Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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Please be careful when copying anything that could be considered your employer’s intellectual property
Very unlikely $NEW_EMPLOYER will run all your ideas past $OLD_EMPLOYER to see if it's their code...
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That's very unfortunate but hopefully you developed skills that will help you in your future career.
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Weres crowd strike windows shitting the bed when u need it
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Back in the 1990s I developed an app over the course of 6 years, first 3 in C/DOS then we ported that to C++/Borland/Win95 and continued developing it for another 3 years. I was the only coder, we had a dedicated tester / documentation specialist and the algorithms lead who was more of an idea guy than any hands-on code work.
We got bought out. Buyers "needed it in native Win32 because of the depth of the talent pool." Whatever, I'm here to help if they want it during porting. Buyers estimated 2 developers could port it in about 2-3 months. Yeah, o.k. Never asked for help, but at 6 months in they had expanded the dev team to 6 guys and were still struggling and looking to hire more. Ultimately they reduced scope a little and called it "ready to use" in Win32 after about 15 months. Glad they got it "maintainable" by switching to that Win32 dev environment with such a deep talent pool to hire from, they easily spent more man hours on the port than we spent developing it in the first place.
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Thank you
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For sure, I've learned a ton in the last year. Hopefully I can land a Linux focused job this year and get away from Windows support once and for all.
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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.
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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.
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My work laptop has Debian on it 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.
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I feel you so much on this. Bet your work was really cool.
What cool FOSS things would you do first if this take-over company allowed you to?
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Thank you
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Thank you
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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.
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Oof, that's rough. My spouse is a software engineer and has been through a similar thing recently.
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Already backed up securely and anonymously
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Start job hunting now. By the sound of it they are one of those PE firms that zombie walk every acquisition into mediocrity.
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I am careful, but not concerned. The new company's IT doesn't give a damn about anything that I set up or implemented. Their reactions when I was describing my work and job role before the buyout was essentially, "Aww, the cute little sysadmin was making scripts and using Linux, isn't that sweet."
As far as they're concerned, all the old hardware and software are e-waste and are being scrapped. They are ripping out everything, literally. From our phone system, to our physical devices, to our firewalls, network switches, Active Directory, and file server.
They are replacing every single part of our infrastructure. Everything I built is useless in their eyes.
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Thank you 🫶
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For sure, already reaching out to recruiters and applying to some job postings.
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Shutdown: noun
Shut down: verb
You can't straddle the lane.
