Shutdown: noun

Shut down: verb

You can't straddle the lane.

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.

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.

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.

Quit?

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.

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.

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.

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

You're welcome to join me.

Man it does stink. Get some of them up on GitHub or Gitlab if you can.

That's very unfortunate but hopefully you developed skills that will help you in your future career.

I feel for you. Here's hoping the new system is clean.

@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

Thank you for your service 🫡