I went a similar route (Postgres for CRUD and Elastic for searching) and also underestimated the effort of keeping the two datastore in sync as well as underestimated the effort in maintaining a reliable Elastic cluster with limited manpower/experience. After moving to Postgres full text search with indexes and query boosting, I accomplished everything I needed inside Postgres with update triggers and search queries that were incredibly performant.
The documentation that Microsoft puts out regarding its "multi-master" features basically advises against using "multi-master" mode and leveraging the Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) Roles to ensure consistency across the domain and forest because its conflict resolution is not comprehensive [1]. FSMO roles were created decades ago as a transition from Windows NT's Primary Domain Controller (PDC) model to avoid some of these complexities around changes in a large distributed system. Its a decent solution that has its own pros/cons, but AD is not something I would use as a good example of a multi-master distributed database.
Can you please expand on this a bit more? I live in Colorado and saw virtually no change when looking for a new job inside and outside of the state last year. I did run across a few "no job applications from CO" as was mentioned in other comment threads, but most job postings I saw did not post salary information.
I see your points and understand the frustration. The minor changes over the years haven't bothered me too much. What really messed with me was when the commit pop-up (with diffs) was changed to a tab, nestled in the same space as my files. Nooooooooo! I want the pop-up. I want to know that this is different from what I was doing before.
I have had similar experiences, however, it's important to be specific: the NMCI contract ended in 2010 and DoN moved to the Continuity of Services Contract where we bought services piecemeal until we could fully take it over. The Navy and Marine Corps tried to transition to NGEN during this time but mostly failed and each service ended up taking different paths. Now, the two services operate their networks differently: the Marine Corps, for example, runs it as a government owned and "shared operations" model where it's mixed government and contractor.
I imagine that the laptop you were given in 2018 was not an NMCI laptop, but instead a laptop from either the Navy or Marine Corps' new ownership/operations model which is incredibly flawed. Also, HBSS was poorly implemented in the 2010 time frame and Tanium was introduced (at least in the Marine Corps networks) around 2017. Both are major contributing factors to the issue you're describing.
In short: the current state is that computers are barely usable and that is not NMCI from yester-year.
I agree that military IT has been atrocious. I disagree that NMCI was "damn near treasonous levels of awful." NMCI was a large, Department of the Navy (DoN) -wide contract that had incredibly challenging tasks it needed to complete to be successful. The first few years were bad but it got better over time and, by the time the next transition was set to happen, it was running pretty smoothly.
When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.
In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.
Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.
OP here. This find was a tiny joy in my day. The article was from 1998 and the page appears to be untouched by all the "upgrades" in HTML. I love this...image maps, light HTML, tables...oh my!