Working from SA to being in Australia as a Software Engineer
This is just a short little post about my experience that I had moving from South Africa to Australia with my family for work.
I signed a contract with my current employer in 2021. It has been a bumpy ride in some regards but also a smooth one because of some decisions that we made as a family. One of the most important decisions I would say is to live as if we are staying in South Africa until the point that our visas were approved.
My work as a software engineer has been fulfilling with most of my time spent with one of the clients that I have grown to work with. I have been working on multiple processes for the customer by implementing the company’s product in various ways. I also had the exposure to multiple other types of projects outside of the company product.
What Was it like in SA Working for a Australian Company?
Working for an Australian company from South Africa has been challenging with the most challenging being the six plus hours difference in time. I started out waking up at about 1am SA time just to be awake when the business hours start in Australia. I kept it up for about two months before I realized that it was affecting me negatively, especially with my interactions with my family. Luckily, the company allowed me to move my hours from 1am to about 4am, which actually made a huge difference. I was not as moody due to the lack of sleep and I actually could be awake for when the kids went to bed.
The other issue that encountered was the latency when needing to work on servers and data from down under. We had the best services that the companies and customers could buy and still some times a request would take well over two seconds for a simple request. This may not sound like a lot, but if every page that you work on has about 20 requests and then there are some dependent on each other, it can become really, really maddening. We had some workarounds where I would deploy the work to a remote server and remote in to test or to do some of the work on a remote virtual machine located closer to the actual data sources. This really helped with migrations and large data queries. Jobs that would have taken up to twenty plus minutes on my machine in South Africa ran under 30 seconds on these machines.
As far as company culture and the like, it is the same as any company I would say, there are no real red flags that I have not seen at almost every other company that I have worked at or heard from people working there. There are always things that you might not agree with but it is not so bad that you would leave because of it.
I was very lucky with the position that I got because it was a Visa sponsored position, meaning the company would assist in bring me and my family over to Australia. In that regard, it has really been a ride, which I will most likely write a post about the process.
Being in Australia has been something different. I have to be at the office most days with the ‘freedom’ that I can work from home if needed and in an emergency. This is something that was not really possible from South Africa ;)
Waking up at a normal hour, which is still early for some (5 am) is also great now that we are in Australia.
Working with a lot less latency has really sped up some of the development efforts that I have undertaken and not having to wait such long time periods just to test something also has been really nice to get back a feeling of productivity.
From a perspective of a software engineer, I would recommend coming over to Australia.
What Are the Notable Differences?
What Are the Commonalities?
Would I Recommend It?
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