Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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@Lettuceeatlettuce okay, glad you still have a job at least. Sick that they're giving you those towers! It'd be a field day for me, I hope you enjoy it!
For sure! đ«¶
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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
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Shutdown: noun
Shut down: verb
You can't straddle the lane.
Harsh but fair, edited lol.
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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.
For sure, I'm on it already.
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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.
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Oh buddy theyâre wiping your laptop that sucks. Figured you were talking like servers and stuff (which is still bad.) if itâs company issued you donât have a choice, but do they allow personal hardware to be connected? If so Iâd just go buy my own thinkpad.
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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?
Good question. I was in the process of testing out DokuWiki for internal documentation, that was really cool.
But probably using Tailscale to phase out our janky ipsec VPN solution. Super high speed and bandwidth aren't a concern at my current place, so Tailscale would be a great solution to fix the current setup we have and make remote work much easier for end users.
I was looking at a Grafana/Prometheus stack for active monitoring and metrics too, which would have been really cool.
I was also talking to the former owner about developing an in-house piece of software that used machine learning and OCR to pull relevant data out of huge construction PDFs, convert it to CSV formatted data, and import that directly into our estimating software, saving our estimators massive amounts of time having to manually parse those documents and input the data line by line, cell by cell.
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Oh buddy theyâre wiping your laptop that sucks. Figured you were talking like servers and stuff (which is still bad.) if itâs company issued you donât have a choice, but do they allow personal hardware to be connected? If so Iâd 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.
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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 itâs called? I se to remember some coworkers getting a Linux shell on windows. Of course that still leaves you with the shitty windows UI.
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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.
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.
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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
I don't know where you are, but this isn't always enough. If it's your employer's IP it's not yours to license to begin with.
In my situation, it even extends to any hobby projects I work on and I don't think my situation is unusual.
That said, most employers don't care about hobby projects with no earning potential.
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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.
It's incredible how that proprietary software is actually inefficient e-waste. Most FOSS isn't bloated or slow, but proprietary software got the high ground because of contracts and "security", I'm sure.
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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
That seems like a good idea.
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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 shutdown 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 shutdown, 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!
I feel for you. Here's hoping the new system is clean.
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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 shutdown 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 shutdown, 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!
That's unfortunate. Both for throwing out all of your work and replacing it with an objectively inferior solution with poor track record of long-term sustainability.
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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).
Sadly, this means all my Linux and FOSS implementations I've worked on
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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
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Please be careful when copying anything that could be considered your employerâs intellectual property
Very unlikely $NEW_EMPLOYER will run all your ideas past $OLD_EMPLOYER to see if it's their code...
Will they even know if they are throwing it all away?
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Shutdown: noun
Shut down: verb
You can't straddle the lane.
shutdown: command -
It's incredible how that proprietary software is actually inefficient e-waste. Most FOSS isn't bloated or slow, but proprietary software got the high ground because of contracts and "security", I'm sure.
I always advocate for FOSS solutions at my work, but most of the time I get shut down with some variation of âWe prefer $MSPâs solution because it gives us someone else to blame if shit hits the fanâ. I hate that sentiment, but I appreciate the honesty.
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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.
I donât know if thereâs any precedence for this, but I could see a court asking to see the git commit log if things went that far.
