sites or hanging out in the ass-end of the world. 200k USD, and in a big city, with lots of perks.
I've done outside work in Australia and Canada, -40C and +40C, and remote IT not only pays better but means I live in a city and am walking distance from 4+ coffee shops and lunch options.
That said, if I could make IT wages bartending I'd totally be slinging drinks. Hard work, margins on booze are better than food but still tight, and brutal on your liver...
$160k AUD is the going rate for senior/principal roles in Australia.
$200k AUD roles are rare in Australia. They do exist but hard to come by.
Most $200k+ AUD devs I know will be working at Atlassian, Amazon, Goggle, not many options in AU, tech is quite narrow, not much variety. It’s also the RSU’s that push them in to the $200k+ bracket.
Comments
Eh if you live in Aus construction gives tech a run for its money. Work everywhere, you can walk on-site and get >35p/hr with little to no experience. If your ticketed it's more like 80 per hour. Get yourself a abn a shovel and a drill and your off to the races.
NDIS work also pays similar to construction.
You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
I have two friends who work(ed) in the trades (plumbing and construction) and have talked about their experiences with me a lot, and you're not telling the full story here though. Sure the pay is good, but first of all it takes years of taking lessons, being subject to being ordered around and taken advantage of by more senior union members, tons of red tape and bureaucracy, and a lot of tests to actually move through the ranks, and you need to get training to do even base level stuff safely. So "just walk on site and get $35/hr" is kind of misleading. Moreover, the job takes a serious, serious toll on your health and body, far more than any office job would. So the pay might seem good at first, but you'll realize why it's that good pretty soon — and it's not just because of unions. The friend that was in construction got the fuck out of there literally as soon as she could, ran to get a white collar job even at a pay cut. My plumber friend is doing it because she failed out of trying to get a computer science degree, so she doesn't really have another career option, but believe you me, she would sell her soul to be able to do software instead of a trade if she could.
The grass might seem greener on the other side (like that "if architects had to work like programmers" article the other day), but there really isn't any industry that's as easy to work in and high paying as tech is. That might be a bubble that'll pop eventually (I suspect it might) but right now that's the reality.
What does tech pay in Australia? AU$80/hour = AU$160K/year which I think is ~US$110K/year. Big Tech TC starts at about $200K/year for straight out of college and quickly goes up to around $450K/year by mid-career. Plus you don't need to do physical labor or risk your health hauling stuff.
I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
Yeah there's bugger all of the work actually there though and the competition to get it is pretty high. I went through a bunch of interviews over the last year for a mix of systems engineer through to lvl1 support (beggars can't be choosers).
Most offers peaked at 85k. I did a half dozen interviews and had a few offers. Got a good mate who is a data analyst with a fair wack of experience, he struggles to find much available at 120k per annum let alone higher.
Job security in IT hasn't been great to me either. Prior to starting my own company I never had a role last >12 months due to some external factor deleting my job(e.g. company loses support contract). Meanwhile the whole time I've had constant offers to get back into construction. I'm not ticketed or anything I'm just reliable and turn up.
The lowish tech wages in Australia are in part explained by our economy being pretty unsophisticated. A data analyst (already of dubious utility at the best of times) is going to find getting work hard in a country with a population of 25M that moves very slowly and doesn't actually make anything. The same goes for most engineering roles. A lot of us just become glorified PMs.
IT is even worse, I work for a company that has >10K employees and we have 50 external IT staff which seems to be enough. The cattle side has won over in the "Pet vs cattle" analogy. After the initial setup, most SMEs will have a guy who comes in once a week.
My brother in law runs a small construction firm and said that his single hardest problem is finding decent reliable workers. The only reliable ones aren't decent (highschool dropouts with alcohol problems, couldn't be trusted to do act on their own initiative). The decent ones all think they can run their own construction company after a few months, so they disappear, never to succeed, because they don't realise how much more there is to running a company (particularly construction).
The American tech industry is far more generous than in other countries, and Americans tend to forget this fact.
and you're not doing fly-in, fly-out to remote mining sites or hanging out in the ass-end of the world. 200k USD, and in a big city, with lots of perks.
I've done outside work in Australia and Canada, -40C and +40C, and remote IT not only pays better but means I live in a city and am walking distance from 4+ coffee shops and lunch options.
That said, if I could make IT wages bartending I'd totally be slinging drinks. Hard work, margins on booze are better than food but still tight, and brutal on your liver...
$160k AUD is the going rate for senior/principal roles in Australia.
$200k AUD roles are rare in Australia. They do exist but hard to come by.
Most $200k+ AUD devs I know will be working at Atlassian, Amazon, Goggle, not many options in AU, tech is quite narrow, not much variety. It’s also the RSU’s that push them in to the $200k+ bracket.
(Not saying anything in your comment is wrong, just an additional data point)
For "big tech" in Australia, ~$160k is pretty much the starting compensation for graduate/entry level SWEs.