Market Update Q1 2019 - Pinpoint Asia

January 2019 started off with a lot more activity that what we saw in previous years. There was demand from both the buy side / sell side for developers (Java / C++) and Application Support specialists. However, in March, hiring slowed down amidst news of layoffs at the bulge bracket Investment Banks
We saw every major bank building a Site Reliability Engineering team. The term SRE is sometimes interchangeably used with DevOps – the difference is illustrated in this article. Software Release / Source Code Version Control / Software Deployment are jobs that could be replaced in the future by SRE / DevOps related roles
Top sought after tech skill-set continues to be Python / Java (AngularJS / ReactJS) with an understanding of DevOps / Agile Programming

The market is expecting the announcement of Virtual Banking licenses very soon. Among the potential lists of licensees, more than half of them would be mainland Chinese enterprises including Tencent, Alibaba Ant Financial, Insurer ZhongAn and Xiaomi. The other local banking players would very likely be Standard Chartered & HKT, and WeLab. We are expecting these new banking players to be looking for tech talent from the HK banking sector

Q1 saw Hong Kong-based digital insurer Bowtie receive Hong Kong's first virtual insurance license. Their founder Michael Chan spoke at the AWS Cloud Financial Symposium illustrating how to adopt new cloud and AI technology to minimize cost and maximize customer values.

Over the past couple of years, Chinese tech firms like JD and Tencent were paying above average salaries to woo candidates. We saw this trend ceasing as these top high tech companies were looking to trim costs and shutdown unprofitable divisions. This could mean that top mainland software engineers will now be more open to roles within sectors such as banking and in locations outside of mainland China

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