ITP Techblog

Kia ora koutou ITP members and supporters and wishing you all a happy Diwali. There was no news in brief last week and this week we were blessed with one of those fabulous 3 day weekends so this is beaming to you on a Tuesday for a change. I hope you all have fabulous short weeks. Noho ora mai, Vic

#BOTY Voting starts next week for Bird of the Year, so time to do your research folks. It’s all about the underbirds this year. I am most impressed with the Titipounamu campaign this year, they are hard core. Follow them on twitter: https://twitter.com/TeamTitipounamu

Flexible working - I spoke at a Slack new ways of working event last week, it was awesome to be at an in person event buzzing with excitement. The venue was packed and the questions were excellent after my wee talk as well. In researching Slack’s position on flexible working I came across their latest Future Forum Pulse Report - this tells us 80% of respondents want more flexibility about where they work and 94% want more flexibility about when they work. A lot for employers to take in. 
This article talks about workers from around the world who will never return to the office. The advice from Atlassian on needing to reengineer the business is really important to note - creating opportunities for in person connections multiple times per annum, co-ordinating meetings across timezones, creating social connections online (so not all meetings are business). 

Data centres - the data centre build announcements continue with this latest one to be based in Southland looking for government financial support (as Microsoft, AWS and the like have done recently). This is awesome for Southland but I can't help but feel for Catalyst Cloud who invested heavily in an in country datacenter long before it became trendy to do so - well pre-Covid. Unlike Spark and Datacom who received government contracts to support their investments Catalyst didn’t benefit in the same manner. We are certainly feeling the datacenter love here in NZ now. 

All of Government RFP for Talent is out again - All of Government Generation Three Talent Acquisition Services
You may recall I was pretty pleased when the government attempted to shake up the long term contractor placement model resulting in a really strong backlash - “the assassination of contractor recruitment in New Zealand as we know it.”
Well it seems the backlash won and they have reissued the tender with the old percentage of rate structure back in play eg: for a permanent placement the pricing wording is “This is a set percentage of the successful candidate’s first year annual salary”.
You can read the tender on GETS here.
There is a vendor briefing tomorrow (Wednesday 26th) at 10am if you want to know more. 

ITP Events this week: 

• CV Writing and Interview Workshop for Students - Thursday 27th at 4pm Online
• Panel discussion - Advantages and disadvantages of delivering IT services in Papua New Guinea 
  Thursday 27th 4:30pm in Wellington, in person
• Tech Chat Tuesday - Tuesday 1st at 12:30. Member only event online. If you have topics to suggest for this week that would be awesome. 

Updates in short:

• James Webb telescope is still impressing us - this time with amazing pillar like images
• NZ is still popular for investors
• Are layoffs coming here too? - we might have a skills and talent shortage but big tech in Silicon Valley is laying off staff.

Shout out - for this wonderful new set of resources from Digital Future Aotearoa - designed for primary school aged learners these wonderful ways of teaching digital technology concepts, both in groups (in classroom with a teacher, or in a Code Club with a club leader) or individually at home with a parent.