Australia and New Zealand have a long-standing rivalry, with our sporting battles matched in ferocity by battles over some of our finest exports, including who invented the quintessential Aussie (or Kiwi) dessert, the Pavlova.
As our business booms and we need even more outstanding tech talent to join us on our mission to weave humanity into technology, Transpire is willing to make a big concession… on behalf of Australia, we are willing to officially* trade ownership and founding rights of the Pav to New Zealand in exchange for their best and brightest tech talent.
And, the tidal wave of talent has already begun crossing the Tasman!
Oleg is a talented iOS engineer who has recently made the move to Brisbane with his wife. Among other things, he’s loving the climate:
“New Zealand is really beautiful … but it was so cold. Summer in New Zealand – especially on the South Island – is sometimes colder than winter in Brisbane. So we decided that we need to do something about that.”
Andy joined Transpire in early 2022 as Principal QA. He and his wife had been planning a move to Australia for some time to reunite with his brother so their kids could grow up together. As it happened, on the same day he began looking for jobs in Australia, our tenacious Talent Acquisition Manager found him!
“I was very lucky – Wayne found me out on the very same day that I marked myself as available for jobs on LinkedIn.”
As for the work, Andy has enjoyed a step up in technology since moving into the Australian market.
“New Zealand is very highly Microsoft focused, which was a bit of a surprise for me when I moved there from Singapore – the tech stack is relatively smaller in terms of what companies are willing to experiment with. The amount of opportunities for any technology or anything that you want to learn is at another level here.”
Andy is building a specialist QA team around him, including Isaac – a QA Automation specialist who he worked with in New Zealand. For Isaac this all happened at the perfect time:
“My wife had just come over to visit her family for the first time in a couple of years. That’s when we made the decision that we would eventually move over and that same weekend, Andy texted me for a catch up and said, “Hey, would you be interested in this?””
Uldis is another former colleague of Andy’s from New Zealand, with special skills in error prevention. As Andy says, bringing these specialisations into the team is part of building an industry leading QA team:
“I think those skills set us apart, way higher than most of the companies within the New Zealand market, and I think they will set us apart from a lot of the (Australian) competition as well.”
As well as using his expertise in error prevention in QA, Uldis is particularly excited to get a lot deeper into accessibility with Transpire:
“There’s this potential project we’re looking at which needs to support multiple languages including Arabic and for Chinese and then making that accessible. Some of those languages don’t follow the same rules, from left to right or top to bottom. So that’s definitely a challenge, plus the opportunity to solve a problem using leading technologies.”
So what about the working culture? There seems to be an idea in New Zealand that working in Australia brings with it more stress and longer hours. But for Oleg, that’s not his experience at all:
“I expected it to be more stressful because people usually say that about Australia – everything is faster. But it wasn’t stressful at all. People are friendly and everything just goes well.”
It’s a credit to our People Experience team that all our recent hires have had a smooth and pleasant onboarding experience.
Isaac said: “It’s been great. It’s a really fun role, the whole vibe of the company’s great and it has a completely different energy to where I came from.”
For Andy, he’s really enjoying the move into consulting and seeing the impact that we’re creating:
“The fact that we’re touching so many important industries and so many important organisations, at the same time, is just an absolute pleasure.”
Oleg has a simple message for any Kiwis thinking of making the move over the Tasman:
“The climate is better. The people are nice. The work is well balanced.”
If you’ve been thinking about a move, please have a look at our vacant roles on our Careers page, or get in touch with Wayne. We’d love to hear from you.
*not officially official
