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!
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.
Oof, that’s rough. My spouse is a software engineer and has been through a similar thing recently.
Based om all the replies in this post it seems like it happens quite a lot. Or it all just happens now for some reason…
Your feelings are valid, that blows.
Thank you 👊
Their loss!
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!
It’s not dumb to feel sad about it. Enshittification is sad, especially when you see it from the inside.
You put lots of time and effort in. Now it will be discarded due to decisions of others.
Sad and/or disappointed feelings are normal.
Take care of yourself.
I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.
Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.
Even that is pretty temporary.
If you build a house, there’s a good chance, it will survive for decades or even centuries. The house I currently live in survived two world wars and heavy bombardment in one of them. I don’t think any software will manage that.
25 years ago the system was setup as a quick temporary solution.
original generation of COBOL programmers where expecting their programs to be replaced (or at least rewritten) within a decade or so – and then Y2K and we realized how much COBOL was still in the wild – and now a couple decades down the line, they’re still having problems trying to convince fintech to switch from COBOL to the new language of Java …
But there are different types of temporary. Temporary because the code got updated/upgraded or new and better software got implemented feels fine. It feels like your work was part of the never ending march of technical progress. Temporary because it gets ripped out if favor of a different, inferior suite hits hard.
If my code gets superseded by someone else’s complete rewrite that is better, then I’m all for it. If my code gets thrown out because we’re switching to a different, inferior system that is completely incompatible with my work, then that just hits like a ton of bricks.
Thanks 🤜🤛
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.
It’s not dumb to see something you’ve worked and put your heart on being gutted to make room for some bullshit.
🤜🤛
it sucks that they teach us our code will live forever, so watch out for introducing bugs…
then the companies go under, designs change and you waste your life leaving behind nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the corporate style has already taken over. None of the new IT guys are mean or nasty, but they just don’t care about FOSS. It doesn’t even register with them.
Talking about all my integrations is just met with blank stares and, “Linux huh? I remember learning a bit about that 10 years ago in tech school.”
It’s just not even on their radar.
that’s actually really sad, IT of all people don’t care about FOSS?
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.
My current work is going through this
They dropped an open system we used but the team managing the new one is so bureaucratic and disconnected from the people actually doing work it’s ridiculous.
They reject every proposal/change unless it’s 100% perfect. I had a project delayed by four weeks because I didn’t end single line docstrings with periods. They didn’t review the substance of the pr, they just commented on the docstrings and stopped as if the rest had no merit. It was two weeks between review cycles, so it took three cycles to actually fix what could have been one.
That whole team is just clearly a make work program. They nitpick and bike shed on every issue. But they aggressively document all the make work they do so they look super busy and important to the execs.
I just want to get work done, but instead it’s a Sisyphean effort.
Libre software is for control of our own computing. We do not own other people’s computers.
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.
the next guy will likely have better/different ideas on how to do things. The extra fucked up part comes when the “new guys” purge all the people and systems that were already working and proven end up just circling around to more or less the old things. While of course acting like it was all their “ideas” after spending more money than was ever needed. The workers get fucked and the undervalued knowledge is lost (and the new workers also get fucked by being underpaid and overworked themselves). So fucking done with how much the wasteful executives giving themselves bonuses and keep cutting more and more corners.
Check your formatting
lol thanks. It must have somehow kept the quote format from another reply I made.
Now be prepared for windows nagging you to update everyday
- but corporate policy is to let IT handle updates
- but Windows doesn’t like being ignored so it bypasses group policy and auto-updates
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.
I was assigned the installation of a whole industrial line for food packaging, multiple millions worth, on and off I spent like 8 months abroad forcing badly designed machines into working (I was the top tech and I resigned after this job), even ended up in the hospital, likely due to stress. Few months after I left, I go out drinking with a former colleague who had been on site with me, he says: “Well, I’m happy to inform you that, the customer hasn’t called us for months! Means everything’s working, great job!” and shook my hand.
The following morning, another former colleague sends me the screenshot of a mail from the customer saying that the business opportunities didn’t work out and they’re decommissioning the line. Literal blood, sweat and tears, completely wasted.
Sorry to hear that, sounds rough too! Thanks for the well wishes, I’m talking with a few different recruiters right now and applying to some positions.
Still have my job currently, but hopefully I can make the jump soon to a Linux environment.
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
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!
