My plan B is to get a job at the Amazon warehouse if and when I get let go. I am at an age right now where its a disadvantage and trust me, its not for a lack of trying. Companies want to do more with less and there is advocacy to put the younger generation ahead. Basically intentional ageism, even though you can hit the ground running compared to fresh out a college. AI is certainly taking the sail out the winds for this profession. But Crowdstrike was certainly a blessing in disguise and I believe it spooked a lot of C-Level execs and bought people like me more time. Because AI couldn’t fix that CSAgent BSOD. That was a boots on the ground effort.

In the next 10 years though, I hope to have wind down and maybe have an exit plan to either Mexico or back to my home country in the Caribbean and live off what I have earned until SS kicks in.

Thank you for sharing what you have been through and hope you continue to be blessed with opportunities going forward.

Oh, it was just this little thing 🙂 https://github.com/neozeed/xMach/pull/5

oh what was the repository? I dont’ remember any notificaion

The cat & terminator are indeed AI. I’ve been enjoying the absurdity of it.

I guess I haven’t looked on github in a while. I’d been daydreaming of trying to get 4.3BSD Uwisc going to Intel but I know deep down, it’d be a waste of time, as nobody would use it. But I kind of like the Quasijarius rant of a pure BSD safe from ‘the future’ of cruft. But it’s not 1988 so nobody would care. I donno.

Any time!

Always fun to yell at the literal & proverbial clouds!

What an essay! Thank you very much.

Thanks!

This year has been quite the struggle, personally, professionally and well yeah, the year isn’t over.

I’m glad that my weird little blog is still valuable to people out there, sometimes I feel like it’s going nowhere, or nobody reads it, but it’s always uplifting to see that I’m still slightly relevant.

I’d largely say the rise of Linux was a 1-2 hit on the entrenched 1980-1990’s Microsoft work culture.

The first being the super late arrival of affordable 32bit operating systems, and compilers. This is the kind of thing that needed to be out in 1987! It may not seem like a big deal now as time telescopes this kind of stuff, but there was no cheap xenix, nor any cheap Microsoft C/386 in the 1980’s or early 1990s. This gave rise to GCC, and even things like EMX/RSX/DJGPP on common platforms like DOS/OS2 where hackers filled the void themselves. And this early beachhead of GCC onto commodity platforms started to pave way for the second punch which was…

Windows licensing. Once the internet started it’s deregulation, everyone wanted to run a server, and that just again cost a lot of money. And college kid’s time is literally worthless, so enter the Linux, built on GCC. By being able to remove the licensing from the equation universities shifted into this paradigm, and Microsoft had lost the college momentum.

At it’s heart Agile was the idea that groups should set their own pace, and focus on the short term. Instead, it’s been an inversion where every part of the organization moves in lock step of 2 week ‘sprints’, endless meetings before and at the end of each day with no obviously big picture planning anymore which gives us constantly small shifting in software, but no more giant leaps.. At best Linux is just derived from SYSV, just as OS X is 4.4BSD on Mach, itself derived from 4.3BSD. There will be no new NTOS, or Unix in the world of Agile, as dreaming big is explicitly forbidden.

Microsoft goofed by getting rid of the Quick languages. Once GCC had passed version 1.27 where it’s usable enough on i386, Microsoft C/386 was doomed. They may have not known it, but the only thing they could do was ensure there was a free ‘bbs’ download version of the Quick C/Basic/Pascal/Fortran/Cobol languages. They lost mindshare there.

Just as the Windows server/core thing should have been far more aggressively priced.

There is definitely some relationship with the ‘low end dev’ with Linux/Python/Perl and Agile, but I think it’s more so available tools on the cheap, and IT management overall of following the same roadmap.

The larger symptom of the industry is that long term employment is not desirable, and everyone should be jumping ship every 2-3 years, there is no tribal knowledge, so big planning is impossible, just as the work processes has become the same everywhere, with only marginal incremental changes are possible. I’ts a broken system everywhere.

First of all — congrats for your new job. You did it!

For me you are like deity in retrocomputing and I am just wondering why it was so difficult to find a job.

A’m in my 49 now, so — the same team ))) I have a stable job for now, but constantly try to learning all this leetcode problems and behavioral interview questions.

Do you think the rise of linux is due to the agile culture? Or it gives agile culture an opportunity to rise?

Thank you for your blog…. it is unique place over the net.

It’s hard to move out of that comfort zone. But once you pass 50 you are such a liability. It’s funny how much you are not wanted but the number of times already I go on rants at work people are enamored at what good ideas they are

I’ve got no solid answer on the future , AI is already making a mess, and CrowdStrike has shown us that testing is so 1990s. It seems that being a business process professional is the real future. Kids haven’t learned lessons of dev/stage/QA/prod it’s all ship it live!.. and it sucks, just as agile has given us “operating systems” where the feature is the removal of the gun icon. There are no big projects that agile is capable of delivering. The rise of Linux is exactly that.