Tech turmoil offers WiseTech Global a chance to scoop recruits

With rising interest rates proving to be a backbreaker for non-profitable technology companies, many of which have had to cut staff or raise money at lower valuations, White said the local ecosystem is being further hamstrung by a poor training pipeline.

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“We are underweight in our education system and its ability to generate highly qualified talented people. You can look at China and India and their focus on technology education – it’s clear that they have got incredible results, and they are amplifying that. We [Australia] haven’t done that well.

“We need to get people excited about technology careers, but as a sector we are losing them to law, accounting and banking. Building deep, valuable, long-term intellectual property is not really going to happen in start-ups; while they create the opportunity, you need to put in time to build valuable, sustainable and irreplaceable value.”

One notable issue with our education system, White says, is that there is little understanding around the value of a hard science and technology career – and funding is not the problem.

“The amount of engagement in an area like software engineering is actually quite low; right now, a lot of our talent is still coming from overseas.

“We put a lot of money into education in 2012/13/14 as a strategy, but it didn’t make any change to the outcomes, so I don’t think it’s a funding problem, and it’s not about teachers and talent. It’s a fundamental social issue,” he says.

Technology still gets a bad rap as far as being seen as a provider of stable jobs, a hangover from the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s, and the recent downturn in the sector is likely to add to that sentiment. But White says the current turbulence is a natural, and quite likely a healthy, shift in focus away from non-profitable, growth-at-all-cost companies.

“There was a moment when there was a high level of liquidity available to start-ups. It was all about burning cash,” he says. “This was one of those irrational exuberance moments.

“Unprofitable tech is clearly not the way to go forward, and every investor and VC is asking for a path to profit, and that has tapered off, this unreasonable froth that doesn’t provide a lot of value.”