Vancouver, a new Adventure

It’s time for VSHN to expand internationally. Between this and next month, three VSHNeers will board a plane to Vancouver, BC, Canada, with the idea of transforming the way we work.

Faithful readers of this blog will surely remember that between October and November 2019, Daniel Hauswirth, Manuel Hutter, and I spent a few weeks in Vancouver as a “trial run.” During that time, we learned to live and love the city, scouting office locations, fulfilling our daily duties from nine timezones away, and also (of course!) enjoying a fantastic site on Earth with breathtaking scenery. We compiled our experiences and memories in a video on our YouTube channel, and the evidence we collected overwhelmingly supported our hypothesis; as the Mandalorian would say, “This is the way.”

Sadly, the global pandemic temporarily broke our plans to move to Canada for a few years. But in the meantime, we kept working towards this goal, and we officially registered a business in British Columbia last year.

But now, the time has come for the next step.

VSHN has a double goal: to provide the best 24/7 support to our customers and a healthy and enjoyable work experience for our VSHNeers. Opening an office in Vancouver reinforces this commitment. By “following the sun,” we can increase the quality of our monitoring and maintenance services while at the same time ensuring nobody has to be awake at two in the morning to do that.

Our explicit goal is to reduce the need for nighttime work for Swiss VSHNeers, to handle maintenance, solve incidents, and provide support during regular business hours. This approach will naturally yield better customer support; having an office in such a location allows us to spread maintenance tasks across multiple days. And it means we can provide support and handle incidents with fresh minds daily.

Tobias Nehrlich and I will take off next week, on July 14th. We have lots to do until then, like coordinating payroll and accounting, organizing work with our teams, and last but not least, sorting out our private lives (personal belongings, homes, etc.)

As soon as we arrive, there will be more to do; first of all, surviving the jet lag! And then organize our coworking space, complying with the “administrivia” required for operating in Canada, getting ready for maintenance tasks in coordination with our colleagues in Switzerland… and even looking for VSHNeers in Vancouver!

Yes, we’re going to be hiring, so if you are a DevOps engineer in British Columbia interested in working with a company with the best culture you can imagine, get in touch with us! We’d love to hear from you soon.