Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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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.
They blocked a 10 row lookup table because it wasn’t indexed and wouldn’t have suitable performance. That held me up for 2 weeks because they wanted me to profile it and document the lack of an index (it had no measurable impact, in case you were wondering).
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.
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Hoard a copy of your work. Even if your new overlords are gutting and replacing it, ot might be useful elsewhere one day.
Source: Similar situation once upon a time. I am currently using on a daily basis what was once replaced in a different company.
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25 years ago the system was setup as a quick temporary solution.
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Please be careful when copying anything that could be considered your employer's intellectual property off of that employer's systems. And definitely be even more careful about using one employer's IP for a new employer (neither company would be pleased to discover this).
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True. In my particular case it's not an issue (because of a long and boring story I can'tbe arsed getting into), but shielding oneself as well as the employer from legal liability is important.
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I get it. I've just been through a merger and the new head software delivery has plans on rewriting everything in their tech stack. He is in for an absolute fucking ride when he realises that such a rewrite will not take a year but 5 to 10 and will incapacitate our department for the entire time. In a rapidly evolving market. It is 3 decades of continuous and rapid feature expansions he's trying to unroll.
It's not FOSS though, so I'm not as invested in it, I'm just here to see him either fail utterly or get kicked due to his cognitive dissonance that'll cost our department in the tens or hundreds of millions.
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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.
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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 …
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- but corporate policy is to let IT handle updates
- but Windows doesn’t like being ignored so it bypasses group policy and auto-updates
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Thank you for your service 🫡
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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.
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that's actually really sad, IT of all people don't care about FOSS?
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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.
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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 -
Depends on where you work and what their policies are. My work does have many strict policies on following licenses, protecting sensitive data, etc
My solution was to MIT license and open source everything I write. It follows all policies while still giving me the flexibility to fork/share the code with any other institutions that want to run something similar.
It also had the added benefit of forcing me to properly manage secrets, gitignores, etc
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It's natural to feel sad seeing your work undone. Start searching for a new gig and do the best you can to not have an emotional response to the stuff you dislike; that'll only make you exhausted and burned out.
I'm sorry your job got worse. Try to find where you can be happy again.
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My job title is "Linux System Administrator". I'd quit if they tried to make me drop Linux.
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Your feelings are valid, that blows.
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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)!
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But it's also difficult to prove you didn't make it similarly 2 times. Just do some name changing, reordering and some slight changes and you should be golden.
