Sydney is a relatively bleak place for getting a good selection of tech jobs. There are the obvious BigCos, then... not much. I may have to Make My Own Fun - another startup?
You could do your own startup but it’s really hard to do it in Sydney because even though the economy is doing well you don’t get the funding. What I mean by that is just not seed but all the stages required to be a behemoth.
US has it. They live and breathe tech. 5 largest companies by market cap are all Tech. They eat other tech companies for billions of dollars. Everyone and their dog in SV has a startup on the side. There are conferences on how to invest in startups. Some people just exclusively invest in startups. It’s crazy.
Sydney also has a tech brain drain. I lived in Sydney for 10 years and most of my friends moved out here too. Just better opportunities.
Sydney is such a nice place to build a startup though. Sucks that the ecosystem isn’t there. Vancouver has a similar problem too.
There's definitely way more opportunity in SV - obviously. And the tech brain drain is both overseas and to the disproportionately huge local players - Google HQ in the valley is one player among many big names; Google Sydney is an insane behemoth hoovering up the talent.
It is a nice place to live, though, and the Atlassian guys proved it's not impossible to build a pretty kick-ass startup here. There's also a pretty decent pipeline of smart people around. Part of my hope is that you can do smaller-scale stuff here without the Go Huge Or Go Home mentality of SV. What would be interesting is to work on things that interest me, make some money and influence the field. I don't think SV is mandatory for that.
