Facebook and Twitter workers could ‘plug gap’
New Zealand should ‘‘roll out the red carpet’’ to the thousands of Facebook and Twitter staff who have been made redundant in the United States, to help grow our own software industry, a government adviser says.
Bruce Jarvis, who is helping the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment develop a transformation plan for the cloud computing industry, said the laid-off tech workers could help plug a skills gap in New Zealand.
Last week, Twitter owner Elon Musk abruptly dumped about half of Twitter’s 7400 employees and Facebook-owner Meta announced it would shed about 11,000 staff, or 13% of the social media giant’s workforce, within weeks.
Those redundancies are part of a much broader retrenchment in the US tech sector that has also seen many technology startups cut staff and implement hiring freezes in anticipation of investors closing their wallets in response to rising interest rates and recession fears.
Jarvis said ‘‘some might argue that is a warning sign of what is to come in New Zealand’’.
But he believed the employment outlook here would be better as the country’s cloud computing sector had been ‘‘far more sustainable and only hampered by a lack of readily available talent’’.
‘‘Now that talent is being freed up overseas, New Zealand must roll out the red carpet and welcome them to our shores,’’ he said. ‘‘We have seen it happen before with Peter Jackson enticing the film industry to New Zealand for the Lord of the Rings franchise and we can do it again for the software-as-a-service industry.’’
About 13,000 people were employed by 600 companies in the sector here, Jarvis said. The sector grew revenues by 19% last year but staff numbers only rose by 9%, he said. Not all the staff laid off by Meta and Twitter had technical roles but the skills shortages New Zealand technology firms were experiencing were also broad, he said. ‘‘One of the biggest skill shortages in New Zealand is for product managers; it is not actually code writers.’’
Employers should approach recruitment firms to work out how to attract freed-up talent to the country, Jarvis said.
Most of the skills technology companies needed were on an immigration ‘‘green list’’ and the main task was to ensure overseas candidates knew about opportunities in New Zealand and that employers provided a really great experience when they brought those people into the country, he said.
Breccan McLeod-Lundy, chief executive of Wellington software firm Ackama and co-chairperson of industry body NZRise, agreed there was an opportunity.
The skills shortage was ‘‘not as dire’’ as it was late last year but the market was still tight, he said.
Immigration rules meant in
practice that employers would need to offer jobs to overseas tech workers while they were still abroad, rather than hope they first travelled here to look for work, he said. Even if they didn’t hire laid-off workers, the ‘‘flow-on effects of that pool of workers freeing-up will make life a lot easier for New Zealand businesses’’.
During the peak of the boom,
US tech firms had been offering Kiwis the chance to work remotely for them from New Zealand, offering them less pay than they would get in the US but more than many local employers could match.
Ackama currently employed ‘‘one or two’’ Americans and had employed more in the past when it was easier to sell New Zealand as a lifestyle destination, he said.