Gozit

Not sure what it is for me. My personality is just more direct and I don't have a tolerance for unnecessary pandering and political correctness.

Amra

It's more honest. And honesty is more engaging and makes more lasting connections than superficial 'niceness'.

John_B

Another 6 Music fan? One of the things that helps keep me sane. All my favourite DJs from the 90's seem to have made their way there, including Steve Lamaq, Mark Radcliffe and Mark Riley. I've been listening to Shaun Keaveny since he was on XFM. I even saw Lauren Laverne live a few times when she was in Kenickie, back in the 90's. They also have Iggy Pop, Huey Morgan, Jarvis Cocker (Had). Proper music station for music lovers by real artists and people with a real passion for music. You just feel like you have a real connection with the station

I'm also a big fan of NPR. Tiny Desk (YouTube) is first class. My favourite Canadian station is Indie 88.

Shard

That's good.

Recently I've been seeing some photos of Malta on Instagram, damn it's beautiful.

Gozit

Yep, life by the sea in a more laid back country is beautiful. Silly that the wages still don't match the true cost of living though. Going to focus on finding a remote Can/US job so I get more money but can spend at least 5 months of the year here. Lets see.

Shard

Digital nomad ! Seems to be quite the trend for your generation. By the way how much time have you spent in Malta?

Gozit

Yes exactly i want to follow the DN lifestyle. Not sure how easy it will be to find an employer willing to play ball but worst case get a remote job with a Canadian employer and just keep it quiet if I leave the country for a few months.

I've been here since end of May... supposed to head back to Canada in 2 weeks when the quarantine is lifted for fully vaccinated travelers.

Shard

Are you in Malta now ? There must be plenty of contracts/employers that are not bothered about location, so long as the work is complete.

dbd33

My perspective, as someone involved in hiring for a large organization in Canada, is that no one hired in the past year or so, permanent or contract, has been on site at all. Lots of people are in locations that make it infeasible to be on site routinely and many have worked from remote countries for a year. That said, they must all agree to be resident in Canada and to attend an office on reasonable request. I assume this policy to derive from a combination of tax/employment law and past miserable experiences with outsourcing.

I have worked remotely into Canada for short periods but for organizations where I have an established relationship. In order to connect with a Canadian client/employer at a sensible rate on the basis of being a rootless cosmopolitan I think you'd have to be the only bilingual (E/F) expert in product X in the world where product X would have to be the flavour of the month.

Shard

It's getting off topic, but what do you make of this idea that Covid has demonstrated that remote working is more than possible, and that remote infrastructure has improved such that in five year's time many jobs (tech and otherwise) will in fact be outsourced to lower cost countries. I know that outsourcing of offic based work is nothing new, but there's some suggestion that 2020 was a tipping point.

dbd33

I haven't noticed a general improvement in remote infrastructure. Fifteen years ago there were teams with the members located remotely just as today, I was on a project for a year thinking everyone else was in one room until, right at the end, I found that they were scattered across the US. What has changed is that more companies have now invested in the necessary components to make remote working viable (e.g. more VPN servers, better consideration of security issues). Computing departments are slow moving and reluctant to change, covid forced more of them to catch up a bit.

Outsourcing is, I think, all about shedding healthcare costs; even a crappy benefit plan is a considerable expense to the employer. That need is now addressed in two ways, increased use of hourly paid, benefit free workers, "contractors" and service bureaus in undefined locations "the cloud". Many cloud implementations use the software as a service model, that is, the cloud vendor provides the whole application to run a business of some type. I think we're now entering what we might call the monsoon era wherein cloud clients find the lack of support for basic services (such as timely recovery) from the cloud vendors (I mean, holy shit, why would you trust anything important to Microsoft?) and the inability to strategically differentiate from other companies (because everyone is running the same packaged solution) unacceptable and drop out of the cloud.

In short then, I think outsourcing is yesterday's news.

Shard

The monsoon era.

https://www.cityam.com/blair-think-t...bs-outsourced/

dbd33

Well, Canada is a country firms outsource to, not from, so I don't think we need much worry. For example, several software companies now have offices in Vancouver because it's cheaper than CA and in the same time zone. That's also true of film and television program production companies.

Rixy

Yeah I'm that same way. I've even had people say to me I need to calm down and maybe a therapist will help lol.
No I just need you to not be spineless and get to the bloody point.