Hey Russell!
We recently did a reorganisation of the lists and the luv-jobs list was removed because it had hardly any traffic and hardly any subscribers. There are some topics where a small number of people is sufficient, but for jobs most employers won't hiring at any given time and the ones that are might not have a fit for your skills. So quantity is very important for jobs.
Yep, that's totally fair.
It sucks the way the government is trying to prop up real estate companies by encouraging office based work. Especially when we have world-wide fuel shortages and driving to work is extremely inefficient for petrol vehicles.
Not just fuel, but also time and opportunities to get out of renting. I used to spend an hour and a half each day just to get between Pasoce Vale and University of Melbourne, and had to rent since I don't think I can pay off a one million dollar house before I'm dead. Working remotely allows spending that commute time on mentally recharging, and at least for a while made buying seem viable, since I was no longer married to the city. I could understand needing to be on site if there were a need for physical presence, eg data center work obviously. But when I can use async comms, Git, VPNs, and ssh to transcend time and space, expecting to chain me to a chair under painful fluoro lights in a distracting office from 9-5 (which is realistically more like 8-6 with commute) just seems perverse.
But there are companies hiring for remote. The last few positions I've been in discussions with over Linkedin have emphasised the remote component of the work up front.
Some of the positions I've been in discussions with have been advertised as partially remote work with the first few weeks on-site. If I was in your situation I'd make plans around living in a motel for a few weeks at the start of employment and spending one week a month in a motel. This of course depends on your personal situation, my health is fine for living in motels and I don't have any dependents who would suffer if I was away for a week but not everyone is in that situation.
I have idly considered actively seeking such work in places that are within a day's driving such as Canberra. I try to avoid planes as much as possible, I have caught Covid19 once and that was on a work flight.
That's interesting. I don't have responsibilities like pets or dependents, so I'd be open to living away from home for a bit if travel and accommodation were paid for.
What are you the GNU maintainer for? Do you have an active Github account?
I've heard that some employers like to look at Github as part of the hiring process, I've never been into github and only use it when forced to do so. It shows my PRs but I don't have projects there. I have idly considered just putting a heap of stuff there to make it look impressive.
https://salsa.debian.org/users/etbe/projects
I have stuff in Salsa (the Debian git system) but I don't know if employers will be interested in that. Maybe I'm just better off not working for a company that can't look at Salsa.
I'm lead maintainer for GNU Datamash, and on the books as a possible successor to Arnold Robbins for gawk. Possibly maintaining gawk in future is very intimidating, so I balked a bit at first, but one thing I'm doing during this downtime period is trying to become more active there. I'm https://github.com/cryptarch on GitHub, but like you I don't have much on display there at the moment. I used to have a bunch of stuff, but I took it down eight years ago in protest over MicroSoft buying them out. I haven't got around to re-upping much, even though I'm now more resigned to the situation :P
Thanks for your patience with this email, hopefully it's not too much noise for this list!
The problem we face with this list is lack of content. So anything vaguely related to Linux goes at this time. Hopefully after Phil's good work in fixing the list software we can get more discussion happening but even if/when that happens posts about Linux employment will remain on topic here.
Cool, thanks :) ~ Tim