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!
That’s very unfortunate but hopefully you developed skills that will help you in your future career.
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.
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
At least you learned a lot along your journey, while getting paid for it. So it’s not entirely a waste of time.
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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Yeah, I had some cool Ansible integrations, Docker containers running internal infrastructure monitoring, OSTicket FOSS ticketing system, Open Project for project management, Tailscale for secure remote access, etc.
Oh well, I got a bunch of great experience building it, and I can still use that stuff on my own infrastructure at home.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world and find yourself so many projects at home you’ll never find time for anything but computers again :)
And at your next job, at an employer who sees the value of FOSS and a nerd with strong Linux-fu!
Quit?
If I can find a solid job somewhere else, for sure.
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 work at a “Microsoft Shop” in a division that was a previously acquired software developer that used an entirely linux based dev stack.
That stack is still all linux and we basically have to do all our work in WSL. It’s a pain.
Teams is its own plane of hell. Sorry to hear.
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.
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.
Shutdown: noun
Shut down: verb
You can’t straddle the lane.
shutdown: commandHarsh but fair, edited lol.
I’m sorry, friend.
If any of those deployments included code you or your team wrote, I highly encourage archiving it in VCS somewhere, even if only internally.
Also do a formal write up of all the deployments and why each tech choice was made.
Your hard won knowledge and skills should be preserved somewhere.
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. 😮💨
Oh buddy they’re wiping your laptop that sucks. Figured you were talking like servers and stuff (which is still bad.) if it’s company issued you don’t have a choice, but do they allow personal hardware to be connected? If so I’d 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.
Can you run WSL or whatever it’s called? I se to remember some coworkers getting a Linux shell on windows. Of course that still leaves you with the shitty windows UI.
My last job was Windows desktop, so I installed vmware and ran Linux in fullscreen mode.
Yeah, not worth it to just have the command line unfortunately. 🫤
That sucks. I know what it’s like to feel like the only voice of reason when your company is shooting itself in the foot.
I see from other comments you’re already looking for a new job, which is a very good idea. From your description of this buyout, it seems very likely that you’re about 6 months to a year out from the layoff stage of the private equity playbook.
At the end of the day you’ll always have the experience you gained from building all that stuff. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to build it back even better somewhere else!
@Lettuceeatlettuce such a sad story! I’m assuming you’re finding new work? I hope you’re able to take your Linux/FOSS skills somewhere they’ll be appreciated
Looking actively. I haven’t lost my job (yet) I cut my teeth in IT on supporting Microsoft products, so I still have relevant skills for the new corpo’s IT, but it already stinks of the big corporate style.
Super inefficient processes, stuck in their ways, everything has to get bumped around to 3-4 different departments before getting approved, etc.
And cLoWd EvErYtHiNg! So we are hardcore vendor locked with Microsoft, there isn’t a chance of me getting them to try using anything FOSS as an alternative.
At least my home lab is 100% Linux and FOSS, same with all my personal computers. I’m having even more fun than usual going home after work and playing with my tech.
And one small upside is they are giving me all the old computers from my current company, so I have a huge pile of towers that I can referb and sell, or use for more home lab testing.
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.
If I am ever able to build it and get it working reasonably well, for sure!
Wow. You have some really cool quick-improvenent ideas alongside major improvements. OCR would have applications in so many other situations too!
It definitely sounds like you will be under-appreciated under the new owners, you have so much skill and knowledge that are kinda going to waste with them.
But based on your other comments here, you know this too. Best wishes and good luck in your search.
Thanks a bunch. Yeah, hoping to find a good job doing something I like in the coming months.
@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! 🫶
Start your own company :-)
