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!
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.
Thanks 🤜🤛
It’s not dumb to feel sad about it. Enshittification is sad, especially when you see it from the inside.
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.
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.
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!
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)!
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.
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.
This won’t be the last time, I’m afraid. At the end of the day, software developers build sandcastles.
If you want to build something that will outlast your company, make sure you also have a hobby or craft outside of computing.
Start your own company :-)
Well… shit. My company just sold my department to another company. The phrase they use in the office is “a Microsoft shop”. We’re talking Windows, Teams, Azure and O365.
The transition is going to be shit. After the transition is over, it will be shit.
I might just operate my workflow entirely out of WSL2 out of spite.
I feel simultaneously good and bad that the least modern team at my company is the Windows admin team. I hope they were embarrassed as shit when they were asked how that automated process I help them create 9 months ago was going and they said, “Uh, we’ll be rolling it out this quarter.” They’re constantly at least 2 steps behind our Linux admins.
I don’t think feeling sad in this situation is dumb at all
I’m with you in your pain Linux brother/sister… I’ll drink a pint in your name tonight
Thank you, I might join in spirit heh 👊
This is why I stopped giving a shit at work and not spending all the extra effort. It all just gets killed by some manager that doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about.
I always feel like the features I’ve worked on become my coworkers or like pets. When a specific feature breaks often, I’ll think “damnit Frank! One of these days I’m going to patch that edge case once and for all!”
Then I patch Frank and he quiets down so I can focus on the next thing leadership wants.
You get to know these things and you put care into designing them (if you didn’t put care into them, you’d likely be a hack of an IT person). It’s always hard to see them go.
Sorry for your loss.
Thank you 🫶
That’s not dumb. It’s devastating. I’m not a linux user due to multiple of reasons and I’m sad about it. I’d be very sad if I was able to make it to the other side and then get taken back
Thank you 👊
Thank you for your service 🫡
That’s a damn shame, I’m sorry! I hope you got to back up a few of your personal things, and if you didn’t at least you have a bunch of knowledge to take onto your next project
it sucks that they teach us our code will live forever, so watch out for introducing bugs…
then the companies go under, designs change and you waste your life leaving behind nothing.
Yeah, it’s rough. I am trying to look on the bright side, that I learned a lot that will help my career going forward, and what I did implement worked very well and helped make a few people’s lives easier.
Libre software is for control of our own computing. We don not own other people’s computers.
