TA Professional Perspectives

Today Shopify announced that working from home has officially become their default work paradigm. Plans to expand offices have been shelved. Their Chief Talent Officer (a fancy name for head of HR) was interviewed on the move by a somewhat skeptical CBC reporter. The reporter brought up, among others, the fact that trials elsewhere have not been very successful, and the issue of mental health. The CTO replied that technologies and attitudes have recently shifted (COVID a factor) and they are confident the company is making a good move, allowing them to hire talent regardless of geography. And yes, it's going to be very competitive. Two or three years ago, the big boss of another massive IT company in the US was bucking the work-from-home trend by famously invoking the belief (fact? fiction?) that people co-located and gathering around the office water cooler are an irreplaceable source of innovation. What would she say now? IBM, where telecommuting was common place with many ...

Mobility of the workforce: how far have we come, how far will we go ? By Tatiana Andronache, I.S.P. Published in Galt Global Review Mobility. Flexibility. Telecommuting. Teleworking. Virtual Office. Virtual meetings. Virtual teams. Flex-office. Home Office. Alternative Officing. The landscape of the office work environment has dramatically changed in the last twenty years. It’s easy to get confused by the many overlapping buzz-words that describe changes already in place – or predict changes yet to come. What has really changed ? Not too long ago, a desk, a stack of files and the nine-to-five schedule were the “trademark” of any office worker. Unprecedented advances in computer technology, compounded by the advent of the internet have made possible a dramatic evolution in what office work means today, not only in terms of tools and technology, but also from a human perspective. It is possible now to access and process information from pretty much any place where some k...

Now that I came to think about it, Y2K has changed the course of my life - and not for the better. In the spring of 1997 I was recruited by a head-hunter and left my programmer/analyst position at a medium-sized IT shop for the lure of the big name. Where is that bang-head-against-wall spot? Back then, the year when I would have retired with an indexed company pension was nowhere on the horizon, and the very notion of retirement was an unfathomable concept. So I went. After three months of no work assignment, and not even a computer on my desk, I, like many others in the newly-hired contingent started questioning our raison-d'etre. Some were organizing fake meetings just to keep talking lest they fall asleep. (Some did). Some left. And then things started moving because Y2K was coming and we, like hundred others, had been corralled so that the company could bid on, execute and profit from the expected demand for Y2K contracts. I landed in what was to become the Y2K Centre of C...

From Shakespeare to IM: does language still matter ? By Tatiana Andronache, I.S.P. Published in Galt Global review A few centuries ago, a few enlightened scholars and writers were using their feathery pens and their best language skills in order to create masterpieces for the elite of their time - and the elite of times yet to come. Today, we have a myriad of ways to create and distribute an untold amount and variety of  “communication” to a diversified audience around the globe, tuned in for the “here and now”. But what happened to the content of  this communications ? And what about the quality of the communication skills of those who devise all these wonderful technologies ?  In the world of IM (or instant messaging, the hottest trend in communications) brevity and speed are of the essence. An impressive amount of technical work goes into creating this technology, which, among other things, enables hurried teenagers to exchange cryptical messages con...

The English Language as an IT tool   By Tatiana Andronache, I.S.P. Published in ComputerWorld Canada 2006 “Grace, no execution”, the emperor decided. But his handlers wrote the order down as “Grace no, execution”. The emperor signed without a second look, and a head rolled needlessly because of a misplaced comma. Or so the story goes. In our era, we are more than ever under the tyranny of words, commas, dashes, slashes and dots - in our invented languages as well as in our natural ones. Experts tell us time and again to watch our grammar and spelling on resumes if we want to have a chance at that coveted IT position. Or so the story goes. Why is it that once that perfectly spelled resume has landed its author the targeted position, all of a sudden spelling, clarity and style become the Cinderella of the IT profession? Maybe resumes do get turned down because of this kind of flaws, but the same rarely happens with technical writing. When was the last time you or y...