new zealand chip design industry
If you are working in the area of electronics design (RF, a little bit of FPGA/DSP, digital circuit...), Tait Electronics in Christchurch (radio comm gear), Navman largely in Auckland (GPS/ marine electronics) are the biggest ones. They have about 100-200 engineer/ software developer each. If you are more onto the power electronics side, check out "Fisher and Paykel" (whiteware). The rest are small to tiny shops.
All claim to be desperate for people. But, your mileage may vary... I am not really that sure if the advertisements are genuine. Is that a bargaining chip to force the government on some policy? I don't know...
A couple of my friends are with one of companies mentioned above. Both of them are top fresh graduates in their year. The company employs them on 3 month short contracts. They are now one year after graduate and still has not secured a permanent position. I have also gone through an interview with them for a specialist position, which is closely related to my research. They threw a couple of fairly junior guys to interview me (one would be one rank lower than me if I got employed, the other was the "deputy" team leader who can't authorise for the acutal employment decision. ) During the 1-hour interview, they asked nothing about my research nor the advertised position, but kept on sidetracking on something completely unrelated. Say, my speicalist research area is smart antenna and had done a 2week design project on toy car motor-controller in my second year. The interviewers spent at least 40 mins on the nitty-gritty of the goddamned remote control toy car and started nailing down to the "hobbyist details" on the mechanical design (brakes, acceleration and such). When concluding the interview, they asked if I wanted to know more about anything. I asked which type of algorithms do they actually want to investigate for their new product.... Then, we spent the next 5 min to talk about something related. It sounds pretty unprofessional to me...
Anyway, the position is still open -- 4 months after my interview, according to the newspaper. I give up playing the crazy game with those guys.... and have just got a job offer somewhere in Britain....