I interviewed for a shop in Ottawa.

I was working at the time, but it was declining situation so I was Motivated.

So I show up a the appointed time, and I meet a guy who can best be described as ‘a little grizzled’ and ‘a little stressed’. We go over my resume, first off the bat.

“These are the things we need from you,” he said, tapping items on a list. “And these are places you suck,” he said, tapping the same list.

I basically checked out at that point; there was no way I was suitable for this post. I could learn it, but it was a lot. And while I had a lot of other skills that showed up on the job desc and my CV, missing so many important pieces was insurmountable. It wasn’t a super-fun experience no matter how interesting he was - he was a great lead hand - and I left without much fanfare. Great rambling talk about all kinds of things, but it’s the worst I’ve ever flamed out in an interview; and the fastest.

Imagine my surprise when he 'strong-hire’d me. I actually said to the recruiter, “Yeah, you’ve got it wrong. No no, and it’s totally okay, but you’re off by one or something. You mean to call the name above mine or the name below mine, and that guy is probably gonna love this job. But you don’t mean to call me. No stress, all good, but yeah, I’m not the guy you wanted to call.”

It was a great job and that guy was my lead. Brutal honestly is fabulous if you can take it.

check your devices

Go ahead. Open your iPhone. Some things don’t present as being safe to open without damaging the unit, so no one’s going to pop it open for lulz.

Terrorists killing terrorists

These are the terrorists killing anyone standing around people the terrorists don’t like. During a funeral.

I am starting to love them

Be careful whom you worship.

Based

On second thought, you’ll be onto some new fad in a day.

consider PCLinuxOS for a mageia (mandriva, conectiva and mandrake, both branches from RedHat pre-Enterprise Linux) descendant.

if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it

I miss Cringely’s take on this.

. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.

It’s a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.

But this new one is QUITE the departure. It’s not ‘red hat’ stupid but a little further on the spectrum.

I was actually about to do that (move to Debian).

Maybe stay within the Enterprise Linux camp for a bit. Not to start a flame war, but when an OS company was deciding between EL and Debians, the RPM format was the deciding factor.

But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though?

I can only recommend you look at the last decade of IBM’s history in that respect.

While Jeff’s support for ELs has been imperfect - I marveled at the supply-chain issues gleefully baked into the drupal vagrant stuff - I came here to really say:

IBM’s not really the poster-child for preserving the sanctity of source code in the past (cough cough Monterey cough), and I’m surprised they’re even suggesting everyone respect their own demands around that.