One thing that does annoy me is the lipservice politicians pay to the I.T. industry. I have always thought - and still do - that NZ would make the ideal Outsourcing country. We speak English as our first language, we are brought up to think outside the square, and we have technical ability to match anybody. Add to this the time difference - we can be working overnight for Europe, and we crossover the working day for the US.
And we come cheap. Which comes to the point of this post. I get Computer World every week and read the Job Sections with interest. Every week there are jobs that read along the lines of - "Senior Developer/Team Lead, 5-10 years commercial experience, ability to lead a team or project.
Come on people. $65 - $75k for the top of the tree in a highly specialised field. To me that is ridiculous. It is no wonder people are bailing overseas. Until we get real with pay rates in this country people will continue to look further afield to get ahead.
The government has introduced tax benefits for film studios making movies here. That is great and good luck to the movie industry. Why don't they offer tax breaks from companies setting up IT operations here?
Pesimists would argue that we would struggle to find enough people to fill the jobs. My arguement to that is, pay peanuts get monkeys. If the companies were able to pay on a world scale, then surely people would have no reason to look further afield and ex-pats would look at returning.
I mean we are the best country in the world in every other respect.
4 comments:
Very true!
If tax breaks are good for one business or industry ... why not cut taxes across the board?
Otherwise, you're just talking cronyism - the Government handing out favours to whichever group they feel is worthy today.
Not Tax cuts for workers - tax breaks for companies setting up operations here. Like they do for the movie industry.
Why do investors deserve to pay less (or more?) tax than workers?
Don't get me wrong - I think that a lower company tax rate would be great. I just can't see that the arguments in favour of one don't apply to the other.
Post a Comment