From a blue van with a surfboard at ANU, CEO and co-founder of the Australian global technology giant Atlassian, Scott Farquhar wants Canberrans to know they’re “open for business”.

Joined by ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr and surrounded by technology students vying for a chance to meet the tech billionaire, Mr Farquhar said he was excited to be in Canberra with his literal “banner on wheels” to announce he has 1,032 jobs up for grabs.   

“Tech is the industry for well-paid, interesting, and plentiful jobs, and tech is the place for our best and brightest,” Mr Farquhar said.

“Tech is the industry that we all need to capitalise on now. These are welcome words for our industry and they were certainly not uttered back in 2002 when Mike and I were starting out.”

Campaigning on Atlassian’s TEAM Anywhere policy is evolving the company into embracing a distributed workforce, giving Australians the opportunity to work from wherever they live – rural, regional, or city.

Canberra has one of the highest populations of people working in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Mr Farquhar said Atlassian has seen the potential and opportunities in the national capital.  

“Three years ago, I could count the number of employees we have in Canberra on one hand. As the city with the highest concentration of ICT workers in any metropolitan area outside of Sydney and Melbourne, this made no sense,” he said.

“Today, we have 20 Canberrans working for Atlassian … and we hired three people in Canberra just in this last week alone. So, we’re really excited about that.”

Passionate about creating software and tech jobs within the country, Mr Farquhar said for Australia to maintain its one per cent share of global GDP, “we need to produce one per cent of the world’s software and one per cent of the world’s technology”.

Painting a positive picture of the tech industry, he said the sector provides high-paying jobs that more Australians, particularly women, should know about.

“If you look at the tech industry, we’ve got half the gender pay gap … doesn’t matter if your parents are rich or poor, doesn’t matter if you have to pay for university,” he said.

Atlassian senior research librarian Alison Jones works from her home at Weston Creek and corroborated her boss’s claims.

“I believe we [women] are a minority, but my own team, research operations, and the wider research team is female-dominated, so for me, that’s my main experience…

“It’s not particularly noticeable one way or the other, and I’ve got to say one thing about working from home is that there’s just a different dynamic about how you relate, I guess, and some of that back and forth that goes on in some offices – not at Atlassian and certainly not remotely, so it’s a great company to work for.”

As a librarian by profession, Ms Jones said because Atlassian is a forward-thinking technology company, she never thought they would have a role that fitted her qualifications. But an advertisement on LinkedIn sent her on a journey to her dream job.

Ms Jones’ role entails making research content more available and readily accessible for the research team, which she described as a “fabulous” job with “fantastic” working conditions.

Barr: Canberra excels in workplace flexibility

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr is hopeful Atlassian will contribute to the ACT Government’s commitment to creating 250,000 jobs in the local economy by 2025.

“We’re at about 240,000 now, so 10,000 to go. If Atlassian can contribute to that that will be a wonderful, wonderful outcome,” he said.

“At the moment, one in 10 residents in our city works in the [ICT] sector and there’s room for that to double over the next 10 years, and it will through partnerships like this.”

In a city of around 450,000 people, 240,000 Canberrans make up the labour force, and Mr Barr said the ACT Government is looking to increase the ACT’s working population.

However, Canberra is home to around 1.75 per cent of the Australian population, so if Canberrans can just make up over 1.75 per cent of Atlassian’s job target, the Chief Minister will be pleased.

“…there isn’t a city in Australia that has such a concentration of people with existing skills or people training to get the skills necessary. So, this is clearly a growth area for the Territory’s economy,” he said.

“We’re only one-tenth the size of Melbourne, one-twelfth the size of Sydney, but we are growing faster than most cities and one of the reasons is this sort of employment growth and this sort of flexibility in the way companies are employing someone brings the lifestyle questions into the equation, and that’s where Canberra stands out head and shoulders above the other Australian states.”

The future of tech is a distributed workforce

One student in the crowd who is about to begin an internship at Atlassian was Matthew Chen, a third-year computer science student majoring in cyber security.

Describing meeting Mr Farquhar as a “once in a lifetime opportunity”, Mr Chen said he’s looking forward to being able to learn new skills and create software that can help many people.

In terms of working for tech companies remotely, he said being able to tap into that part of the market is “invaluable”.

“A lot of tech work can be done remotely, so it should be done remotely where possible because the skills are all over the place, as Scott and many others have said,” Mr Chen said.

“…I’ve always told [said] that tech is readily accessible to anyone just because anyone can learn how to code, whether that’s through YouTube or by themselves – you don’t necessarily need a university degree, so it’s something that’s open and available to anyone.”

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