Preface: All numbers are in AUD, so x/0.63 to get to USD. AU$100k == US$63k == EU55k, AU$300k == US$190k == EU160k etc

Contracting life is a bit shit

I'm a contract app developer in Australia. There are pros and cons to this, the main pro being that you get paid very well if you can land a long contract. At $1000 - $1200 / day (AU$), if you're fully contracted you can get up to around $300k a year.

The main con is the trough of sorrow that comes at the end of each contract, which somehow always seems to be on December 24th, when your client decides that the app you've been building as a sole developer to craft your multibillion dollar client's vision into 15 stretch major features including AI for some board-related reason that would normally take a team of 5 people 18 months to build that you've done alone in 6 is now going to be cancelled because the TV and print-based marketing agency that they hired to get users to download the app who've never marketed an app before had no idea how to market an app besides "influencers?" and couldn't get any users within two weeks of launch and so we're canning the whole thing.

Sorry, I got side-tracked. The main con is trying to get new contracts. It's a bit of a slog. Sometimes when the going's good there's multiple offers at $1000+/day. Sometimes it's a bit of a drought, and you feel a bit ridiculous asking for what you've just been paid for the past 5 years.

The new job hunt

Recently, I learnt about a handy job hack, that you wouldn't believe, which is: get one that pays in USD.

When you're working a remote job, it's weird to think that in Australia you can max out at about $200k for a full-stack engineer job, whereas you can do the exact same work for a global startup you can get around $300k + $xxxk in equity, for companies that might actually be worth something.

That's not a joke. Senior software engineer roles in Australia generally pay $160k - $180k base, with no options. Options aren't really a thing here. We do get 11% of our salary in the form of superannuation (retirement savings), which is cool, but almost the entire amount of what US/Global companies are offering senior devs in equity/options is what we're getting paid here as a salary.

Their base salaries are finally comparable - better, even! - to what I'm getting paid as a contractor, plus there are additional perks like private health insurance, parental leave etc.

You're missing the big bit in the middle of the world

So I've been applying for quite a few of these moonshot (to me, anyway) jobs, mainly using this handy site: https://briansjobsearch.com/ (not affiliated at all, I just like it). But I'm finding that so many principle / staff / senior full stack engineering jobs are only open to candidates from US, CA, EU, UK, LATAM, EMEA. Candidates who are Australians, Asians, Kiwis etc are all being excluded, despite having the same skills and experience, native or high-level English proficiency, and huge economies that are worth targeting.

I've seen the above on so many Greenhouse and Lever job descriptions, and I'm really curious as to why. Why isn't anyone hiring Australasians? At first I thought it was a timezone thing, but let's compare 9ams and 5pms in SF, London, NY and Melbourne:

Now, you may say "There's not a lot of good crossover time there", which is a point, but not a good point. There's virtually no working-hours crossover for SF and London either. NY and London have abour a 3 hour crossover each day, and SF and Melbourne have 1hr.

My fear in posting this is that I'll get a lot of HN responses saying that crossover is 100% necessary for devs and that I must be doing it wrong. But honestly, 1-odd hour of crossover for Q&A + some good chat about potential issues and a proper ticketing system, I rarely need more than an hour to talk to anyone.

There is, of course, scrum minutea like refinement, grooming, planning etc, but usually that's done in pods, and why not have an Australian pod?

The 9-hour gap: Why don't you want 24/7 coverage?

The main reason I think Asia/Australia/NZ etc are an important missing link for the global startup ecosystem is that there's a big gap from 5pm to 2am SF time where no one is working. That's a 9 hour gap where bugs can be fixed, support can be given, and features can be shipped.

It seems like an oversight that so many companies are missing out on this, and speaks to a larger issue of how many companies are missing out on doing business with Asian/Oceanic economies.

Is there something else I'm missing here?

The other quirk I've noticed in the job market is that companies who do offer jobs to Australians purposely hide salaries from their job descriptions. The exact same Fullstack JS Engineer will have a documented salary range of US$140 - US$200k on the US, UK, EU job listing, but when the listing is Australia specific there is no salary mentioned at all.

Is this because of some Australian IR law that I don't know about? Are companies confused by supernnuation and universal healthcare that they don't have to pay for so don't know how to calculate the salary? Is there some other tax / political thing that I'm missing?

I'm not sure, but it's really annoying. I don't want to go through an application and an interview just to find that the salary you're offering is $100k less than I was expecting based on other job listings (I've had this happen twice), and I don't want to take a job where I'm doing the exact same work as someone else but know I'm getting paid significantly less than them.

Is it just cos it's too hard?

My gut feeling is that US-founded startups consider Australia, NZ, SE Asia as too hard-basket to set up offices for, and don't want to deal with the potentially complex company structure, tax and payroll issues that hiring employees in these countries might require.

I don't know, but I'd like to know! All I'm saying is: Consider Australians, Kiwis, Singaporeans, or anyone else in our sweet-arse timezone, get stuff done while you sleep, and service the whole world.