Hard News: Spring Timing
270 Responses
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
For all the talk of ICT shortages it's only really in the highly-experienced category (five years plus). Companies hiring in ICT never want to take people with less than a couple of years of experience which means there aren't enough experienced people to fill the positions and so on.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the ICT job market - or for that matter, the job market as a whole - is an inverse bell curve. In other words, lots of plum jobs at the top, lots of dead-end jobs at the bottom (a bit like mine right now), and not many intermediate jobs in the middle.
Another fear I have is that I'm getting too old (now in my mid-30s) to get into a real ICT job, while also still being too inexperienced for it.
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BenWilson, in reply to
The proposed compulsory Kiwisaver running in conjunction with Super just seems a messy inefficient system.
It's less simple, but I don't see it as a replacement for a universal pension, which is actually something that's really good about NZ. Otherwise people with not much super end up getting considerably less as a result. But how to rejig it in an affordable way is a niggly practical detail. It's still bizarrely iniquitous that super rich people can get a generous pension, when young people with nothing at all might be ineligible for any kind of benefit. As I see it, though, it's the young people who are not getting the money that is the problem, not the old people who are.
The most sensible middle ground is probably means tested super, with a sinking lid as the amounts in super start growing into serious money. Which really doesn't take that long. Australians have a staggering amount stashed away (over 1.6 trillion dollars), and it's only a little over 20 years that it's been compulsory. It's been so popular that the minimum contributions are now way higher than they used to be.
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Sacha, in reply to
Too many NZ businesses don't think it's their job to do any in-house training, just like they refuse to fund their share of research.
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bmk, in reply to
The most sensible middle ground is probably means tested super, with a sinking lid as the amounts in super start growing into serious money.
I could get behind that. But it would probably also need other alterations. Such as a higher rate of deductions for kiwisaver but then lower income tax accordingly. IE 10% kiwisaver deductions with a corresponding tax cut for people under 30. For people over 30 standard kiwisaver but no income tax deduction.
Then you have a very basic means-tested super to catch the people who fall through (obviously this would apply only to the people coming through from the change) for whatever reason and don't accumulate enough savings.
I think the current plans proposed both by Labour and National are messy and aren't an answer. National is just burying their heads in the sand and leaving it future governments to sort out. Labour is trying to prepare; but imo doing it in a ham-fisted ill-thought out manner. Labour are just trying to patch things on without fundamentally reforming the system in a meaningful manner - but still at least they are admitting that something has to be done.
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bmk, in reply to
Too many NZ businesses don't think it's their job to do any in-house training, just like they refuse to fund their share of research.
Yep, exactly the problem. They all insist on only hiring trained and experienced employees in the specific role they want with none of them willing to train or provide that experience.
I think one of the reasons NZ is so bad for this is simply that we have far too high a proportion of small businesses. From my experience and from what I've seen the larger the company the better they treat their employees and the more willing they are to higher new grads and train them. They also meet all their statutory obligations which small businesses often ignore.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Labour are just trying to patch things on without fundamentally reforming the system in a meaningful manner – but still at least they are admitting that something has to be done.
Labour made the mistake of proposing raising the age of super, but later (after all of them retire). That went down like a cup of cold sick, because far from solving the problem for future generations that the population bulge is going to cause, they simply upped the ante on future generations. Absolute dick move. It was a policy that no one could like. It didn’t affect the older people, but it hurt the younger, for whom it was meant to be a solution. I could not fathom it at the time. If they want to do that, they should do it right now. Of course they won’t do that because it will actually fuck with their current demographic*. Did they drop that one? I hope so.
Compulsory super contributions is a is a much better idea. If they hadn’t put it on employers to match the contributions, but just made the contributions come out of pre-tax income (so they are tax free) then it would have been popular all round. As it is, Kiwisaver has been a popular scheme. It could be popular with business, if it were altered so as not to be a tax on them. I presume they did that to avoid raising other taxes, like they thought employers wouldn’t notice, or more likely, that they don’t matter because they’re less likely to vote Labour.
*ETA: Which is actually the only viable solution to the supposed boomer bulge that will bankrupt us all. Except I don’t think that’s going to happen, in reality. However much there is a bulge of both population and wealth because of the post-war baby boom, that will all redistribute downwards as they start dying. Then X generation will be the whipping boy, and I bet (knowing mostly people in this age group) that we do just as the baby boomers did, and as people mostly have since time immemorial, and hold onto such assets as we are given, however iniquitously we came by them.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
I think one of the reasons NZ is so bad for this is simply that we have far too high a proportion of small businesses.
On that point, how many of these small businesses started out as large ones?
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bmk, in reply to
It could be popular with business, if it were altered so as not to be a tax on them.
Most businesses don't mind it much since they allowed to offset their contributions against those employees wage/salary raises. I know several people whose workplace gave the staff not enrolled in Kiwisaver a blanket pay raise while those in Kiwisaver got less to allow for their Kiwisaver contributions. One friend was pissed when he found out this was possible and wanted to withdraw from Kiwisaver because he thought the employer contribution was one of the benefits off the scheme only for him to find out it wasn't really.
In effect employees pay for Kiwisaver twice - once in lower income and again in their own contributions. As far as I can tell the only benefit of it is the government contributions. Which is why even most proponents of Kiwisaver simply recommend putting in only as much as you need to get full government contribution and then no more. And considering the money from the government isn't free but coming from everyone; you can perhaps see why I think in it's present incarnation it is a deeply flawed scheme.
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bmk, in reply to
On that point, how many of these small businesses started out as large ones?
Very few, I imagine. NZ has long prided itself on its small business culture. But I actually see that as a negative. I think of countries like Germany where they have large companies; but those companies treat their employees far better than businesses do here.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
Companies hiring in ICT never want to take people with less than a couple of years of experience which means there aren’t enough experienced people to fill the positions and so on.
I am happy to say that is not what I have been doing. I, and quite a few of my colleagues with hiring responsibility, like taking on new grads as junior developers, or better yet starting with students who are still finishing up (we pay our interns). Sacha's observations notwithstanding, we do invest in people by running in-houses course taught by our senior staff. The payoff is that after a year bedding in we get several years of high productivity from grateful people before they bugger off elsewhere. And they sometimes come back too.
There's no shortage of candidates from my POV. There's a shortage of very smart diligent people with social skills. The experience and technical skills we can fix, the personal qualities are the hard part. (Am actually starting to think about the social skills too. They're clearly teachable, but it's less obvious how we should do that.)
We don't ever use recruiters. I suspect it's in recruiters' interests to talk up shortages as it makes their services seem more valuable.
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bmk, in reply to
That's great to hear that you are doing that and you are to be congratulated for it.
And I like to hear that about the experience and technical skills being the thing you can fix as I have good social and personal skills but lacked the technical experience. Having two solid years in a IT related-role will help (I ended up working as an IT librarian which has actually given me a far wider range of IT skills than my previous desktop support/helpdesk job ever did) will hopefully have helped but up here there are just so few opportunities. But it's nice to know there are places doing what you are doing in the bigger cities if my family ever does end up moving.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
IT librarian
Sir, do you have a moment to talk about Koha?
;-)
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About half of the Greens ICT policy is about FOSS. However, their policy includes acknowledgement that
– Open Source products may not fulfill all of an organisation’s ICT needs
It's true. I'm involved with the Greens, and we've taken a foreign platform for something important. The alternative would involve a lot of building and complexity, and ain't nobody got time for that (in an election year).
Recruitment is difficult. I can see why it's outsourced, or given to professional HR folks, but their incentive structure is about minimising risk. It's much easier to discern a terrible candidate than an excellent one, and the rewards to a HR professional for performance are less than the costs of failure. Overstating experience requirements are a way of buffering against that potential failure, as is hiring boring candidates who tick requisite boxes.
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bmk, in reply to
Is that your work? I know I've briefly looked at it before but at the time was so snowed under that never really got back to it.
Just having another look at it now. Is it primarily used by schools, tertiary institutes or public libraries?
[Edited to say what I was meaning :) ]
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Sacha, in reply to
Sacha's observations notwithstanding, we do invest in people
Hey it was a generalisation across all NZ businesses and the sucky culture we seem to have tolerated in them. Yours has always been outstanding.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
I work for Catalyst IT. Koha's one of the many FOSS things we do -- we have a team that does Koha consulting, hosting, and migrations.
In NZ, Koha is popular with the specialist libraries. There's only one or two public libraries in NZ on Koha, but there are many large ones overseas, likewise not many tertiary institutions in NZ but large ones overseas. The issue in NZ is that for reasons of scale, libraries tend to form consortiums. When you consider that librarians from bitter experience hate and fear system migrations, and that support contracts usually have terms of years, you can see that most NZ libraries are locked up with expensive proprietary systems and the opportunities to convert larger libraries are fairly few. We'll be talking to a large NZ tertiary institution this week though :D
I guess I don't see Koha as being "for schools" particularly. It's a great option for a school because it's free if you can run it yourself, and there are good hosting options from multiple vendors if not. But Koha can scale way beyond that. If Koha can work for the Delhi public library, which has to do crazy things like 1 hour loans, it can work for any NZ-scale library.
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Sacha, in reply to
since they allowed to offset their contributions against those employees wage/salary raises
another charming move from the current govt to redistribute wealth which went largely unremarked.
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bmk, in reply to
Thanks for that info. I work for a tertiary library and we certainly aren't committed to consortia for anything other than a couple of databases. However, exactly as you mentioned we are locked into a licensing term for our the proprietary system we use. By and large the system we use is good but since budgets are always tight when our licence period comes to a close I'll certainly remember Koha and something I might have a play with out of interest too.
It looks a very cool product.
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BenWilson, in reply to
One friend was pissed when he found out this was possible and wanted to withdraw from Kiwisaver because he thought the employer contribution was one of the benefits off the scheme only for him to find out it wasn’t really
Precisely. That’s not a good dynamic, doesn’t encourage the system. Of course, if it’s compulsory that doesn’t matter, but it would have been such an easy thing not to make it a part of the wage/salary negotiations like that.
In effect employees pay for Kiwisaver twice – once in lower income and again in their own contributions.
That maths only works short term. It’s ignoring that the contributions are not lost, they’re invested. You get them back with interest. But yes, that’s how it feels in the pay-packet. I definitely made no bones to employers in Australia that if they wanted to quote my salary including super, I personally just considered it a lower salary. They argued the toss, but at the end of the day, salary negotiations are not really done by numbers at all. That’s a trick that the employer wants you to believe, but you’re not under obligation to take any offer they make, and can always make a counter offer. If you pitch the “I want X take-home, and that’s just how it is”, then who are they to say that’s not fair? We decide what's important to us in our lives for ourselves, after all. If I consider super as basically lost money (and at the start, I did), then there’s no law that says I’m not allowed to see it that way. The same goes for any other perk they may offer. It's common to try to get an employer to see a car package as actually worth what the car costs. It's not, if you would never have bought that car, quite aside from the fact that the company is only offering that because the car doesn't cost them what it would cost you.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
We don't ever use recruiters. I suspect it's in recruiters' interests to talk up shortages as it makes their services seem more valuable.
Furthermore, from past experience, recruiting agencies generally aren't interested in junior candidates, a category I still seem to fall into despite my age and experience.
And from a recent chat with Careers.govt.nz, they didn't seem to be able to help much:
01:31:04 PM [Mary]
Kia ora, welcome to Careers New Zealand, you're online with Mary
01:33:09 PM [Careers] How may I help you today?
01:33:27 PM [Me] I've been working in computer retail & servicing for the last 8 years, and the industry has been sent in decline by online-based dealers. We've attempted to compensate with good customer service, but it's still not enough to fight against a stagnant local market. Which is why I've started exploring other avenues.
01:34:08 PM [Me] My experience is equivalent to a CompTIA A+ certificate in computer technician service.
01:34:20 PM [Careers] Ok, so have you explored further into our website and seen our IT industry profile yet?01:34:40 PM [Me] I'm aware of skills shortages in the ICT sector from recent news articles.
01:35:51 PM [Me] For further context, I studied Information Science at Otago a bit over 10 years ago, but failed an essential paper twice and did not graduate. I've had my fingers burnt to ashes before, and I'm wary of reinventing the wheel again.
01:36:34 PM [Careers] You will need to look at all the industry related jobs within the industry profile that we have created and examine each IT job that interests you and explore the related vacancies listed in a big blue square within the job summary's section called "Job opportunities" and apply directly to advertisers and view the related IT recruitment companies also listed within the blue square
01:37:23 PM [Me] A close friend has suggested tech journalism, which neatly gels with my interest in participating in social commentary. Industry insiders via Twitter tell me it's easy to get into but hard to actually make a living from it.
01:38:19 PM [Careers] you willl need to examine your values say for example interest versus money, which is more important and so on.
01:38:55 PM [Me] Another complicating factor is that I may be autistic, which puts me at an inherent disadvantage when applying for jobs. I have a poor sense of eye contact and body language, which are key to the interview process.
01:40:00 PM [Careers] Would you like to think about a career planning service where you can go in and see a career counsellor to work through the difficulties that you describe?
01:40:31 PM [Me] Others tell me that with my experience, I don't necessarily have to go back to study, and that I just have to apply for things like internships at major companies
01:41:13 PM [Careers] The organisation I have in mind that would work best for you would be the Careers Development Association of New Zealand www.cdanz.org.nz You may like to have career planning and interview preparation techniques worked on
01:43:35 PM [Careers] Got to the cdanz website and click on the button that says 'find a member' and locate the region closest to you to see a list of career consultants available in your area. You may also want to do a shop around to find out their charges as they are private career practioners. This would be the best option for you especially regarding you concerns re possibly being on the autism spectrum.
01:44:48 PM [Me] I'm not entirely certain how seriously the job market will take my current experience. A lot of the major IT companies seemingly want people with 5-7+ years of coding and/or project management experience, and my sort of experience doesn't seem to fit that.
01:45:52 PM [Careers] Again, seeing a career practioner face to face and bringing your cv to him/her will help.
01:46:07 PM [Careers] We do not offer face to face consultation
01:46:17 PM [Me] I got my current job through WorkLink first up. At the time I believed I had social phobia/anxiety.
01:46:43 PM [Careers] So please check out the web site link I just sent as a possible career planning option
01:48:35 PM [Me] thanks, that's all I need to know so far
01:48:52 PM [Careers]Before we end our online discussion, may I ask how you heard about Careers New Zealand? This information helps us evaluate our service.
01:49:18 PM [Me] via the Internet.
01:49:30 PM [Careers] Thanks for answering that question. Feel free to contact us again if you would like some more help. All the best! -
bmk, in reply to
That maths only works short term. It’s ignoring that the contributions are not lost, they’re invested.
That's true. But Kiwisaver was sold as you put in half, the employer puts in half and the government a bit extra. In reality it's you put in half, your employer puts in half (which he then takes back by paying you less than your co-workers who aren't enrolled) and the government a bit extra. It was misleadingly marketed to people. And it totally changes the dynamics of it. I mentioned the friend who was disillusioned by it resulting in him being paid less than a co-worker. Another couple I know are just as furious with it because they'd joined assuming they'd be able to use it as deposit on first-house (which again was how it was marketed) only to be told their income is too high.
Because you can still save yourself but then you get much greater freedom than when in Kiwisaver - so the question with Kiwisaver is really if the government top-ups are worth the corresponding loss of freedom. For many people (probably even most) this is the case. But I still think compulsory Kiwisaver in it's present form is a bad idea. I think they need to completely re-think what they were doing there. Ever do a proper reform or leave it as it is.
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bmk, in reply to
If you ever get interested in CNC software flick me an email. We like to collaborate.
That's really amazing because you know what got me interested in IT was working at a factory operating a CNC machine. I had to learn how to program it and from there I got interested in programming and IT in general. Funny how circular things can be :)
And will definitely get in touch sometime.
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Ben said:
Australians have a staggering amount stashed away (over 1.6 trillion dollars), and it’s only a little over 20 years that it’s been compulsory. It’s been so popular that the minimum contributions are now way higher than they used to be.
Going up to 12 per cent, from the current 9, by the end of this decade. I don't think I'd describe the increase as being due to it's the 'popularity' per se, just a clear recognition that 9 per cent isn't sufficient for most. It's certainly not unpopular though.
And at the risk of recalling an earlier distraction, the Tasmanian Labor/Green government just got turfed out, after 16 years, for the Libs.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Another couple I know are just as furious with it because they’d joined assuming they’d be able to use it as deposit on first-house (which again was how it was marketed) only to be told their income is too high.
Their information is incorrect. You can always use your KS for a first-house deposit, up to a cap of not being allowed to take out the government's contributions. The income cap relates to the matching funds and other extra money, not to what's in your KS account. KS is your money and it is entirely within the rules to take out all the employee/employer contributions and investment returns to use as a deposit on a first house, even if you earn a million dollars a year.
As for it costing your friend income up front through a lower rate of pay, that only works for a single pay review round, and is probably only good for a thousand or two dollars a year. It's also only a "loss" if the money that they would have got from the pay increase would have been invested for a return equal to or higher than the return from your friend's KS fund; which is incredibly unlikely, so your friend is still ahead of their co-workers.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I think one of the reasons NZ is so bad for this is simply that we have far too high a proportion of small businesses
A source of a lot of our employment woes, I suspect. Small-business owners are frequently running a partnership, or they're the sole director and shareholder of a company, and their income is entirely from drawings on the business. Every dollar "wasted" on employees is a dollar that's not available for them to use for their own purposes. It's hard to see investing in staff as a good thing when you're bombarded with messages about how employees are lazy, good-for-nothing bludgers who want everything for nothing (fuck you, National) and there's a direct 1:1 relationship between money spent on staff and money not there to be spent on you.
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