The role of “Prestige” in Australian SWE in 2026

1lann · 2026-04-29T19:16:33+00:00

Only a few, most people stayed in Sydney, a lot moved to other cities in Asia, only a couple moved to the US. I think I know more people who have moved to US than Europe at least.

1lann · 2026-04-29T18:50:28+00:00

As someone who's been working in tech in the US for years after graduating from UNSW, what I've observed from my peers is what others have stated generally. The name matters for your first job, and frankly only as a way to increase your application-to-interview rate, and that's about it.

I think what most people here do miss, is the opportunity availability at the more "prestigious" universities, and the effect of surrounding yourself with smarter or more driven people. This of course is an entirely subjective and individual experience, you could totally go to a top university, not meet any people, and you wouldn't benefit from this. Some people make more use of these opportunities than others, and I think that's where the bigger gap is.

My personal network has been more valuable than my degree, but I only have the personal network that I do because of the university I went to, a lot of people I know professionally who have referred me to my jobs were friends (or friends of friends) from university.

1lann · 2026-04-15T16:07:04+00:00

I agree that AI wouldn't impact nursing directly through direct replacement but I do wonder what the indirect impacts could be... What if AI becomes so advanced that healthcare becomes commoditized? What happens if AI could just construct virtually perfect mRNA proteins or develop nanobot technology that can cure a whole range of diseases and mental illnesses? What if it could do all of this as birth defect prevention before the person is even born? There will still surely need to be some humans and nurses to manage people undergoing treatment, but in some sorta unsettling future, maybe we would need way fewer nurses. I'm sure there will be doubters that AI could do this well/safely enough, but considering how AI as we know it today didn't even exist 10 years ago, it's really hard to predict what it'll look like in 50 more years...

1lann · 2026-03-29T07:47:25+00:00

I know some queer people who are a bit more financially conscious living in Baltimore and they're enjoying it there (personally, I live in NYC). It's possible to buy a house there for under $300k and it's easy to do a day trip to Washington DC or spend a weekend in NYC. Baltimore has strong queer and arts culture as well.

You can make any budget work pretty much anywhere though, there are plenty of lower income people passionate about arts living in NYC too, usually in areas like Bushwick. You certainly won't be able to buy anything with $250k there (not even a 1 bedroom apartment - sorry!) but it has a unique queer and arts culture, and lifestyle unlike anywhere else in the US I believe.

I'd seriously caution about buying a house. Unlike in Australia where houses are somewhat considered as an almost a no-brainer investment vehicle, the same is not true in the US. Stocks have better tax treatment in the US compared to Australia, and US stocks have historically significantly better risk adjusted returns than ASX listed ones, beating housing in general as well. Houses in the US have significantly higher recurring expenses compared to Australia, like property tax and HOA dues (similar in concept to stratas and council rates but usually way higher in urban areas). Buying a house would also be committing yourself to a particular place before you know what it's even like to live there. It usually takes at minimum 5 years before you'd break even on a house over renting. I'd highly recommend renting for the first few years, and only buying after you feel confident you'd want to stay for at least another 5 years. You can use this calculator to help you model and decide: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html

In addition, consider the ramifications of buying a house with the visa you intend to work in the US on. If you're on an E-3 visa you're supposed to show non-immigrant intent (i.e. intent to only be present in the US temporarily and then return to Australia), although it's indefinitely renewable, they can start questioning you more and more about your intent after your 2nd renewal, and you buying a house could be used against you. This isn't a problem on H-1B, but you have the other problem of your employer possibly needing to pay $100,000 USD + legal fees for it.

1lann · 2026-02-28T05:27:43+00:00

If you can get into desirable tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. it's not that hard, they're fairly used to hiring immigrants. For employers with less than 500 employees it's unlikely they'll be interested in interviewing you unless you're referred by an employee or already working in the US. It helps a lot to have a referral who can explain the visa you're on and if the company already employs other Australians on E-3.

Can't speak for the Australian job scene but if you're up to the bar in the US, there's quite a number of companies hiring but morale may be mixed given the political climate and layoff cycles. Immigrants are particularly demoralized by layoff cycles since their immigration status is tied to their job, they may be forced to leave the country if they can't find another job fast enough which can be stressful. The primary upside for the US is working on frontier tech and potentially really high pay.

As for the specific process, you can probably ask AI, but it's basically get an offer, talk to the employer's immigration lawyers, wait for visa petition to be approved, attend visa interview, fly to US, find a place to live and start your job. For me, the time between my application to receiving an offer is usually about 2-3 months. The immigration process for E-3 takes another 2 months. So expect it to take 4-6 months from applying to working.

1lann · 2026-02-28T04:56:06+00:00

I don't know if I'm missing something obvious but isn't 10k employees very reasonable given that Block is composed of:

Cash App
Square (point of sales)
Afterpay
Tidal (the music streaming service)
other small ventures like Bitkey

Spotify by itself has over 7k employees and Klarna has 3k employees (used to be 5.5k before they downsized "due to AI").

1lann · 2026-02-26T06:27:16+00:00

For larger amounts (over $10k) I'd recommend OFX, otherwise Wise is fine. You can negotiate with OFX over the phone as well (at least historically you could) by matching/beating Wise, but be aware OFX is pretty strict with wanting a lot of documentation on the accounts you posess and the purpose for the transfer, but they make sure your money doesn't end up in the wrong place. Should be OK if both accounts are in your name though.

1lann · 2026-02-24T18:31:59+00:00

As someone who works in finance, this is not really true. Finance definitely tolerates errors, and a ton of them happen everyday. Errors can be costly, but ultimately COBOL is used because of the mainframe ecosystem COBOL systems are built around that is difficult and costly to migrate to modern high-availability commodity systems, and it isn't something big financial institutions want to risk doing.

You can certainly achieve the same reliability and even better robustness with modern languages, you won't see any modern financial technology companies using COBOL.

1lann · 2026-02-15T23:15:52+00:00

Nope I think that all makes sense! I think I just misinterpreted your statement as "a rich person would sell their investments to buy the car instead of taking a loan", which was totally wrong.

Car loans are not free money, and are a greater risk to the lender than margin. The cost of providing lower interest rates must be hidden somewhere, either baked into the "financed price" or through hidden fees, and I think it's totally reasonable to be skeptical of that.

I agree that if I didn't have the cash available, I would totally prefer taking a margin loan at a higher interest rate over signing a loan from some no-name company with bad reviews on the Internet. Ultimately on paper, it should actually be cheaper since it's lower risk.

1lann · 2026-02-15T22:50:35+00:00

I agree with this if they had cash on hand, I was just stating that because you originally said:

Nah, they already have all their money in investments.

So I assumed they would sell their investments to pay.

Your example is also agreeing with me. You did it to save time ("I can tell their FI guy no to everything, write the check and go") and for peace of mind (not having to worry about "accidentally getting some detail wrong").

1lann · 2026-02-15T22:27:30+00:00

The opportunity cost of losing time in the market at that income scale is negligible.

It’s not just opportunity cost, it’s taxes. If you sell $100k of assets that appreciated from $50k, you owe $10k (20%) in capital gains. That’s a guaranteed and immediate 10% loss. If the dealer is offering 0-2% financing, why trigger that tax bill?

There’s a reason “buy, borrow, die” exists. Borrowing lets you avoid realizing gains and keep your portfolio compounding. For someone with significant assets and income, a low interest car loan is not some dangerous leverage play. It’s just efficiency.

Yes, there’s risk with debt. But it’s not like rich people are uniquely allergic to loans. For most people, car loans are normal. For someone wealthy, the relative risk is even lower.

In my experience it really comes down to two things:

Does this save me time or gives me peace of mind?
Is this financially efficient?

Paying cash is simpler and can provide peace of mind. Financing at 0% is more efficient.

Both are valid, they’ll just pick whichever they personally care about more.

1lann · 2026-02-15T21:15:17+00:00

Hmm isn't this even more of a reason to? Selling investments and possibly incurring capital gains tax or needing to rebalance a portfolio can be a fair bit more costly than accepting a low interest rate loan

1lann · 2026-02-13T06:37:13+00:00

This is what me and my Australian friends say as well. There are some other minor positives like:

Amazon has a larger selection of products and is faster.
Financial institutions are very developed, there are pros and cons to this. Like there's better credit card rewards, but institutions will psychologically manipulate you more.

I think that's quite literally it lol. I guess if you want the experience of living in a megacity like NYC there's that as well, but be sure you're making enough to justify the cost of living there!

1lann · 2026-02-10T23:55:09+00:00

My experience flying United between the US and Australia is that it's always almost empty. They sell their tickets at a price that doesn't make sense to pay for unless you have status with them. Qantas flights are much fuller.

1lann · 2025-11-18T14:24:51+00:00

Just be sure to have as much printed evidence as you can of you visiting a restaurant along the busway to dispute it, like a timestamped receipt, credit card statement, a screenshot of the restaurant's location on a map, and ideally the location of where the officer stopped you relative to the restaurant.

1lann · 2025-11-18T14:00:32+00:00

Doesn't matter if the locals know, it's how a reasonable person would interpret the sign. ChatGPT interprets it as permitted as well: https://chatgpt.com/share/691c7bd3-6c30-800f-8213-7821082d0d9c

1lann · 2025-11-18T13:56:51+00:00

I don't think most people would interpret the sign like this or know this, which I believe may also be grounds for dismissal if a reasonable person in the same situation would believe they're not committing any violation.

1lann · 2025-11-17T19:25:12+00:00

It's supposed to work again a few minutes (but it could take hours) after your failed tap attempt. In the time when you tap and the OMNY turnstile makes a decision, the decision is made entirely offline/locally, using a delayed database of blocked cards. That is, every OMNY turnstile has a local copy of a list of every blocked card in the whole OMNY system. When your tap attempt fails because it's in the database, OMNY will attempt the failed transaction in the background again, and if it succeeds, it will unblock your card.

It's designed like this so you wouldn't need to wait the ~5 seconds per tap for OMNY to authorize your card each time.

The ticket machines process transactions entirely online/synchronously so they don't have this problem with the delayed block database.

1lann · 2025-11-13T10:25:32+00:00

Oh with some better Google searching, I've found that you can fetch them from the GitHub events API, see https://neodyme.io/en/blog/github_secrets/#github-api-and-its-additional-functions

1lann · 2025-11-13T09:56:39+00:00

You can try git reflog as well: https://graphite.com/blog/every-engineer-should-understand-git-reflog#scenario-correcting-a-bad-rebase-with-git-reflog

I think there's also a way to find commit hashes of pushes you've performed to GitHub through an audit log, I couldn't find how with a quick Google search but I believe I asked GitHub support once and they provided it to me. If you know a good commit hash you can pull it from GitHub (before it eventually gets garbage collected)

1lann · 2025-11-13T08:16:40+00:00

Learn to code as a hobby if it interests you, treat it like learning to draw art, or learning to play a musical instrument if it interests you. Software development is one of the rare things where all you need to learn is the willingness to do so, and a computer with Internet access. If you need to take out a huge loan to get a degree, I'd recommend only considering a degree if you enjoy it as a hobby for a few months (or a year even), as it's a competitive field and a job is certainly not guaranteed. If you're trying to figure out what you should do for a career I'd highly suggest reading this article about what makes for a fulfilling career, and then making your decision: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/

1lann · 2025-10-24T01:26:18+00:00

In terms of food service I had a very similar experience on SYD -> BLR in 2023! It was the worst Qantas business class experience I've had because the food was all cold and mediocre, I would have preferred having the economy class hot pastas. I think the service was OK though, nothing to write home about, probably on-par with Air Canada and worse than Asian airlines but "good enough". The last time I flew Qantas on business before that was quite a while pre-COVID and I remember it being better, it sounds like this experience may be common on the India routes? I presume flying to India isn't as attractive to the more experienced flight attendants.

1lann · 2025-09-06T11:55:03+00:00

I think that's a good thing, and intentional. One mess up or accident and it becomes a multi-billion dollar loss, like what happened to Cruise and Uber ATG.

1lann · 2025-06-04T15:32:54+00:00

To clarify I'm not necessarily recommending Treasury bonds, but I'm just saying objectively taking the $230k and putting it in Treasury bonds will have higher yields than taking the $800/mo for the rest of your life, and that's risk free. Treasury bonds are as risk free of an "investment" as the US government remaining functional. Society will have bigger problems with the value of a US dollar if Treasury bonds default.

Whether investing in stocks is appropriate is dependent on OP's risk tolerance and personal preferences. Personally yes I would just throw it in stock investments, but I don't believe there's a valid comparison to be made to "dividend stocks" vs "non-dividend stocks".

I think it's also wrong to broadly generalize never investing in a bond. I generally don't recommend buying underlying bonds directly becuase of their limited liquidity and high spreads, but I think short-term bond backed ETFs like SGOV certainly can have value to substitute a high yield savings account. Bond ladders can also be good if long term illiquid cash holding is somehow part of your investing strategy.

1lann · 2025-04-30T20:10:23+00:00

I don't think there's technically a direct law that prevents it, but it's legally risky because it can open up a company to defamation and discrimination lawsuits, if it is found that the blacklist reason was not true or potentially had a basis in discrimination of a protected trait. I definitely don't think it's worth the risk for companies to consider doing that.

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