Being Forced to Say Goodbye
Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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!
it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.
I'm an electronic security installer. You know how many times I've done stuff like install a complete 40+ camera CCTV system at a new store under construction only to be back at the same store a year later ripping it all out when it goes out of business? I know what that feels like.
Worst is when you come around for a regular store equipment refresh and recognize something you installed at that store ten years ago and start feeling real old...
Good luck wherever life takes you now.
It's not dumb to feel sad about it. Enshittification is sad, especially when you see it from the inside.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yo, that's not being dumb. That's a legitimate complaint. The OS you use is a tool you use to effectively do your job. A welder would equally be upset if their boss swapped out their welder for an inferior one they are less familiar with.
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’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.
Start your own company :-)
At least you learned a lot along your journey, while getting paid for it. So it's not entirely a waste of time.
Weres crowd strike windows shitting the bed when u need it
Absolutely feel you, kinda similar situation at work atm. What frustrates me the most is that none of the IT personnel understands my frustration because most are not in that kind of IT community and don't share the ideas behind all that. Just here to earn a dollar, whatever system we're working on. No intrinsic desire to make the world better or at least more secure, none of that. Just robots and bureaucrats.
At the end of the day, they are just digital things. You had some great learning experiences with them. Now it's time to put those skills to use, and learn what's next that makes you happy.
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.
I always feel like the features I’ve worked on become my coworkers or like pets. When a specific feature breaks often, I’ll think “damnit Frank! One of these days I’m going to patch that edge case once and for all!”
Then I patch Frank and he quiets down so I can focus on the next thing leadership wants.
You get to know these things and you put care into designing them (if you didn’t put care into them, you’d likely be a hack of an IT person). It’s always hard to see them go.
Sorry for your loss.
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.
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
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.
Libre software is for control of our own computing. We don not own other people's computers.
Thank you for your service 🫡
You're welcome to join me.
I feel for you. Here's hoping the new system is clean.
Man it does stink. Get some of them up on GitHub or Gitlab if you can.