Where are you moving to and what is your skillset? Our staff are in both London and NZ, so I feel somewhat qualified to comment.
The NZ market is very idiosyncratic and different to London. The differences made it difficult to maintain a small development team remotely so now we just have a few people working from their homes rather than an office.
Your comment on .NET or Java makes it sound like you don't have either of those skillsets and indeed you will find it harder to get work without those. Compared to London my observations:
- Microsoft stack has a very heavy adoption in NZ
- heavy concentration of govt. work in Wellington, and particularly in a few consultancies like Datacom
- we found it very difficult to find people who knew anything about DevOps 4-5 years ago
- there are clusters of tech-only companies around different areas but most jobs are less pure tech and support functions for other businesses, with all the limitations that usually means for tech specialists, which generally limit options with NZs smaller company size
- half the salary is not my experience unless you're going from front-office IB type Dev into a small private company. I'd say 75% was more accurate, but the lifestyle is attractive
The NZ market is very idiosyncratic and different to London. The differences made it difficult to maintain a small development team remotely so now we just have a few people working from their homes rather than an office.
Your comment on .NET or Java makes it sound like you don't have either of those skillsets and indeed you will find it harder to get work without those. Compared to London my observations: - Microsoft stack has a very heavy adoption in NZ - heavy concentration of govt. work in Wellington, and particularly in a few consultancies like Datacom - we found it very difficult to find people who knew anything about DevOps 4-5 years ago - there are clusters of tech-only companies around different areas but most jobs are less pure tech and support functions for other businesses, with all the limitations that usually means for tech specialists, which generally limit options with NZs smaller company size - half the salary is not my experience unless you're going from front-office IB type Dev into a small private company. I'd say 75% was more accurate, but the lifestyle is attractive