Learnings, insights and community

Action packed, energizing and inspiring! Last week in Sydney, Amazon hosted its yearly AWS Summit and also presented a brand new event, Amazon Innovation Day, for "Leaders with a bias for action". It was 3 days of presentations, workshops and hearing from some of the most talented people in the technology industry.

I'd been hearing about Ruby conference for years, with it being an annual highlight on my partner's calendar. This year, I finally got the chance to attend and see what all the hype was about.

We're excited to welcome Debbie to the Sydney team today. Debbie has been working on the web since table layouts were a thing and most recently spent 4 years as a product manager with a startup.

Today is G's last day, after 5 years with us at Lookahead Search. When she joined it was just Martin Kelly and I in a small room in The Rocks.

In Sydney next month a bunch of people from underrepresented groups are going to RubyConf. In April over in Melbourne, you'll see fresh faces at CSSConf and JSConf.

Saturday 3rd February was Global Diversity CFP Day. It was a day to help underrepresented groups with talk topics and proposal writing. Workshops were held all around the world. The Sydney chapter was led by Kris Howard and a group of mentors from the Sydney community (including myself) was there to help out.

Australia is an amazing place to call home. We have so much to celebrate about our nation, and it's important that we acknowledge our achievements and celebrate as a nation. However, out of love and respect for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community, we here at Lookahead Search believe that January 26th is not the right date.

457 visa grants for Developer Programmers are down 41.5% and Software Engineer are down 18.1%. For now, employers who do sponsor have a huge competitive advantage.

We were delighted and honoured to attend to the AWS Startup Day event in Sydney. The talks were inspiring, the questions were thoughtful, and the crowd was engaging and welcoming.

Hiring is hard, and it takes time. If you're trying to hire a team of people that are just like you, it will take even longer. Here are a few tips that we've found will help you hire a more diverse range of people, and as a result, hire faster.