Some background ... I've been a Linux user since \~1995 when I started installing Slackware on a spare PC, one diskette at a time. I was broke as hell at the time and had a single working floppy disk. It was a LONG process and TBH I can't recall much about Slackware at the time.
A few years later I finally broke into the IT field with a "web programmer" job at a small web hosting company. Everything started out running on Solaris but within a year, I convinced my boss that Linux was the way and we ported all of the web hosting servers over to Linux. This was Red Hat Linux 4 or 5 ... no "Enterprise", that didn't come out until 2002. Over the years until 2016 I had various job roles - mostly "jack of all trades" where I did Linux admin, web development, some mysql DBA work, etc ... towards the end I had settled on more admin than development.
I worked for IBM from 2016 - 2021 and towards the end I absolutely hated it. Throughout those 5 years, I got $0 in bonuses, and I got a single 1.5% raise one year, but nothing the other 4. I did get a block of RSU stock for about $3000 which in hindsight was a total insult. $3000 would have vested at $1000 a year over 3 years. Morgan Stanley takes about 40% off the top for taxes, which would have left me \~$600 take home ... $600 for a year ... total insult.
Anyway, in 2021 I accepted a job at Red Hat. I told my wife at the time that it was my "dream job". As a long time Linux user, I was going to work for "the source". I joined Red Hat on the Ceph/Software Defined Storage team and spent the next year learning standalone Ceph and was just getting completely up to speed. I was set to start the weekend on-call work when IBM dropped the bomb. They were taking over Ceph and taking half the support team and engineering over to IBM. I was one of the "lucky" ones. To this day, I am convinced this was only because of the "Senior" in my job title. "Senior" was more to accommodate my base salary as it certainly did not define my Ceph skills. I told my managers I would give it a try for a year ... that lasted 10 months.
I totally understand the IBM acronym of "I Bring Misery" ... The 10 months back at IBM were the absolute worst 10 months of my professional career. I was thrown right into the deep end, supporting million dollar IBM customers running Cloud Paks on OpenShift storage. I knew absolutely nothing about OpenShift storage to start out except it ran Ceph under the hood. To add insult to injury, when we were transferred, we were told IBM was going to treat this team differently, "Red Hat culture and processes were going to be retained". This was supposed to include paid overtime for weekend work. My director and his directors were told all along to "keep logging weekend time; we're working on getting everything integrated into IBM's systems, and once that's done, the back pay will be paid out."
After 10 months I had had enough - after several panic attacks from having to work solo over weekends when I had zero OpenShift background, I was able to transfer back to Red Hat. I left IBM with about $20K worth of overtime logged into Workday, only to hear back a week later from IBM legal that the whole team was considered "exempt" and thus were exempt from getting any overtime pay. $20K - poof, gone. I filed a Business Conduct Guidelines complaint against IBM HR because whoever in HR had been telling my director and his director this all along was flat-out lying. Yeah, IBM wrote off that complaint as unfounded, no surprise there.
I've now been back at Red Hat for just over 3 years, and the second time around I am much more comfortable in my own skin on the High Availability Cluster team. This team has been wonderful - I really could not ask for a better group of people to be working with. It literally broke my heart the other day to hand in my resignation and even more so when I told my team that I was leaving.
Over the last year at Red Hat, the changes have been immeasurable. I kept reading on the company's internal free for all mailing list "memolist" about how the company no longer had any resemblance of the original company - all Red Hat culture was sadly gone. Hell, it was not the same company I joined in 2021. Very sad to leave. Nov 12th is my last day.