I'm a software engineer myself so I don't know a lot about this, but there are a few patterns that are not far off of what you're describing. For instance:
Absolutely, and IMO the EU should be developing our own semiconductors.
It seems completely unreasonable to me that one pillar of modern society has to be bought from USA or China and doesn't have a locally sourced alternative...
I’d definitely consider it being manufactured in the EU (given the privacy laws and generally responsible nature of some of the governments around this sort of stuff) to be a perk. I don’t really think the US government is spying on us through our “management engines” and that kind of stuff, but it would be a nice perk, to be 100% certain.
I'm from Castilla y León (mid west) and the only people I know doing this are people who have to work at unusual times that wake up at 3-5 in the morning.
People with normal working hours don't take siesta.
I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money.
Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year.
I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.
Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount.
1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them.
2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more.
3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche.
4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot.
I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*.
As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.
> While the Northern European moose is smaller than the North American, we still treat it with a lot of respect if we ever come across them in nature.
Smaller deers are dangerous and you need to be careful with them. In Spain the largest deers are red deers (males over 200kg are very rare) and there are a few cases of people killed by them. Even small females are dangerous enough to kill healthy large man.
Even roe deers, which are quite small (maybe 30kg a larger male), can cause serious injuries because they are crazy agile and fast and their antlers are quite sharp. Here's a video of a man trying to feed one: https://www.club-caza.com/files/videos/Ataque-de-corzo-a-per...
Deers may not look dangerous because they are herbivorous and cute, but they are.
Deers may not look dangerous because they are herbivorous and cute, but they are.
Good advice, and not something most people think about. As a general rule, all wild animals should be treated as dangerous and not cute and harmless. Even a baby squirrel will scratch the shit out of you. Cute little bunnies? Yeah, watch what happens when they're cornered and think they nothing left to lose. Experience says birds might be the one exception, though I've never tried to get close to an eagle. :-)
If it has claws, teeth, and doesn't live with me in my house, I treat it with a respectful distance until I have reason to believe otherwise, no matter how cute it might be.
For this reason I use a virtual debit card for each subscription and only use it for that. If a subscription is hard to cancel I will just cancel my card instead.
I clicked through to this thread because I want to know more about this.
I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer).
I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing.
It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me.
For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum.
For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win.
So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??
IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.
That makes more sense. It's still sad to hear. As an outsider, Red Hat always stood out to me as a truly special company. Too few 'open-source' enterprises have figured out how to profitably develop F/OSS in a principled way, without the 'open core' bait-and-switch.
It's just the tech company circle of life, I guess. I wonder what younger tech company might play a similar role as Red Hat has another 30 years from now, and if they even exist yet.
It was after but like for CentOS Stream the writing had been on the wall long enough; both rwmj and I are in the virtualization team.
There was hardly any new feature between RHV 4.3 (early 2019) and 4.4 (2020, last non-maintenance release) and there literally wasn't time for IBM to say anything about RHV 4.4, considering that feature work for 4.4 would have started before the acquisition (July 2019).
I am sore because I had many customers who were left without a path that made sense for them. Kubevirt is the future but it would be like giving your Grandpop a hoverboard. He’ll break a hip.
I'm not there anymore but there has been significant change in the company culture (which was great) and IBM is making conditions gradually worse.
One thing that is a clear change is that IBM is pushing for having a cheaper workforce, more employees but cheaper and therefore less qualified. Many short term goals of getting quick sales rather than get stuff that is sustainable over time not just technically but also burning people out.
Depecration of CentOS is something that really pissed me off, specially when we had acquired CentOS a few years back.
Some projects have been transfered to IBM. Others without being transferred directly were influenced by IBM in a negative way (I was a software engineer in one that was).
Significant changes in teams that deal with end customers, support has been affected, consulting has been affected. I know sales had some kind of merge as well (I don't any friend in sales but I've heard some stuff), etc...
Also there are loads of ridiculous changes in policy to save costs and they don't even save any money.
Something that really pissed me off were problems in HR. For instance I've seen problems in payslips (once I was paid THREE times with different amounts and the following month I got a discount on my payslip because I was paid too much, I know a guy who got paid 4 times that month and the month after he still got an extra amount because after 4 different payments money was still missing). I've heard of problems and delays doing the paperwork for paternity leave.
Hi! I don't recognize your nick but thanks for the kind words in your other message, first of all. I'm curious who you are, it would be great if you dropped me a private email or social media DM to tell me! Sorry about not responding to every point, I tried to focus on those where I can reply without being too vague. I hope you understand.
First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before.
And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out.
Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower.
And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something.
Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it.
From the sidelines, thanks for this detailed reply. I went to bed last night before I saw it, but I was hoping I would get to see a more detailed account of this perspective.
one thing I don't hear mentioned is a huge change in company culture. we started hiring management from cisco, and they are NOT a good personal fit. like super sexist nasty backstabbing management types. that was NOT the type of people Red Hat hired pre IBM.
To be honest if the worst thing you can say about a company is they changed the distribution model of the thing they were giving you for free from point releases to rolling updates then they could be a lot worse.
That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing fees and support. So it's really useful for developing software where your customer is the US government or someone else standardized on RHEL.
Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.
Because CentOS had been languishing, with releases and security fixes taking longer and longer, and the thought at the time was that since CentOS was seen as the entry point to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it might be leaving a bad impression with potential future customers.
The thinking behind CentOS Stream is different. The idea was not to kill off a free competitor (those were always going to exist, and projects like Rocky and Alma forming was inevitable, and this was obvious). The idea was to create a real community where previously there was not much of one. CentOS was the Android-style "throw it over the wall" model of open source. About the most you could do as an outsider to contribute was file tickets on Bugzilla and package for EPEL. Whereas CentOS Stream provides a place for people to contribute to future versions of RHEL, and therefore, RHEL clones like Rocky and Alma.
So Rocky Linux devs and users, Alma Linux devs and users, CentOS devs and users, Facebook employees (they use CentOS Stream internally), Oracle Linux devs, and whoever else can make and review contributions, which is a more symbiotic relationship than existed before.
It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds.
I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
Wow. You two had very different experiences of the acquisition.
I guess a lot of the anxiety surrounding an acquisition is anticipatory, and on some level that can cause culture changes in its own right, if it inspires a fair number of people to look for work elsewhere.
Odd, most pre workouts supplements include caffeine.
I use a pre-workout from a very famous supplement brand which includes 175 mg of caffeine and I can definitely tell the difference. I can't tell how much of that is because of the caffeine, because it has more stuff like creatine and L-carnitine among other things, but I cant I feel like I last more doing this and I have more energy.
> I think this is some of the disconnect between users on this site who don't understand why people would possibly actively choose iOS even with the lockin. Most people do not want to use a product that is constantly updating and adding features
Precisely the reason why I have an iPhone and an iPad is because they give me 5 years of updates and even more of security fixes.
Firefox feels the need to scream at me every time it updates, which is all the time—far more often than iOS, and far more often than Safari. I think that's what the GP meant.
FF does the equivalent of a major iOS update several times per year, as far as the user experience of the update is concerned—iOS doesn't fill my screen with on-launch "hi! We updated!" notices unless the release is a big one and there's actually new stuff to tell me about, in which case they usually keep it short and to the point. FF opens & foregrounds a new tab to tell me about the exciting update (ugh) and sometimes also pops some call-out bubbles for Pocket or some other crap, way, way more often than any other software I use, and it's really annoying, especially for a piece of software I've been using exactly the same way since it was called Phoenix and before some of the people working on it were born, probably—none of the shit in those announcements has ever, once, been anything I needed or wanted to know about.
This, despite monkeying with UI and force-foregrounding unrequested content being UI poison for people with low computer literacy. I roll my eyes and close the crap; others get confused and are significantly delayed in doing whatever they actually wanted to do with the browser, on top of feeling confused and betrayed that their browser did something different when they opened it this time.
I don't remember the specifics of how to do it, but you can disable the Firefox upgrade welcome tab...
My Firefox install hasn't bothered me by opening any unwanted tabs in a couple years, at least? But it still updates on a system restart or when I tell it to -- it just reloads all the previously opened tabs without any UX burden.
Despite looking gross, they are indeed delicious.