Job Hunting Tips for OZ

[Ash007]

Yep. you are right. For medicine, which is the best?

I don't know about other states. But Sydney U has the best reputation for medicine. However, they don't accept undergrads for their medicine program anymore. You actually, have to have a degree, sit for a test and interview before they would accept you into their medicine program. I remember they changed this around 95 when I started my studies in UNSW. Because of this, medicine in UNSW became very popular and competitive. I'm not sure if that is still the case now, there is a big scandal that happened to the medicine faculty a couple of years back that tarnished it reputation.

By the way, what are the definition for you guys for High-end IT? I'm a bit confused over what you guys mean by high-end, low-end IT jobs. From what I have gathered, I could be wrong here, are you guys referring to Oracle, DBAs, ERP etc stuff? What about programming jobs? Software development in R&D? Sydney has google which recently announced google wave that was developed here. Shouldn't that be considered cutting edge stuff as well? May not pay as much as what you guys are looking at in the ERP area. There are innovation in this country, maybe not on a general country wide level. Aussies did invent the WiFi, we have good programmers, coders in this country. I would even hazard a guess that there are very talented people in this country compared to what you can find in Singapore. Its probably not in the same "area" of IT you guys are thinking of.

 

[scroobal]

Thanks, looks like they have gone along the way of Melbourne U, following the American format. I was told that eventually all Uni will follow that format including for courses such as law.

One interesting point that I have uncovered is that people from the old estblishment sent their kids to Uni of Adelaide for both Medicine and Denistry because of its history. Apparently they have garnered the most number of Nobel laurette. Its not popular with Asians though and they prefer Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney cannot be beaten if you are into corporate law, high finance etc. The networking in UNSW and USyd is tremendous. Especially for Asian migrants with no prior links and network, its beneficial.

At the end of the day, whether you live in Perth, Adelaide etc, your kids will do much better going to Sydney or Melbourne. The critical mass and depth is there.

I find that it intresting to listen to broadly as one uncovers gems every now and then.

I don't know about other states. But Sydney U has the best reputation for medicine. However, they don't accept undergrads for their medicine program anymore. You actually, have to have a degree, sit for a test and interview before they would accept you into their medicine program. I remember they changed this around 95 when I started my studies in UNSW. Because of this, medicine in UNSW became very popular and competitive. I'm not sure if that is still the case now, there is a big scandal that happened to the medicine faculty a couple of years back that tarnished it reputation.

High end IT is cutting edge, high content of original design, greenfields development. Similar to Silicon Valley (but certainly not similar and no where close). It revolves around innovation, and bridge building. The software are developed primarily from ground up and not off the shelf where some level of customisation is done but the basically plain vanilla.

As you know, Canberra is not an industrial city. There is no labour intensive activity. Its purpose built for a capital. The median income is the highest of any city in Australia. Because the Federal Government is there, so are the decision makers. Major firms that support Federal Govt have major offices such as IT, Pharmaceutical, Defence, as well as lobby groups. There are also lot a Americans and Europeans who are essentially principals that tender for jobs and solutions. Another city that has high end IT but at a smaller scale is Adelaide - North Adelaide where Australian Defence industry and Defence infrastructure exist. Besides high level IT , Engineers and Project Managers of all disciplines make huge sums for the high level work. Work on Aircraft, submarines, DSO work etc. Also alot of americans as it is the base camp for their tracking station in Pine Gap etc. Again many fly in for the week and fly out for weekend. Families still prefer Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne is only 45 minutes by air.

Mid Level is similar to banks and some industries where main platforms are bought off the shelf and customised to some extent for local condition. IT staff however in Banks compared to other industries however are well paid because Banks generally to do well and the value going thru it is very high. Banks are pretty much automated and IT is a vital function. IT takes up substantial budget and IT head is usually the No. 4 in a bank. If you reach IT management in a bank, no need to do contracting work anywhere unless you love IT work. IT management remuneration is very high. Thats why people aim for it.

By the way, what are the definition for you guys for High-end IT? I'm a bit confused over what you guys mean by high-end, low-end IT jobs. From what I have gathered, I could be wrong here, are you guys referring to Oracle, DBAs, ERP etc stuff? What about programming jobs? Software development in R&D? Sydney has google which recently announced google wave that was developed here. Shouldn't that be considered cutting edge stuff as well? May not pay as much as what you guys are looking at in the ERP area. There are innovation in this country, maybe not on a general country wide level. Aussies did invent the WiFi, we have good programmers, coders in this country. I would even hazard a guess that there are very talented people in this country compared to what you can find in Singapore. Its probably not in the same "area" of IT you guys are thinking of.

 

[Ash007]

Its actually a good idea they insist about this format. I remember one of the reason for this is that a lot of undergrads took up medicine because they scored the top marks in HSC. After, 1, 2 years studying they realised its not the profession they want to be in. Hence, the "stricter" criteria in medicine. Studying medicine is a lifelong commitment.

UNSW is a mini ASEAN when I was there. Certain eateries, cafes are dominated by asians from certain part of the world. Every few steps you take you see an asian. In the commerce faculty I think it got as high as 70% asians, this includes local and overseas students. The problem with this is some students dont' mix around. Sinkies especially, like to "stick" with one another and copy assignments off each other. Occasionally, they will "venture" to another group if they can't manage to finish an assignment. You can see this happening in UNSW on a normal uni days where people from certain countries sits around each other. Most of them, especially the overseas student, have this idea that going to Uni is to get a paper. Just pass everything and go back to get a job. You are right about the networking, with an environment like this its rip for establishing a good social network. But don't forget the right attitude is important in achieving this. Not having a Sinkie mentality helps a lot.

Check out also the Aussie equivalent of prestigiouse university in Australia. Over here its termed the sand stone university. in general universities in this group are known for Law, Medicine, because of their long standing establishment. This is the reason for people sending their kids to Uni Adelaide for medicine and dentistry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandstone_universities

There is also the group of 8, which is considered the Ivy League of Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_Eight_(Australian_universities)


Side question: Are you sending your kids to uni? planning to go back to one? or just asking out of curiosity?

Thanks, looks like they have gone along the way of Melbourne U, following the American format. I was told that eventually all Uni will follow that format including for courses such as law.

One interesting point that I have uncovered is that people from the old estblishment sent their kids to Uni of Adelaide for both Medicine and Denistry because of its history. Apparently they have garnered the most number of Nobel laurette. Its not popular with Asians though and they prefer Melbourne and Sydney. Sydney cannot be beaten if you are into corporate law, high finance etc. The networking in UNSW and USyd is tremendous. Especially for Asian migrants with no prior links and network, its beneficial.

At the end of the day, whether you live in Perth, Adelaide etc, your kids will do much better going to Sydney or Melbourne. The critical mass and depth is there.

I find that it intresting to listen to broadly as one uncovers gems every now and then.

I don't think Canberra is the only place where this High end IT is happening. Its happening in Sydney and Melbourne as well. In terms of high contents of original design, greenfields development, it definitely exist in Sydney. Maybe not as close to Silicon Valley like you said. There is definitely a lot companies that are doing these here. The problem is finding the tens of companies that are doing this versus the hundreds that are doing the low-end stuff.

High end IT is cutting edge, high content of original design, greenfields development. Similar to Silicon Valley (but certainly not similar and no where close). It revolves around innovation, and bridge building. The software are developed primarily from ground up and not off the shelf where some level of customisation is done but the basically plain vanilla.

As you know, Canberra is not an industrial city. There is no labour intensive activity. Its purpose built for a capital. The median income is the highest of any city in Australia. Because the Federal Government is there, so are the decision makers. Major firms that support Federal Govt have major offices such as IT, Pharmaceutical, Defence, as well as lobby groups. There are also lot a Americans and Europeans who are essentially principals that tender for jobs and solutions. Another city that has high end IT but at a smaller scale is Adelaide - North Adelaide where Australian Defence industry and Defence infrastructure exist. Besides high level IT , Engineers and Project Managers of all disciplines make huge sums for the high level work. Work on Aircraft, submarines, DSO work etc. Also alot of americans as it is the base camp for their tracking station in Pine Gap etc. Again many fly in for the week and fly out for weekend. Families still prefer Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne is only 45 minutes by air.

Mid Level is similar to banks and some industries where main platforms are bought off the shelf and customised to some extent for local condition. IT staff however in Banks compared to other industries however are well paid because Banks generally to do well and the value going thru it is very high. Banks are pretty much automated and IT is a vital function. IT takes up substantial budget and IT head is usually the No. 4 in a bank. If you reach IT management in a bank, no need to do contracting work anywhere unless you love IT work. IT management remuneration is very high. Thats why people aim for it.

 

[scroobal]

Thanks, just building up my knowledge base. Like to share when people ask me. Curious by nature.

Side question: Are you sending your kids to uni? planning to go back to one? or just asking out of curiosity?

 

[scroobal]

Could you or anyone else share which companies do greenfields development in IT in Sydney. Qantas that I am aware stopped doing it long time ago but now moved to off the shelf software that they customise. It can be DB, Design Architecture, Running Proof of concept etc. None of the finance chaps do that. The closest is NSW govt contracts but they tend to do the high end IT stuff in Canberra except for transport related projects which already have off the shelf software or at the home country of the vendor. The low end is at the box belt in Paramatta.

Have a contact (actully another SBF forummer) that does sourcing for the Canberra guys and it ill be a big help. Even Gartner could not help him.

I don't think Canberra is the only place where this High end IT is happening. Its happening in Sydney and Melbourne as well. In terms of high contents of original design, greenfields development, it definitely exist in Sydney. Maybe not as close to Silicon Valley like you said. There is definitely a lot companies that are doing these here. The problem is finding the tens of companies that are doing this versus the hundreds that are doing the low-end stuff.

 

[fishbuff]

.. I would even hazard a guess that there are very talented people in this country compared to what you can find in Singapore. Its probably not in the same "area" of IT you guys are thinking of.

talents require time, energy and opportunities to develop. U cannot have talents at the snap of the finger. Singapore govt failed to see this point and it imports in FTs that the expense of providing opportunities to the local citizens. If every single companies care only for the bottomline, then any self-confessed FTs can do the jobs at 1/3 of the prices and live 10 to a room somewhere in SG.

There is little motivation among the IT professionals in SG to pursue their career in the technical lines, so where can they go next when they hit 40? insurance of property agents are the first 2 jobs that come to my mind followed by taxi drivers. I have seen many manufacturing engineers from my past companies resorting to these jobs. There arent simply any unions nor economic support for them in SG.

 

[Ash007]

Could you or anyone else share which companies do greenfields development in IT in Sydney. Qantas that I am aware stopped doing it long time ago but now moved to off the shelf software that they customise. It can be DB, Design Architecture, Running Proof of concept etc. None of the finance chaps do that. The closest is NSW govt contracts but they tend to do the high end IT stuff in Canberra except for transport related projects which already have off the shelf software or at the home country of the vendor. The low end is at the box belt in Paramatta.

Have a contact (actully another SBF forummer) that does sourcing for the Canberra guys and it ill be a big help. Even Gartner could not help him.

Sorry, I left it very vague to avoid mentioning names. I suppose it does depend on your definition of high-end stuff. I've only been back in Sydney for 1.5 years, so my knowledge in the field could still be sub-par. I'm basing most of this on my previous experiences in Singapore. I'm still a low rung software engineer here. Tell me if you think this is high-end or low-end.

We run about 18K+ testfiles for one of the software we develop here. The actual product that software runs on is sold throughout the world. To run all the testfiles on the actual product itself would take a couple of days. And we do this everytime for every bug, features that is added. We have our own software that we developed in-house to "emulate" the product. It actually runs an OS on top of another OS in the server. This is farmed out to our server farms, Mac G5s, you can guess what architecture our product runs on now , and could be done in around 45min. We also heavily customised and developed tracking, databases, management/reporting software for our needs. Which testfiles crashes, data changes and automated this to give an indication if the software change is acceptable or not.

Note, I'm only describing what we need to do for our software testing, not the actual development of the software. There is more there which I'm not comfortable in writing this out. I recently did an evaluation on a 17K big blue POWER6 server on seeing if we can replace some of our current setup. Everything was setup and performance testing was done compared to our existing server. Turns out, the 17K server is only twice as fast as an older 2K machine we got off ebay. This is just one of the software we have here, other software we develop has similar approaches applied to it.

What I want to point out is that, we are a very lean organisation, we use parts, off-shelf or in-house for what we need, ideas are thrown up on a daily basis to see if it would work or not. If this was a banking/finance company, we would have bought the big blue server at 17K each and used those instead. However, compared to the previous company I was in, testing in this case seem to be a league on its own. Manual testing is still done in my old company. I once asked our GM why does our department are still here, while the trend seem to be moving to India/China in other parts of the world. He replied its because we are actually "lower cost" compared to them. We work smarter here. I'm learning a lot here since I started, Linux, OSX, Windows Flavours.

If you don't think this is high-end, could you please explain to me what do you mean by high-end then? Maybe I'm still inexperienced in this field to understand all this. Are we talking about NASA level kind of high-end?

 

[scroobal]

No need to mention your company, others that you are familiar with.

Your last point about NASA came close to the spot. I suspect that you dealing in the commercial space, commercial market and commercial product. Not the area that I am talking about. These normally have off the shelf software as the core but require customisation

Looking more towards defence, public infrastructure, satellite comms, heavy encryption, predictive systems etc. The closest commericial product falling into this group would be nokia, motorola. I recall that Motorola moved its R&D from Adelaide to Sydney about 3 years ago. Its those kind of stuff.

Sorry, I left it very vague to avoid mentioning names. I suppose it does depend on your definition of high-end stuff. I've only been back in Sydney for 1.5 years, so my knowledge in the field could still be sub-par. I'm basing most of this on my previous experiences in Singapore. I'm still a low rung software engineer here. Tell me if you think this is high-end or low-end.

We run about 18K+ testfiles for one of the software we develop here. The actual product that software runs on is sold throughout the world. To run all the testfiles on the actual product itself would take a couple of days. And we do this everytime for every bug, features that is added. We have our own software that we developed in-house to "emulate" the product. It actually runs an OS on top of another OS in the server. This is farmed out to our server farms, Mac G5s, you can guess what architecture our product runs on now , and could be done in around 45min. We also heavily customised and developed tracking, databases, management/reporting software for our needs. Which testfiles crashes, data changes and automated this to give an indication if the software change is acceptable or not.

Note, I'm only describing what we need to do for our software testing, not the actual development of the software. There is more there which I'm not comfortable in writing this out. I recently did an evaluation on a 17K big blue POWER6 server on seeing if we can replace some of our current setup. Everything was setup and performance testing was done compared to our existing server. Turns out, the 17K server is only twice as fast as an older 2K machine we got off ebay. This is just one of the software we have here, other software we develop has similar approaches applied to it.

What I want to point out is that, we are a very lean organisation, we use parts, off-shelf or in-house for what we need, ideas are thrown up on a daily basis to see if it would work or not. If this was a banking/finance company, we would have bought the big blue server at 17K each and used those instead. However, compared to the previous company I was in, testing in this case seem to be a league on its own. Manual testing is still done in my old company. I once asked our GM why does our department are still here, while the trend seem to be moving to India/China in other parts of the world. He replied its because we are actually "lower cost" compared to them. We work smarter here. I'm learning a lot here since I started, Linux, OSX, Windows Flavours.

If you don't think this is high-end, could you please explain to me what do you mean by high-end then? Maybe I'm still inexperienced in this field to understand all this. Are we talking about NASA level kind of high-end?

 

[scroobal]

Its one of those saddest things. The govt encouraged technical vocations and even created a technical stream and screwed everyone's lifes.

Its has even gone into accountancy. Its cheaper to get an accountant from overseas.

talents require time, energy and opportunities to develop. U cannot have talents at the snap of the finger. Singapore govt failed to see this point and it imports in FTs that the expense of providing opportunities to the local citizens. If every single companies care only for the bottomline, then any self-confessed FTs can do the jobs at 1/3 of the prices and live 10 to a room somewhere in SG.

There is little motivation among the IT professionals in SG to pursue their career in the technical lines, so where can they go next when they hit 40? insurance of property agents are the first 2 jobs that come to my mind followed by taxi drivers. I have seen many manufacturing engineers from my past companies resorting to these jobs. There arent simply any unions nor economic support for them in SG.

 

[Satan]

Its one of those saddest things. The govt encouraged technical vocations and even created a technical stream and screwed everyone's lifes.

Its has even gone into accountancy. Its cheaper to get an accountant from overseas.

Sad fact of reality for Singapore eh? At least this problem is not really. there in Oz because of the minimum wage.

 

[fishbuff]

Its one of those saddest things. The govt encouraged technical vocations and even created a technical stream and screwed everyone's lifes.

Its has even gone into accountancy. Its cheaper to get an accountant from overseas.

two of my malay ex-colleagues showed talents in IT but because of the environment and lack of resources/opportunity, they can only achieve desktop/operator role. I tried to encourage one of them to take on oracle dba but it is just too hard for me to do so from oz and they are in sg.

i strongly believe that tertiary education should be made readily available to all singaporeans and not just a tiny sector of the social elites. when i look around my relatives and friends, i wonder, if they have such opportunity to study, all would have achieved and become current engineers and professionals. But Nooo.. some dickheads in the govt controlled this to stratify the society.

 

[IWC2006]

I suspect that all along you have been talking about mid and low level IT jobs and task and I have been talking about the high end. In that case, you are probably right about. You might not be familiar with the top end.

I realised that when I saw your comment about Gartner.

Aiya, if you are talking about R&D, robotics or scientific type of software development then it make sense to create the base in Canberra. Then why you mentioned about Oracle DBA in the first place? BTW, u don't call those earning $800-900+ per day developers as low-end ok, u can name them as 'mainstream',as they develop custom software for a particular business function and they require specific product and domain knowledge. Low-end refer to desktop / helpdesk engineers which require little logic programming.

U seem to backup your words using Gartner a lot, but I don't really place too much weights on them.

 

[IWC2006]

Sorry, I left it very vague to avoid mentioning names. I suppose it does depend on your definition of high-end stuff. I've only been back in Sydney for 1.5 years, so my knowledge in the field could still be sub-par. I'm basing most of this on my previous experiences in Singapore. I'm still a low rung software engineer here. Tell me if you think this is high-end or low-end.

We run about 18K+ testfiles for one of the software we develop here. The actual product that software runs on is sold throughout the world. To run all the testfiles on the actual product itself would take a couple of days. And we do this everytime for every bug, features that is added. We have our own software that we developed in-house to "emulate" the product. It actually runs an OS on top of another OS in the server. This is farmed out to our server farms, Mac G5s, you can guess what architecture our product runs on now , and could be done in around 45min. We also heavily customised and developed tracking, databases, management/reporting software for our needs. Which testfiles crashes, data changes and automated this to give an indication if the software change is acceptable or not.

Note, I'm only describing what we need to do for our software testing, not the actual development of the software. There is more there which I'm not comfortable in writing this out. I recently did an evaluation on a 17K big blue POWER6 server on seeing if we can replace some of our current setup. Everything was setup and performance testing was done compared to our existing server. Turns out, the 17K server is only twice as fast as an older 2K machine we got off ebay. This is just one of the software we have here, other software we develop has similar approaches applied to it.

What I want to point out is that, we are a very lean organisation, we use parts, off-shelf or in-house for what we need, ideas are thrown up on a daily basis to see if it would work or not. If this was a banking/finance company, we would have bought the big blue server at 17K each and used those instead. However, compared to the previous company I was in, testing in this case seem to be a league on its own. Manual testing is still done in my old company. I once asked our GM why does our department are still here, while the trend seem to be moving to India/China in other parts of the world. He replied its because we are actually "lower cost" compared to them. We work smarter here. I'm learning a lot here since I started, Linux, OSX, Windows Flavours.

If you don't think this is high-end, could you please explain to me what do you mean by high-end then? Maybe I'm still inexperienced in this field to understand all this. Are we talking about NASA level kind of high-end?

I corrected him as you don't refer IT development in OZ as 'low-end' but should be named 'mainstream'. Even for mainstream development, one needs to be very strong with their product and domain knowledge. For instance, to customise a software in the financial industry, a firm usually ask for prior experience in similiar field or specific domain experience eg.frontoffice development exp. Its a competitive industry by itself and it pays well, so really 'low-end' is not the righ word to use.

 

[IWC2006]

two of my malay ex-colleagues showed talents in IT but because of the environment and lack of resources/opportunity, they can only achieve desktop/operator role. I tried to encourage one of them to take on oracle dba but it is just too hard for me to do so from oz and they are in sg.

i strongly believe that tertiary education should be made readily available to all singaporeans and not just a tiny sector of the social elites. when i look around my relatives and friends, i wonder, if they have such opportunity to study, all would have achieved and become current engineers and professionals. But Nooo.. some dickheads in the govt controlled this to stratify the society.

Practically technical IT field is dead in Sg. Everyone strives to become managers or Architect. In Sg, IT development is considered as a 'low-end' job.

Sg gov recently paid top dollar to hire a MIT professor to run the 4th Singapore design university, inspiring to become the 'MIT of the East' - I doubt it will be successful, since innovation is practically none in Sg and IT is a driving force of innovation.

Its good to have a heart to create something but if theres no soul then it will not work.

 

[Ash007]

Yah, I got kind of confused when Oracle, DBA were thrown around. If NASA level kind of development is what you are talking, then no, I don't really know of any company that is doing this kind of work here. CSIRO and the Universities in Australia are probably your best chance of looking for people like this. Do you know there is actually a miniature nuclear reactor in UNSW? There is also a research project to send miniature satellites into orbit during my uni days.

No need to mention your company, others that you are familiar with.

Your last point about NASA came close to the spot. I suspect that you dealing in the commercial space, commercial market and commercial product. Not the area that I am talking about. These normally have off the shelf software as the core but require customisation

Looking more towards defence, public infrastructure, satellite comms, heavy encryption, predictive systems etc. The closest commericial product falling into this group would be nokia, motorola. I recall that Motorola moved its R&D from Adelaide to Sydney about 3 years ago. Its those kind of stuff.

I agree, there is so much stuff in "mainstream" development that is lacking in Singapore after I started working here. It can have its own challenges that I have never thought before while working back home.

Aiya, if you are talking about R&D, robotics or scientific type of software development then it make sense to create the base in Canberra. Then why you mentioned about Oracle DBA in the first place? BTW, u don't call those earning $800-900+ per day developers as low-end ok, u can name them as 'mainstream',as they develop custom software for a particular business function and they require specific product and domain knowledge. Low-end refer to desktop / helpdesk engineers which require little logic programming.

U seem to backup your words using Gartner a lot, but I don't really place too much weights on them.

I corrected him as you don't refer IT development in OZ as 'low-end' but should be named 'mainstream'. Even for mainstream development, one needs to be very strong with their product and domain knowledge. For instance, to customise a software in the financial industry, a firm usually ask for prior experience in similiar field or specific domain experience eg.frontoffice development exp. Its a competitive industry by itself and it pays well, so really 'low-end' is not the righ word to use.

And that is sad irony of IT in Singapore, everyone wants to become a manager/Architect. The title comes with a lot of "respect" in Singapore hence the push to become one. A lot of unnecessary office politics arise due to someone got promoted, got a better review etc. However, most managers/architect I've seen back home are crap. The only reason they were in that position was due to seniority, politics, able to POR LAMPAR with the boss better then you. In my personal opinion Singapore won't be able to be innovative, creative the way PAPies said it would be for the simple reason that sinkies mentality still exists. Someone should write a book, program called, "Unsinkified yourself!" . The MIT professor probably got paid top dollars and retired at the end with no real results ever achieved.

Practically technical IT field is dead in Sg. Everyone strives to become managers or Architect. In Sg, IT development is considered as a 'low-end' job.

Sg gov recently paid top dollar to hire a MIT professor to run the 4th Singapore design university, inspiring to become the 'MIT of the East' - I doubt it will be successful, since innovation is practically none in Sg and IT is a driving force of innovation.

Its good to have a heart to create something but if theres no soul then it will not work.

 

[scroobal]

I am with you 100%. Singaporeans who can get into Uni in a 1st world country can't get into Singapore Uni. How absurd is that. So what happens to those that can't afford to go overseas. We all have friends anmd relatives as you correctly pointed out that we know.

For years, they wanted to make NUS some kind of elite but it cost them dearly. Makes me even more mad when they had kept 20% quoto for Malaysians some of whom had worst score than Singaporeans who could not get in.

i strongly believe that tertiary education should be made readily available to all singaporeans and not just a tiny sector of the social elites. when i look around my relatives and friends, i wonder, if they have such opportunity to study, all would have achieved and become current engineers and professionals. But Nooo.. some dickheads in the govt controlled this to stratify the society.

 

[scroobal]

Agree with you. Even those genuinely like the job are not called for an interview if they are singaporeans because the employer is scared that they going to ask very high pay. Really sad.

Practically technical IT field is dead in Sg. Everyone strives to become managers or Architect. In Sg, IT development is considered as a 'low-end' job.

 

[scroobal]

You nailed it when you mentioned CSIRO. ( just don't work for them - pay to low but their tendered work) Another example is a predictive system that ATO uses. The core design usually comes from the US or Isreal. Centrelink also has great stuff. These guys got huge budgets for R&D unlike public listed companies that shy away from trying anything that did not come off the shelf and already used by competitors. Oracle DB is quite central in these things.

Some of them is groundbreaking stuff and damn interesting. There is one phonetic engine that is able to throw out East Europeans names as these tend to go into watchlist etc. But I doubt if the cicil libertarians would allow it.

You want to consider working the likes of Tenix etc. Guarantee you satisfaction, wonderful remuneration and high FF points as they never located in the big cities so they tend to cover trips home. You would be in 46% tax bracket and well over it.

http://www.careersfasttrack.com.au/Tbq/Article.aspx?magid=7&articleid=27

Yah, I got kind of confused when Oracle, DBA were thrown around. If NASA level kind of development is what you are talking, then no, I don't really know of any company that is doing this kind of work here. CSIRO and the Universities in Australia are probably your best chance of looking for people like this. Do you know there is actually a miniature nuclear reactor in UNSW? There is also a research project to send miniature satellites into orbit during my uni days.

 

[scroobal]

You are right. Ever seen Aussie primary school kids colouring, cutting and pasting practically every day especially from reception to year 5. Thats how you start them on the creative journey.

You ask an Aussie kid what is teal, they will tell you that its colour close to blue. The Singaporean would have no clue. You go to Bunnings, an aussie middle aged mum will ask the store asst for a particular nail by size and function. Singaporeans will talk, hand sign etc.

How to innovate.

Aussie kids will be going gaming and some will end up de3signing new games. We will end get hooked till kingdom come.

since innovation is practically none in Sg and IT is a driving force of innovation.

Its good to have a heart to create something but if theres no soul then it will not work.

 

[scroobal]

Some are R&D. The bulk is building systems, not off the shelf. Sorry if I did not make it clear. I actually kept repeating that its not off the shelf. If you work in a Bank IT, you can also work in the area.

Tend to disagree about your definition of mainstream. Mainstream has high end, mid level and low end. Those outside mainstream are typically gaming, proprietary software for small applications like remote senses, cameras, auto systems and R&D work etc. Very specialised in nature.

A case in point is centrelink system which requires all similar types of IT people and IT functions like a bank but there are no available software. Its very smiliar to a bank but a banks's receivables system won't do as the main platform. When completed a similar category of IT people and IT functions to that of banks are required. Its still mainstream. Its the design and build phase that is called High End.

Aiya, if you are talking about R&D, robotics or scientific type of software development then it make sense to create the base in Canberra. Then why you mentioned about Oracle DBA in the first place? BTW, u don't call those earning $800-900+ per day developers as low-end ok, u can name them as 'mainstream',as they develop custom software for a particular business function and they require specific product and domain knowledge. Low-end refer to desktop / helpdesk engineers which require little logic programming.

U seem to backup your words using Gartner a lot, but I don't really place too much weights on them.