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!
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.
My job title is “Linux System Administrator”. I’d quit if they tried to make me drop Linux.
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.
Start job hunting now. By the sound of it they are one of those PE firms that zombie walk every acquisition into mediocrity.
