Fortunately not really, in my case. I stay out of the pipelines game as much as possible and focus on systems that enable better and more obvious pipelines. And then sometimes go tune some pipelines but mostly I find them to be pretty atrocious UI and much too snowflakey.
"The build is failing. Does anyone know why the build is failing!? See, right here. It says the build failed. Can someone look into why the build failed. Why is the build failing??"
I went to university with David Reveman. He did his master's thesis presentation about compiz (or actually glitz which was a precursor) as slides on the top of the cube, and everybody just assumed it was PowerPoint. Then when it was time for a demo he just flipped the cube around to the Gnome desktop. People's jaws dropped, it was amazing, 🙂
For me the small domino was building quake 1 levels, setting up 10mbps LANs at lan parties, and making dedicated servers with map cycles and third party skins. I quit playing games at these lan parties and instead spent my time doing sysadmin stuff, and I thought "I can make money doing this if I keep getting better at it."
Its likely that I wouldn't use linux today if it weren't for messing around with compiz settings on school computers back when I was a teenager. Wobbly windows and desktop cube was such fun. I guess that's how we can recruit new linux users. Get them while they're young. "But does your windows laptop do this?" wobble wobbleclosing application by lighting the window on fire.
Haha your post made me reflect my journey. I had fun in college tinkering Arch Linux with i3. Now I'm an Infra Engineer (or DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, SRE, whatver) and still do the same job—keeping the system "reliable".
Similar story for me, Ubuntu w/ wobbly windows and desktop cube in Jr High (I was a particularly nerdy kid), arch w/ i3 in HS and college, now I'm a DevSecOps Developer (engineer is a sacred term in Canada)
Learning to do naughty things to the WEP wifi around me is what led me to now doing penetration tests at my org.
Funny how goofing around on a computer as a kid can lead to careers and passions.
I wish I would have taken a career in something related to Linux as I have always loved it and used it to a degree (stopped a bit when I got my first Mac, but that was after the career ended anyway), but I did in administration and now I'm unhappy I liked the heck out of Compiz though.
It's never too late to change. You'd be amazed at how many people there are at tech companies with unrelated degrees, or no degrees at all. Tech is largely (but nowhere near totally) merit based. If you produce results, that's a huge shoe in.
Nowadays we just have multiple monitors, and even windows supports multiple desktops with quick ways to change between them. Though I think the best thing to come out of that addition is the fact that waking up your computer doesn't mess up your window layout anymore. Like it does for a second, but then it fixes them all less than a second later. It was honestly one of my biggest gripes with having multiple monitors.
There's Wayfire. The github says that's it's inspired by Compiz. I've never used either of these so I don't know how similar they are to each other. It is Wayland though so if you're not into that kindof thing it could not be for you.