Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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For sure! 🫶
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Thank you, I might join in spirit heh
