LookSee short-sighted for NZ tech industry
Gambles and shortcuts in New Zealand tech hiring
The Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency (WREDA) has announced that it planned to fly up to 100 experienced software developers to New Zealand for a week to attend interviews and be courted by local technology companies. You might already have heard of the programme: it’s called LookSee Wellington and it’s happening in May.
It’s part of a planned ongoing collaboration between WREDA and Wellington tech employers, discussed briefly in WREDA’s Quarterly Report (PDF) for July — September last year. LookSee is underwritten by WREDA, WorkHere New Zealand and Immigration New Zealand.
As Stuff reports, WREDA will spend $300,000 on LookSee initially. It’s betting on conversion of at least some participants into happy Wellingtonians, claiming each hire will contribute “an average of $57,941” in economic value per year. The successful employing company pays a finder’s fee (happily entitled a “marketing success fee”) of around $9000. An unspecified portion of this money makes its way back to WREDA. It’s not immediately clear where the rest of the fee goes.
On the face of it, this all seems fairly sensible. There is an immediate need. We lack senior tech talent in New Zealand, and there’s no question good senior developers can drive success for tech companies, and therefore contribute positively to the Wellington and national economies. $300,000 is a lot of money, but there are significant potential rewards.
But let’s talk about why LookSee’s vision is… cloudy, at best.
The gamble
This approach is a fishing expedition. Wellington sails its boat into international waters, gambling the cost of the venture against the potential hooking of enough senior ‘developer fish’ to make it profitable. Lock those fish into contracts and hope that they are not just experienced but good, that enough of them are a net positive to the companies they end up in. WREDA is betting (with ratepayer dollars) that many developers will choose lifestyle over salary, knowing that even a modest US salary will beat what New Zealand can offer for an equivalent position.
“But it’s cheaper to live in Wellington!” Well… maybe? Check out this table of developer purchasing power by country from Stack Overflow’s 2016 Developer Survey.
We can assume from current demographics that an overwhelming majority of the new kiwis will be white and cis male. We can hope that most of them won’t treat the exercise as a chance for a free jaunt to New Zealand. We can hope that, tech hiring being somewhat of a crapshoot, that the screening is done intelligently and that no ‘senior’ developers arrive who don’t pass the FizzBuzz test.
In asking the question, “Can we attract more senior talent from overseas?” WREDA and associated stakeholders have failed to properly consider the question, “Where are all our senior developers?”
How did we get here?
As a country we have failed to recognise the need to develop alternative routes into the industry for talented creatives, beyond what the University system can offer. We have not found ways to foster talent from sources outside the mainstream. We have not acknowledged that the most important learning occurs on the job and not in the classroom. We have clung to an academic model when an apprenticeship model might better serve us. We have siloed research and placed payment gates in front of students with great potential. We have remained mired in slow-moving curriculum structures that fail to address current industry needs.
How do we foster our junior and graduate developers? We need a broader conversation, not just on how to train tech talent, but about where our people come from. Are we ignoring untapped pools of skill and creativity because we’re simply not looking in the right places? Because we only look at students who can afford a computer science degree, or who have been conditioned from birth to succeed in an academic environment. Because we assume that the only way to create a useful developer is to expose them to current industry practices after they graduate.
We need to question our assumption that it’s possible to tell a software developer on sight. When you draw from a limited pool of humanity, you get limited results.
Growing Kiwi devs
We need not be protectionist about developers from outside New Zealand taking jobs here. We want an influx of talent! We are a small part of a global developer community, and there’s no shortage of work. Developers entering the country bring new techniques, new practices, the un-looked-for notion. But we must simultaneously pay to grow our own people, and we are behind in our dues.
How should we best use ratepayer/taxpayer money in this area? It’s pretty simple:
Local money should be used, first and foremost, to support the development of local talent.
How about sponsoring paid internships? Sponsored entry into training programmes? Fostering better relationships between tech employers and training organisations? Between tech employers and schools? Widening the reach of programs like Summer of Tech? Supporting intermediate developers in learning to mentor juniors and graduates?
How about tapping the resources of a more diverse community that may never think of attending a university and taking on crippling debt, but who have the potential to become invaluable junior developers?
If a consortium of technology employers want to court international developers, perhaps WREDA might take on a coordinator role without funding the enterprise. But most importantly, they must take the long view of the tech marketplace. That means building for the people we want, the talent we need, in five years, ten years.
Searching for international talent is only a bad idea if we also fail to address the systemic problems with teaching programmers in New Zealand; if we fail to generate our own senior developers, and LookSee becomes an annual requirement instead of an industry hotfix.
