Fred Schebesta, left, co-founder of finder.com with Wayne Perry, the company's digital design lead hired from London. Credit:Wolter Peeters "I don't think we have done ourselves any favours in Sydney with crushing particularly the 20-to-29-year-olds' lifestyle ... It is almost like it is martial law here ... The restaurants here close so early, how can you work all night and not have a restaurant open?" Matt Barrie, of the ASX-listed global skills marketplace Freelancer.com, with 550 employees including more than 100 in Australia, says it is "very hard now to get people to come to Sydney" because the city has become so boring and expensive during what he describes as Premier Mike Baird's tenure of over-regulation and over-zealous policing. Mr Barrie, a scathing critic of the NSW lockout laws, says dynamic young creative staff "want to go overseas because they find it so boring to live here". "We are a dead end. It used to be a lifestyle thing [that would attract them here] but we are not even that any more."

Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, says it's hard to attract global tech talent to Sydney because the city is "dead" and "an embarrassment". Credit:Louise Kennerley Dean McEvoy, CEO of non-profit tech advocacy group TechSydney said creative talent looked for a good lifestyle and a dynamic city as well as good financial support for the start-up industry, but the lockout laws "have had a negative effect on the vibrancy". The Start-up AUS Crossroads 2016 report card on progress in Australia's transformation to a competitive high-tech economy says "Australia has a high cost of living that is currently acting as a disincentive for overseas talent to accept offers of employment with Australian start-ups". It recommends making public schooling freely available for the children of 457 visa holders and reintroducing the Living Away From Home Allowance to help defray some of the living costs of foreign workers. Wayne Perry joined Finder.com as digital design lead, responsible for the design and feel of the company's website and digital products, on a 457 visa from London three years ago. He'd seen an article reporting that salaries for tech employees were higher in Australia than anywhere else and when he applied for the job on Seek.com, "they got back to me within hours". Mr Perry was at first surprised to learn from a colleague there was nowhere he could buy gym clothes after 5.30 one afternoon. But he has been happy to adapt because he loves life in Sydney and at Willoughby on the lower north shore, his commuting time to the CBD is half what it was in London for the same price of accommodation.

There is "relentless" demand for anyone with skills in delivering software said Todd Sekulich, founder and director of Bloc Technology, a specialist recruitment firm for the tech industry. He said front-end Java script developers and mobile app developers who could create fast and "clean" user interfaces for websites and mobile apps were "super scarce". Jobs requiring those skills typically remain unfilled for up to six months. Mr Sekulich said top corporates typically hired "a really bright, sharp contractor who knows it inside out and can go in and develop a user interface" on $650 to $900 a day, while as permanent employees they would command a base salary of $120,000 to $140,000 plus benefits. Lead software developers responsible for managing teams could command between $140,000 to $150,000, Mr Sekulich said. Mr Schebesta said Finder.com's solution is to hire people overseas to work in their home countries rather than come to Australia. The company has opened offices in the Philippines and Poland where the skills Australia's education system misses are "being taught en masse" as well as Los Angeles, New York and soon, London. "We are just going to where the people are, it is as simple as that," he said. "It used to be you would get the British and the Europeans but in my experience the Italians have all left, the French have left, the Germans and half the British have left," Mr Barrie said. "We can still attract students who want to come here for a visa from China and India and Brazil and Pakistan and so forth, but in my experience the Europeans are gone." Mr Sekulich said that while it was still easy to hire from China, India, Sri Lanka and south-east Asia, he had heard it said "quite a few times this year" from potential hires that they would rather work in Melbourne than Sydney due to the cost of living. Mr Barrie cited a recent TimeOut survey of 20,000 people in 18 cities where Melbourne was placed second in terms of the residents' happiness, while Sydney placed second last. He said Melbourne was a "great, vibrant, fun place to live" compared with Sydney and some of his staff had recently petitioned him to move the company there.

Younger more agile companies for whom high-calibre recruitment was "make or break" offered permanent rather than contract jobs as well as equity schemes and share options for early stage employees, Mr Sekulich said. Attractive workplaces "super close" to transport with "breakout spaces", a games room and free food had become standard: "It used to be just the leading companies but now if you don't do that you are in trouble", he said.