I agree with Hamish001 that Loop Secure has been acquired at fair value. TNT will immediately get a profitable company with ~65 employees many of which are employed as highly-skilled cyber security experts. This could well turn out to be a shrewd investment for TNT, given the current shortage of cyber professionals. A relevant article appeared in the AFR this weekend citing the current skills shortage (see below). As ironwang has mentioned, It's also another reason why setting up the Tesserent Academy may be a master stroke by the company to allow them to recruit skilled people in the months and years ahead.

https://www.copyright link/technology/tech-companies-paying-anything-to-get-bodies-in-front-of-screens-20210818-p58jv9
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Tech companies paying ‘anything to get bodies in front of screens’

Aug 20, 2021 – 4.42pm

Geoffrey Cowan, a 32-year-old software engineer, landed back in Sydney in April, after 12 months working at riding sharing platform Uber.

He arrived home with a healthy stock payout and to a red-hot job market thanks to a widespread tech talent shortage.

More than eighteen months of border closures, and a global rush to buy software and cloud products has seen a wave of venture capital pour into start-ups who are competing with tech giants like Atlassian and Canva to find engineering talent to serve their stratospheric growth.

“The hiring needs of some tech companies here are extreme,” says Cowan, who returned to work at financial services start-up Spaceship, a previous employer, after negotiating a salary north of $150,000 a year.

“There are companies who seem to be paying anything to get bodies in front of screens.”

This week the jobless rate plumbed 12-year lows, masking a deteriorating job market as people stopped looking for work, and talk has turned to businesses ‘hoarding’ staff during lockdown.

Before COVID-19 struck, Australian tech companies already had a talent shortage. More than 100,000 migrants came to Australia each year under the skilled migration program, with the tech sector absorbing the lion’s share of those workers.

The newly formed Tech Council of Australia has a goal to create one million jobs in the Australian tech sector by 2025, up from the 861,000 now, but without the capacity to easily import people, experts say it will be a challenge to fill them.

Tech job advertisements on platforms like SEEK or Indeed or LinkedIn have ballooned, and recruiters are working overtime to fill job positions.

Atlassian and Canva are easily the biggest hirers as they support double-digit growth, but it’s not just tech companies. Banks like CBA and NAB are hoovering up engineering talent, as are the high-frequency trading houses who are known to have the most generous salary packages of all.

Jonathan Jeffries, co-founder of Think & Grow, a recruitment firm that specialises in C-suite tech hires, says salaries for engineering leadership positions – whether that’s VP of engineering or heads of engineering –now start from a $250,000 base.

“I have meetings with tech startups every day and have to tell them I can’t find them engineering talent unless they revise their salary offers higher,” says Jeffries.

While every tech company in Australia is grabbing as many computer science or software engineering graduates as they can, Jeffries says the real premium is on previous experience and engineers who can manage other teams of engineers.

“The biggest gap is there aren’t enough managers who can mentor and retrain people into new languages or ways of working,” he says, pointing out those inhouse talent pipelines are the most valuable way to scale human resourcing within a tech company.

“People with those engineering management skills are overseas, so we need the ex-pat Aussies who can do this to come home, or we need to keep bringing in that overseas talent,” Jeffries says.

“Of course, that at the moment is a huge problem.”

Atlassian and Canva have spent years building in-house nurturing programs to retain developers, as well as lifestyle and entertainment perks on top of generous salaries, and often engineers can attract higher salaries after the prestige of working there.

But Lisa Vincent, chief executive and co-founder of AI-powered education startup HowToo, says high-quality and creative talent often finds its way to smaller start-ups where they can easily see their contribution, without breaking the bank.

“There is always a risk that big companies will swipe in and want to poach members of the team with huge packages,” Ms Vincent says.

“But we don’t underestimate the value of building something that hasn’t existed before and there is a type of person who will find their way to us.”

That said, Ms Vincent says the talent shortage is the most severe she’s ever seen and that retention is her priority.

“I never really thought I’d think this way, but we’ve instigated an ‘always recruiting developers’ policy. If good people come up, we’ll grab them.”

Stake, another financial services start-up, aims to hire between eight and ten new engineers a month but lockdowns and the closed borders make this both difficult and expensive.

“We are paying a ridiculous amount for engineers who are not yet fully autonomous workers and still need a lot of support from the team,” says Aline Van Koninckxloo, global head of people at Stake.

Full-stack software engineers are attracting an $80,000 a year salary as a base straight out of university, but within two years they can command a $130,000 a year salary, she says.

“It’s always going to be hard to compete with big tech companies with deep pockets, who are known for good perks, but fortunately for us, there are less tangible benefits like working in a smaller team rather than being a cog in the machine,” says Ms Van Koninckxloo.

While Cowan was initially surprised at the number of job postings available, he says smaller start-ups are not out of the running.

“Ultimately it’s about playing with cool, new toys,” he says. “That’s where the talent shortage will probably find its cap because the good devs will always be hunting out that bleeding edge work.”

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