New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals Collapses (theregister.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals has discovered it is insolvent and advised members it has no alternative but to enter liquidation. The Institute (ITP) wrote to members on Thursday and posted a document titled "Important Update on ITP's Future" that reveals it has "reached a point where the organization cannot continue. After a full review of our finances, the Board has confirmed that ITP is insolvent."
Insolvency seems to have come as something of a surprise. "These debts are historic. They go back over many years. While some of the issues were worked on in more recent times, the full scale of the problem only became visible during the leadership change in 2025," the Update states. "Once the Board understood the full picture, it was clear that there was no responsible way forward other than liquidation." [...]
ITP's constitution requires its members to formally resolve to wind up the organization, so as one of its final acts the group has called a Special General Meeting (SGM) for 23 October 2025 to confirm liquidation and appoint a liquidator. This situation impacts more than ITP's ~10,000 members, because the organization offers assessment services that assess whether IT professionals' skills and qualifications make them eligible to move to New Zealand for work. ITP also certifies IT degrees at New Zealand universities, and oversees the NZ Cloud Computing Code of Practice. ITP also conducted educational and advocacy activities aimed at growing New Zealand's tech workforce.
Insolvency seems to have come as something of a surprise. "These debts are historic. They go back over many years. While some of the issues were worked on in more recent times, the full scale of the problem only became visible during the leadership change in 2025," the Update states. "Once the Board understood the full picture, it was clear that there was no responsible way forward other than liquidation." [...]
ITP's constitution requires its members to formally resolve to wind up the organization, so as one of its final acts the group has called a Special General Meeting (SGM) for 23 October 2025 to confirm liquidation and appoint a liquidator. This situation impacts more than ITP's ~10,000 members, because the organization offers assessment services that assess whether IT professionals' skills and qualifications make them eligible to move to New Zealand for work. ITP also certifies IT degrees at New Zealand universities, and oversees the NZ Cloud Computing Code of Practice. ITP also conducted educational and advocacy activities aimed at growing New Zealand's tech workforce.
bad link in post (Score:5, Informative)
Hemingway (Score:3)
âoeHow did you go bankrupt?â Bill asked.
âoeTwo ways,â Mike said. âoeGradually and then suddenly.â
Re: Hemingway (Score:3)
Argh.
How does one solve this Unicode problem?
Re: Hemingway (Score:1, Troll)
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Honestly, its probably time for a full rewrite. This site is waaaaaaay behind the times, and finding competent Perl coders who are also up to date with modern web tech, and young enough they can be hired for anything resembling a feasibly outlay is probably harder than just a rewrite with modern tech.
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If they got the money I've got the skills to work on the code and would be happy to do it. Heck, I'd even fix the quotes issue for free ... it's 1 line of Perl for double quotes and 1 line for single quotes.
Re: Hemingway (Score:4, Informative)
The site supports Unicode just fine. It's supported Unicode for decades.
The problem is Unicode support is more complex than just saying "we support UTF-8" and done. Especially for a system that allows arbitrary user input.
You can tell when someone writes their own comment system because their website is unreadable. This happens because people realize they didn't sanitize their inputs, and sanitizing Unicode inputs means making sure users don't input things that screw up the site. Unicode is full of this - from control codes like RTL and LTR overrides, to character decorations where you can put accents and such on characters. (Unicode is a system designed for universal human input - so some languages use character sets where you haev a base character, then apply docorations based on context that modify the character. Well, Unicode doesn't limit how many you can stick on and if you do it right, you could have a user comment be 1MB of a single character with so many decorations the entire page is... black).
In the early days, it was easy - users who did this were quickly spotted as non-robust renderers resulted in many systems crashing.
Slashdot took this to the extreme and decided to whitelist ASCII characters only. Then they did the clever thing and stripped the high bits off everything you input to limit you to ASCII input. Back when it mattered because it was quicker to strip the high bits off than to check if every character matched.
Re: Hemingway (Score:5, Insightful)
Turn off Smart Punctuation on your iDevice.
Re: Hemingway (Score:2)
Let's see if it "works."
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Not just "works" my man. It outright works!
Re: Hemingway (Score:1)
Get your Delorean up to 88 mph, go back to the first meeting of unicode, and make them sit through an complete enumeration of every possible ethnicity and gender poo emoji that every unicode compatible system has to waste bytes on.
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I've just gotten used to the "âoe" and "â" characters that crop up instead of quotes.
I just see those as quotes now. Kinda like reading matrix code.
Re: Hemingway (Score:2)
Jawohl, mein AnonyCow
Young productive tax payers leaving NZ (Score:2)
From 2022 and there are more recent articles. They quote the government Stats NZ for the numbers.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
More people leaving New Zealand than entering as young flee high cost of living
Thousands head overseas, partly because of economic conditions, with departures accelerating and labour shortage feared
The question from these numbers, and the collapse of long-lived institutions, is how many people 35 and under are net-tax payers to the federal government and of that, how many pay eno
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"how many people 35 and under are net-tax payers to the federal government and of that, how many pay enough to cover the government handouts, "
What Federal Government?
Did NZ get taken over by Aussie while I wasn't looking?
(I left NZ23 years ago, but I was born in the same town as Liam Lawson)
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Little known fact.
In the Australian Constitution, NZ is a state of Australia!
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Not quite.
(My emphasis and gloss). Had NZ chosen to be part of Australia
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In the Australian Constitution, NZ is a state of Australia!
By "Australia" do you mean NZ's West Island?
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"More people leaving New Zealand than entering as young flee high cost of living ... with departures accelerating and labour shortage feared"
I see, so the problem is definitely not that jobs in NZ are underpaying, nope, it's that the cost of living is too high. Since we're tossing all economic theory out the window, I would like to complain about the lack of workers willing to work for $1 a year for my company. It's obvious that we have a severe labor shortage rather than the fact that I'm not offering anyt
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The problem is urban containment and allowing foreigners and speculators to drive up the cost of the little land government lets trickle in.
Same as in almost every western nation.
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Not surprising, given the warm embrace of Kim Dotcom. Tech will not flourish in this environment.
I think what you are trying to say is (Score:5, Funny)
Re: I think what you are trying to say is (Score:1)
Good Lord! Do they *think* in that accent?
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Good on the 2025 leadership (Score:2)
I don't know any of the background here, but well done to the 2025 crowd who dug in, found it and acted according to reality.
did they get their budgeting system (Score:2)