I just got a new job! I am now a Senior Front-End Developer at Springload, Wellington, New Zealand. This is amazing!

After two years working in the IT & BPS consulting field at CGI, I was fed up with client work and I wanted something new. New Zealand was the right place to look for a job. Springload is the right place to work at. Wellington is a nice place to live in! I got it all!

In hindsight, I’d have only left my previous job and moved to New Zealand sooner. Here are a few reasons why:

• New Zealand is the place. New Zealand has amazing scenery, nice weather, a very good tech scene and very kind people.
• IT salaries are high! The average IT salary for a Java/.NET developer with 2 years of experience is around NZD 75’000$, which is 50’000€ at the current exchange rate. My own salary nearly doubled: I’d have never dreamt of having such a raise by just finding the right job in the right place!
• The cost of life is quite low. It is definitely lower than in France.

I’d love to expand on this but it feels like I’m just bragging. If you’re thinking about moving to NZ, definitely get in touch: @thibaud_colas.

So why Springload then? Well, at first because they were sponsporing New Zealand’s biggest conference (Webstock) and because they had many OSS projects on GitHub. Because their work looked good, and I could definitely relate to what they said about their culture on their website.

Then because my first interview with the founder and our Front-end director went very well. The secund too. I was still in Auckland at the time, so they even flew me down to Wellington!

And that’s what got me sold in the end: I got to meet with the people I’d end up working with every day, I got to see that they had a great office and that they all seemed very happy working here. I got to see that it was an amazing place to work at!

So we just took our bags again, moved a few hundred kilometers again, and here I am at Springload. Yay!