They do already and have been for a couple decades. Dell in particular has had a long history of doing so. Personally, I have worked for a couple companies that have done just that. Now when you look at certain classes of machines for specific workloads you will see engineering specifically for Linux. But when most people look at MSFT & Apple they are thinking about the desktop. And if you look in certain corporate environments, you will find Linux thin clients, but those tend to be very specific highly regulated environments.
First company I sold... paid off student loans, traveled around for a year.... then started a consultancy..
Second company I sold... invested in a friend's business (she's now my wife), self funded another business (that one failed to find a buyer).... went back to work...
Third company I sold... paid down mortgages, put kids into private schools, fixed up house, self funded another business ( currently a going concern, break even)...
What do I do now? Keep working... started a new businesses
and handed off day to day operations to my business partner,
and am now taking a new job so I can move to Europe.
What do I plan to do in the future... same thing, keep working, looking for interesting projects, probably start more business.
I've had this situation happen a few times in my career, my advice is take the money and don't look back. Invest the money, burn it, buy rental properties with it,or go on a trip. It is always better to have a successful exit.
If everyone on this thread tweeted his story, he'll get his money back. In the age of social media, the only effective tool we have against corporations is public shaming.
Honestly, it is probably just you (and your peers).
Quite frankly chances are the team you have sucks at operations, lacks the necessary experience to design complex systems, and probably doesn't do the fundamental engineering to make a reliable software product.
1 - false dichotomy, the best tool is one you have mastered, your team has individuals with 20+ years of development experience on it right? (Probably not)
2 - micro services are supposed to have small areas of concern and small functional domains to minimize operational complexity. Your services are programs that fit on a couple screens right? (Doesn't sound like it)
3 - redundancy's goal is to remove single points of failure, you should be able to kill any process and the system keeps working. (The word critical suggests you have spfs)
4 - CI is a dev tool to avoid merge hell by always be merging. CI is often used by orgs with massive monoliths because of the cost of testing small changes, and too many cook trying to share a pot. Ultimately if you don't have well defined interfaces ci won't save you. (You had well defined published interfaces with versions right?)
5 - agile is a marketing term for consulting services to teach large orgs how to act like small effective teams of experts. (Hint you need a team of self-directed experts with a common vision and freedom to execute it, you got that right?)
Most problems in tech are related to pop culture. Because we discount experience (because experienced developers are "expensive") we get to watch people reinvent existing things poorly. Microservices, soa, agile, ci, these things are older than many devs working today. The industry fads are largely just rebranding of old concepts to sell them to another clueless generation.
Computers are complex systems, networks of computers are complex systems. Complex systems are complex. Some complexity is irreducible, and complex system behavior is more than just a mere aggregation of the parts. People tend to over complicate their solutions when they don't understand their actual problem. They see things they are unfamiliar with as costly and overly complicated (as in your examples above).
Your problem is a culture that doesn't value experience and deep understanding. You and your team will over complicate things because you don't know better yet.
I've been falling back in love with Forth, and specifically SwiftForth https://www.forth.com/swiftforth/ the full source code to everything comes with the paid version, and you can literally change everything. So much saner and cleaner in implementation than shitstorms like Go, GCC, LLVM, and Java.
Reading the article it hints at the reality that it doesn't actually work like passive glasses as it implies. the blueshift effect happens because they're using a laser to excite the crystal and it later emits the shifted light, but you have to pump a lot of energy in for that output. Simple conservation of energy implies this won't work for normal night vision applications, instead they want to shine a laser spotlight and use the reflected infrared laser light for vision. cool material science for sure, but not a replacement for nightvision goggles which don't broadcast your position with a bight spotlight.
I this had happened at any of the companies I started, I would have fired several people in the aftermath. The problem is the policy is broken by design. Let's look at what is wrong here:
1.) priority is not just high, it is critical, communicating this is lost at each layer (executive, planning, execution, process control, quality control)
2.) leadership is lax, the chain of command doesn't designate a clear single responsible individual
3.) policy enforcement in this example actually increases the risk of an unsatisfactory outcome, by increasing the complexity of the solution vs. what is in production
4.) quality control is adversarial and ass backwards, code review is supposed to be a sanity check "does this code do what the developer thinks it does" aka. "can some other person understand it"
5.) test planning should not be the developer's responsibility, quite frankly if QA can't figure out if it is working or not you should fire your QA department.
6.) Ultimately, it is a total failure of policy and management as it requires the President of the company to micromanage the situation.
If you think any of this is fine, I'm sorry but your company is doomed to fail (unless it is already so big it is too big to fail).
In case you're wondering, most firms in this business won't even talk to you unless you're looking to hide at least $10MM. Below that amount, the costs of setting up the corporate structures and paying all the necessary parties aren't worth it. It is kinda funny there is a practical cut off point for being "super-rich" at which point the rules start working for you.
For many projects, Github is just a place to publish yet another public repo. Using github issues and pull requests is a sure fire way to feel ignored. If you want to contribute, e-mail the lead maintainer. Do not submit patches to the ether. Do not think anyone will look at your patches. Having started several large open source projects, and started / worked for a number of open source companies, I can tell you the best way to get involved is to work on your personal relationship with the other developers. If that means hanging out in IRC or Slack, that's what it takes. Github is a terrible form of communication, especially when your org / developers have 100+ repos.
No age is too old. I co-founded a startup last year, successfully raised a 8 figure series A, and am the youngest of founders by more than a decade, and I'm over 35.
The difference between now (startup #4 for me) and when I was in my 20s, is now I waste a lot less time and energy on things that don't matter.
My advice is start consulting on something you know just slightly better than the next guy. You can often jumpstart a product development plan by helping a large company define a product they need. Then make that if more than one company really needs it :)
Metro-North's signaling equipment is a nightmare. There was a scheduled upgrade that was supposed to have been in play by January 1st of this year, and the project is still not yet done. Proper monitoring of crossing combined with automatic breaking could have prevented this accident. But Metro-North has neither.
The cheapest way I've found to live was to buy a 4+ unit apartment building that when the 3+ other apartments are fully rented cover the cost of the mortgage, and utilities. As a result, net out of pocket each year for housing + utilities + taxes + insurance is < $0. (we turn a profit each year) For us, this means we can reinvest our earnings in our businesses and live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle. We live in a city, 3 blocks for 3 different cafes, a dozen restaurants, laundrymats, etc.
This approach works really well with any number of tethered device scenario. You can use the same basic approach to debug distributed Erlang program, work with tethered mobile devices, or even work on many core machines. If you are trying to explore the behavior of a system interactively, you really need peek, poke, and run.