My company’s buyout has been completed, and their IT team is in the final stages of gutting our old systems and moving us on to all their infra.
Sadly, this means all my Linux and FOSS implementations I’ve worked on for the last year are getting shut down and ripped out this week. (They’re all 100% Microsoft and proprietary junk at the new company)
I know it’s dumb to feel sad about computers and software getting shut down, but it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.
That’s the nature of a corpo takeover though. Just wanted to let off some steam to some folks here who I know would understand.
FOSS forever! ✊
Edit: Thanks, everybody so much for the kind words and advice!
Now be prepared for windows nagging you to update everyday
- but corporate policy is to let IT handle updates
- but Windows doesn’t like being ignored so it bypasses group policy and auto-updates
It’s not dumb to feel sad about it. Enshittification is sad, especially when you see it from the inside.
Better start looking for a new job. That company might not be in business for too long, judging from the choices that they’re making. Especially, if they work in the IT space.
For sure, already reaching out to recruiters and applying to some job postings.
You’re welcome to join me.
it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.
I’m an electronic security installer. You know how many times I’ve done stuff like install a complete 40+ camera CCTV system at a new store under construction only to be back at the same store a year later ripping it all out when it goes out of business? I know what that feels like.
Worst is when you come around for a regular store equipment refresh and recognize something you installed at that store ten years ago and start feeling real old…
Good luck wherever life takes you now.
Sorry to hear that, sounds rough too! Thanks for the well wishes, I’m talking with a few different recruiters right now and applying to some positions.
Still have my job currently, but hopefully I can make the jump soon to a Linux environment.
I was assigned the installation of a whole industrial line for food packaging, multiple millions worth, on and off I spent like 8 months abroad forcing badly designed machines into working (I was the top tech and I resigned after this job), even ended up in the hospital, likely due to stress. Few months after I left, I go out drinking with a former colleague who had been on site with me, he says: “Well, I’m happy to inform you that, the customer hasn’t called us for months! Means everything’s working, great job!” and shook my hand.
The following morning, another former colleague sends me the screenshot of a mail from the customer saying that the business opportunities didn’t work out and they’re decommissioning the line. Literal blood, sweat and tears, completely wasted.
Many years ago I did post mix installs. Because we were subcontract, it was not unusual to install a system for one company, then replace it under the banner of another company, and then rip that out and install another system on behalf of the first company again.
I can think of at least 3 different venues in our CBD that I swapped like that.
What it did was make me real good at ensuring anything I installed was easy to follow and work with afterwards… Cause it was probably going to be me again lol
Yo, that’s not being dumb. That’s a legitimate complaint. The OS you use is a tool you use to effectively do your job. A welder would equally be upset if their boss swapped out their welder for an inferior one they are less familiar with.
foss forever, brother
Absolutely 👊
Their loss!
Yeah, I had some cool Ansible integrations, Docker containers running internal infrastructure monitoring, OSTicket FOSS ticketing system, Open Project for project management, Tailscale for secure remote access, etc.
Oh well, I got a bunch of great experience building it, and I can still use that stuff on my own infrastructure at home.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world and find yourself so many projects at home you’ll never find time for anything but computers again :)
And at your next job, at an employer who sees the value of FOSS and a nerd with strong Linux-fu!
Libre software is for control of our own computing. We do not own other people’s computers.
Absolutely feel you, kinda similar situation at work atm. What frustrates me the most is that none of the IT personnel understands my frustration because most are not in that kind of IT community and don’t share the ideas behind all that. Just here to earn a dollar, whatever system we’re working on. No intrinsic desire to make the world better or at least more secure, none of that. Just robots and bureaucrats.
Yeah, the corporate style has already taken over. None of the new IT guys are mean or nasty, but they just don’t care about FOSS. It doesn’t even register with them.
Talking about all my integrations is just met with blank stares and, “Linux huh? I remember learning a bit about that 10 years ago in tech school.”
It’s just not even on their radar.
that’s actually really sad, IT of all people don’t care about FOSS?
Sadly, that’s been my experience for years in IT, at least where I live in the US.
I rarely encounter an IT person who knows what Linux is beyond “a hacker OS” or some arcane system from the 80’s that’s still running deep in a basement somewhere.
FOSS = janky freeware in their minds. They’ve usually never even heard of XCP-ng, OpenShift, TrueNAS, Bitwarden, PFSense, or any of the other professionally supported and enterprise-grade open source technologies.
My current work is going through this
They dropped an open system we used but the team managing the new one is so bureaucratic and disconnected from the people actually doing work it’s ridiculous.
They reject every proposal/change unless it’s 100% perfect. I had a project delayed by four weeks because I didn’t end single line docstrings with periods. They didn’t review the substance of the pr, they just commented on the docstrings and stopped as if the rest had no merit. It was two weeks between review cycles, so it took three cycles to actually fix what could have been one.
That whole team is just clearly a make work program. They nitpick and bike shed on every issue. But they aggressively document all the make work they do so they look super busy and important to the execs.
I just want to get work done, but instead it’s a Sisyphean effort.
It’s not dumb to see something you’ve worked and put your heart on being gutted to make room for some bullshit.
🤜🤛
You put lots of time and effort in. Now it will be discarded due to decisions of others.
Sad and/or disappointed feelings are normal.
Take care of yourself.
I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.
But there are different types of temporary. Temporary because the code got updated/upgraded or new and better software got implemented feels fine. It feels like your work was part of the never ending march of technical progress. Temporary because it gets ripped out if favor of a different, inferior suite hits hard.
If my code gets superseded by someone else’s complete rewrite that is better, then I’m all for it. If my code gets thrown out because we’re switching to a different, inferior system that is completely incompatible with my work, then that just hits like a ton of bricks.
Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.
25 years ago the system was setup as a quick temporary solution.
original generation of COBOL programmers where expecting their programs to be replaced (or at least rewritten) within a decade or so – and then Y2K and we realized how much COBOL was still in the wild – and now a couple decades down the line, they’re still having problems trying to convince fintech to switch from COBOL to the new language of Java …
Even that is pretty temporary.
If you build a house, there’s a good chance, it will survive for decades or even centuries. The house I currently live in survived two world wars and heavy bombardment in one of them. I don’t think any software will manage that.
Thanks 🤜🤛
I’m sorry, friend.
If any of those deployments included code you or your team wrote, I highly encourage archiving it in VCS somewhere, even if only internally.
Also do a formal write up of all the deployments and why each tech choice was made.
Your hard won knowledge and skills should be preserved somewhere.
Got everything saved already. They are wiping my Linux laptop Wednesday and putting Windows 11 on it. Looking forward to my sleek and fast Thinkpad to get much slower and clunkier. 😮💨
Oh buddy they’re wiping your laptop that sucks. Figured you were talking like servers and stuff (which is still bad.) if it’s company issued you don’t have a choice, but do they allow personal hardware to be connected? If so I’d just go buy my own thinkpad.
Yeah, it really bites. And no, they don’t allow anything personal other than phones.
At least I get to use the Thinkpad, even if it is gimped with Windows. They initially weren’t even going to allow that, because their company deploys only HP laptops.
But I made a strong and slightly pathetic case to the manager and he relented. Angry that I had to kiss the ring, but right now I need the money, and I really hated their clunky HP laptops.
Can you run WSL or whatever it’s called? I se to remember some coworkers getting a Linux shell on windows. Of course that still leaves you with the shitty windows UI.
My last job was Windows desktop, so I installed vmware and ran Linux in fullscreen mode.
My job title is “Linux System Administrator”. I’d quit if they tried to make me drop Linux.
I tried to push back, but they are a much larger company and they made it clear that I would be playing by their rules, not mine.
I was thinking of quitting immediately, but at least in my region of the country, the IT market is really rough right now, so I can’t afford to be out of work for months.
I won’t last long here though. They are half owned by a private equity firm, so they run everything based on the bottom line. Their IT team is understaffed, underpaid, and they are always looking for excuses to lay folks off or fire them. Their turnover rate is pretty high, burnout is rife.
Everything based on the bottom line
Using azure.
Pick one! I know why they’re a full Microsoft organisation, you’re already using office and exchange, so 365 makes sense, then teams makes sense, then may as well have some sharepoint storage, power platform is snazzy, and then oops we’re full azure hosted. I get why, it’s very convenient, has some good ecosystem integration benefits for the user and all the rest, but it certainly isn’t cheap.
Anyway, I’m sorry they’re kicking Linux and trashing years of hard work. That really sucks. Sadly new job time I think. But that’s easier said than done these days. Best of luck!
Start job hunting now. By the sound of it they are one of those PE firms that zombie walk every acquisition into mediocrity.
For sure, I’m on it already.
I know it’s rough. Trying to find a job that pays well and isn’t deep into proprietary stuff like SQL Server, C# and alike. Sadly this scenario is overwhelmingly the case, and until the crowdfunded and open source scenario get strong (they still aren’t) there isn’t too much of an option.
I’d argue that most mainstream FOSS is extremely strong. Something like 80% of servers and 60% of smartphones run Linux. Up until recently, Cloudflare was using Nginx for their entire CDN. The thing they replaced it with is technically also FOSS. Probably most computers in the world are using OpenSSL or GNUTLS.
I think the real “weakness” of FOSS is that they don’t have the money or the desire to schmooze corporate decision makers. They also don’t have sexy GUIs, but anyone could contribute that if they wanted.
I think I’m a cloud engineer, so I can’t use the same reasoning as you; but when I started at my company, I was given the option of either a Linux laptop with root or a Mac laptop. Obviously I selected Linux, but about a year later they started retiring all Linux laptops. The reason for this, I was told, is because the IT department didn’t know how to manage Linux laptops but they were familiar with Jamf. They did let us keep root on them, though.
I still miss using that laptop for work. The good news is, since they never implemented mandatory RTO policies, the company moved to a much smaller office. In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!
In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!
Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.
My work laptop is a Thinkpad running Debian with the Plasma DE, I love it so much. Everything is snappy and clean, set up and tuned perfectly to my preferences.
It’s getting wiped in a few days. I requested to keep it as a personal device if I wiped it, they denied that request. I even offered to buy it back from the company, but still no.
At least I get to keep it instead of using their bulky, crappy HPs, but replacing my sleek Debian system with Windows 11 feels so wrong.
I know it’s dumb to feel sad about computers and software getting shutdown, but it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.
Sadly, something we all have to get used to. Everything we do is ephemeral and the next guy will likely have better/different ideas on how to do things.
Basically everything I’ve ever built has been torn down or somehow bastardized eventually.
the next guy will likely have better/different ideas on how to do things. The extra fucked up part comes when the “new guys” purge all the people and systems that were already working and proven end up just circling around to more or less the old things. While of course acting like it was all their “ideas” after spending more money than was ever needed. The workers get fucked and the undervalued knowledge is lost (and the new workers also get fucked by being underpaid and overworked themselves). So fucking done with how much the wasteful executives giving themselves bonuses and keep cutting more and more corners.
Check your formatting
lol thanks. It must have somehow kept the quote format from another reply I made.