When I started at Google over 15 years ago, the deal was that I could spend half my time working on ext4, and half my time working on Google specific issues. These days, the ratio has shifted quite drastically. But the problem is I'm not unique. Oracle has laid off 30,000 engineers in the last six months. Amazon has laid off 30,000 engineers as well, after one of their most record-breaking profitable quarters. The numbers for the Facebook/Meta layffs aren't as clear, but Meta laid off 7800 people in May and transferred another 8,000 to AI specific roles. It's been quite clear that the Oracle Linux department has been gutted, and many people who attended a recent Linux invite-only workshop needed to get travel scholarships because their company was no longer willing to fund them --- or they no longer had a company.

At that workshop, I talked to two people from Facebook that were now doing AI infrastructure projects as their primary role, and I'm aware of one engineer from Samsung which couldn't attend because he was moved from Filesystem work to (you guessed it) AI Infrastructure projects. I suspect there is something about people who have experience in Systems work, either in the proprietary or open source context, having a good set of skills for building AI Infrastructure in the great AI race.

If I could win enough money in a lottery or receive some other windfall so I could self-fund doing Linux kernel work full time, I would do that. But the reality is that this is a terrible environment for engineers to find jobs, and we shouldn't be too judgemental and self-righteous over people preferring to have food with their meals.