Setting: Fitzroy café. Afternoon sun. Coffee that tastes like punishment.
JAMES: Supreet, hiring in Melbourne is a nightmare. Everyone wants “top engineers,” no one can find them. And when they do, the person quits in six months for a 20k bump. I’ve never seen the market this thin.
SUPREET: Yeah, I’m hearing the same from clients. And honestly—this isn’t new to me. I lived a version of this in Indonesia back in 2015.
JAMES: What happened there?
SUPREET: We were trying to build a cloud team for a client. AWS was taking off, but Jakarta didn’t have many cloud engineers. Maybe ten people in the whole market who had touched EC2. Singapore companies were paying double. Local companies couldn’t compete.
JAMES: Sounds familiar already.
SUPREET: Exactly. So instead of chasing unicorns, we changed the game. We stopped trying to hire “cloud engineers.” Because they barely existed. We hired for raw talent. Smart people. Curious people. Didn’t matter if they were from helpdesk, QA, support, or networking.
JAMES: So you made cloud engineers instead of finding them?
SUPREET: Pretty much. We trained them from scratch. Linux basics. Network fundamentals. How cloud pricing worked. How to think about architecture. I mentored them directly, pushed them on real client problems, threw them into high-pressure situations.
JAMES: That sounds… intense.
SUPREET: It had to be. But in a year, they were better than people with “five years cloud” on the résumé. Because they learned deeply, not shallowly.
JAMES: Melbourne would lose its mind over that. Everyone wants “experience with Kubernetes” or “five years React,” whatever. No one wants to train.
SUPREET: Right. And yet everyone complains they can’t find talent. That’s the contradiction. You can’t have both.
JAMES: How did you even find these people in Indonesia? If you weren’t filtering for cloud experience, what were you looking for?
SUPREET: Signals. Stuff no job board filters for:
- Could they think clearly?
- Did they take initiative in past roles?
- Were they hungry to learn?
- Did their résumé show actual effort, not just job titles?
Some of the best were people who tinkered with Linux at home or fixed their family’s WiFi for fun.
JAMES: (laughs) Classic.
SUPREET: But that curiosity was gold. Teachable. Reliable. Sustainable.
JAMES: And they stayed?
SUPREET: Most did. Because the mentorship was the real glue. They weren’t just employees—they were being built. And they knew it. They knew they were growing faster than anywhere else.
JAMES: So mentoring was the retention strategy.
SUPREET: It was the whole strategy. People stay where they grow. Not where they get the highest salary.
JAMES: But some still left, right?
SUPREET: Of course. Once they got good, Singapore recruiters came calling. Two left. Hurt a little. But the rest stayed because the growth, culture, and trust mattered more than a few extra thousand dollars.
JAMES: Okay, bring this back to Melbourne. How does this translate?
SUPREET: Melbourne right now is what Jakarta was in 2015.
Cloud, platform, DevOps—demand is massive, supply is tiny.
Companies keep trying to “buy” senior talent. It won’t work.
The only consistent strategy is:
Hire for potential. Mentor hard. Build the team you need.
JAMES: And what does “hire for potential” look like here?
SUPREET: Forget the keyword checklist. Look for:
- strong fundamentals (networking, Linux, systems thinking)
- curiosity
- self-learners
- people who’ve built anything on their own
- people who write clearly, think clearly
Someone who built a home lab is more valuable than someone who wrote “AWS certified” but never designed anything real.
JAMES: And the mentoring? How do you structure that?
SUPREET: Weekly 1:1s. Real feedback. Pairing on real issues. Give them responsibility early. Don’t treat juniors like juniors. Treat them like apprentices.
JAMES: That’s… not common here.
SUPREET: Exactly why it works.
It’s rare.
It creates loyalty.
And it solves the hiring problem permanently.
JAMES: So your message to Melbourne companies is basically:
“Stop complaining about the senior talent shortage. Build it.”
SUPREET: Yep. Because the truth is, the people who will become your best engineers are currently doing jobs where no one notices them.
JAMES: That’s a great line.
SUPREET: It’s also true.
JAMES: (lifts coffee) So—hire potential, mentor properly, grow your own talent.
SUPREET: (raises cup back) And stop waiting for unicorns that don’t exist.
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