Silicon Valley to hold conference in Belfast

From the Belfast Telegraph this morning:

Chairman of ITLG, John Hartnett said: “Having taken an all-island approach since our foundation, we always envisaged taking the Silicon Valley initiative to Belfast as well as Dublin.

“With such strong support for our objectives from the Northern Ireland Executive, Invest NI, and Queen’s University Belfast, we are now realising one of our key goals.”

Depending on the severe amounts of cynisism you have for these sorts of press releases, you can look at this on many different levels. The ITLG are desperate to get into Belfast for a couple of reasons: i) Invest NI will throw money at them to do so (and more positive press releases will ensue from that). ii) Dublin tech wise now is not the same as Dublin tech wise five or six years ago. They've been invested in, chewed up and spat out. It's a shade of its former self.

If the executive wanted to do regeneration of the tech sector, after all the shouting about Telehouse going to Derry, would it not be wise to start pointing companies away from Belfast and into Derry and get some sort of balance going.

Some of the banks (I won't name names) still manage to bring their talent in from the east (Asia and India I mean, not Newcastle or Holywood) put them up, give them rolling contracts and let go at the drop of a hat it saves any of that nasty employment law thing. It's still cheaper to do that then employ the graduates coming out of university. Horrible isn't it?

The uni's in the UK did a good job of creating a totally flooding the market of computer science graduates, dragging down the salary rates with them. Contractors started to lose out to graduates who were all clinging to the wreckage of post uni must-find-a-job and the employers knew it. The number of grads I've spoken to over the years who come out fresh faced only to find that their rates of £25-£30 an hour freelance aren't going to compete with £3 in India. Don't believe me, go look on elance, hundreds of contract projects to be done, it's a numbers game and we have a big problem on our hands.

Come the summer it will get worse as the new collection of grads come on to the ever shrinking job market. The larger hitech firms in Belfast might have 1-3 jobs going, not 30 or 40.