As a fellow Australian I have to agree with some of my fellow countrymen when they say that compared to the US, our tech industry is much more conservative and focused on banking, insurance and real-estate.
From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies.
I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
Do you know what is a real shame? This statistic doesn't really correlate with the highest quality output.
Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre).
Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff.
I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!
Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country.
The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany.
So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification?
So Germany is a failed state for software developers.
So, uh, is this “devs killer” or “dev skiller” - “the automated technical screening & talent management platform”?
Kind of a joke, but for the devs who are on the receiving side of this platform, maybe not really.
I am wildly suspicious of this data. How could it possibly be audited? The presenter of the data has obvious ulterior motives to make something up where the data is inadequate or flat out lie to support their business.
The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.
This statistic actually says nothing at all about 90% of the people who took the test so the headline is pretty misleading.
You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution !
It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?
"australian developers score the highest on coding tests administered by companies in new zealand that refer to all software development as IT and are most popular amongst people who run windows and work for IT outsourcing companies like thoughtworks" - should be the title.
australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.
I'm guessing because Australian bugs are more dangerous.
I'm doing my best to drag the scores back. After all, regressiom tends to the mean.
Tense and Stressed mind can not create art which software development is more or less. The results show that, and not the skill levels.
I run an engineering group at Microsoft in Australia, we have a reasonable though not (IMO) difficult screening / interview process.
However despite this, we find it hard to get candidates through our pipeline - even to the point where interviewers have been told "I have 15 years of programming experience, why do you expect me to code now". Now, I'm positive we could improve the screening and process we have in place for this - but by the same token it's not terrible... Yes, MSFT is not a FAANG and maybe there is some selection bias in the people who apply - but we also do manage to attract and retain good people who get through the process.
We also offer a competitive package for Sydney, with the ability to take that and work remote from anywhere in Australia, if anyone is looking for a SWE role :)
This comment is super flagrant self promotion, but if you are an Australian developer who wants to stay in Australia and work at a scale only usually available in the US.
Check out https://www.instaclustr.com/careers
We work with companies like Doordash, Atlassian, Sonos and Dream 11 running some of their most important databases at massive scale.. and these are just the ones we can mention.
On top of that we are in Canberra :) Though if you wanna stay in Sydney or Melbourne that's cool to!
Did you miss Bulgaria with its 91%?
> In other words, only 10% of developers from the given country scored higher in their coding tests than the results you see below. We made this change because the mean score includes outliers that often influence averages and skew results.
That feels risky?
Portugal on 4th place! Might not be the headline, but surely warms my heart.
I doubt these tests means anything, Autralian companies use standard tests way less than US companies, there is no reason for Australian devs to just be good at these spontaneoysly.
I don't understand the colors in that map.
For instance, Germany and France, colors vs. percentages, don't make sense to me. Are my eyes the problem?
It would be kind of ironic that it was a bug.
Isn't it more like "more company in country X use our product therefore, more developer in country X train for our specific test" ?
Congratulations!
Well done AusDevs!
But the more interesting metric is, is this correlated with having the highest pay?
Cost of living normalized of course.
Page not found for me
> Switzerland $95,753 Australia $85,167 Denmark $73,017 United States $71,858
This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.