Microsoft had a layoff in China in June. I imagine this "workaround' isn't a thing anymore.

If they were working on opensource code, they could end up working on it upstream and still contributing.

There was a Unix user group I attended and got a lot out of back in the day. As Linux rose, there was a Linux user group that rose up.
The FSF also did a conference I attended back in the day. When OpenStack was rising there was a meetup for them too. That was the last one I attended, over a decade ago.

The user groups are a nice way to share information and make connections that the magazines, mailing lists and now web sites cannot replicate. Its time to introduce a new generation.

I've always had a Unix desktop. I've had SunOS, Ultrix, OSF/1, Irix, Solaris, Linux, MacOSX, Windows w/ cygwin. I had email, word processing, spreadsheets. Internet arrived with Mosaic while I was on SunOS.

I used to have employees complain about storage because "disk is cheap".

IT can't just add a USB hard drive like you can at home. Storage needs to handle more than 1 person hitting it at the same time. If it can't, there will be tickets. It needs to handle failure. That means backups need to happen. Maybe RAID so data is on multiple devices. That helps performance too. Maybe there's a limit on the number of drives so the next drive added means another controller or shelf. The storage is provided by a server which costs too. Maybe that's maxed out and another is needed.

Setting up a central firmware probably has an IAM to authenticate everyone, signing procedures for verifying firmware, bandwidth for the thousands of systems that will be hitting it, storage, backups, sysadmin...

Compared to all the vendor sites distributing firmware? Some of them resemble the dial up BBS from the 90s.

I imagine any employee can build a firmware at their desk and throw it on their FTP site. Multiple versions in differently named directories.

Try going to those sites for hardware you bought 5 years ago but don't have a support contract for.

I had to go through a project's code to match up open source code with their licenses. We had to switch a JDBC library that required a fee for commercial use to another library that didn't.

Then I had to train others with the tool we used. The company said "Do not use GPL code in our code base". When GPL licensed code was found, they wanted to 'fix it' by changing the license. I had to explain you can't change the license, only your use of the code. The fix is removing the code with the license you don't want and re-engineering with different code. If you replace the hood ornament on your Ferrari with one from a Toyota, the insurance company is still going to charge you for a Ferrari.

There was a time when copy protection on Apple ][ and PCs kept people out too.
Eventually someone will figure out a way around the signing. When Tivos came out, AMD64 didn't exist.
There might be enough computer power to brute force things today.

Publicly accessible PR reviews
Build systems (github actions)

Gitlab?
Bitbucket?

Don't forget the iPod.
The 1st phone (by motorola for apple) was a phone with an iPod.
Without the iPod, there would not have been the iPhone.
Without iTunes the App Store might not have happened.

I had a Syquest 88 (1st gen was 40MB) and an Adaptec 1542b SCSI card.. My 286 had a 30MB MFM drive internally, so it was a big addition. I was learning Minix and leaving my main drive untouched was great. I had 2-3 disks to use. Since it was SCSI, I could also use it with Macintosh w/ a DOS format software.

When I bought a 486, I wanted 386BSD or Linux. A university nearby had Macintoshes w/ internet access. I was able to FTP Linux, etc unto that Syquest instead of transfering to a stack of floppies. I later got a 4mm DAT. I had tar programs DOS, Macintosh, OS/2 and of course Unix that could read/write tapes.

CDs were just starting to appear, but I didn't have one. My 1st sysadmin job had 1 CD drive for Sun systems, another for HP and another for SGI. 70 machines & 3 drives. It was 5 years later that work bought a CD-R for $1000 instead of sending software on tape.

When I was hired, the 1st week was in person training & to meet the team. That went away during covid.
I'm surprised these larger companies do not do this.

For finding patterns & connections, AI is a great tool. Sure, it will find the dependencies & workflows.

After that, you're going to need a good engineer, who knows the risks, to guide the AI and explore what the code is doing.

Translating the code to another language is the easy part. Understanding what you start with and verifying the translation is what makes these projects hard. AI is just another tool, like spreadsheets and project planning software that makes some parts a bit easier or even possible.

Most of the comments in this post are not that engineer. They're the manager who says "All you have to do is..."

UK management at its typical.