It's sad, but this wasn't at a .com rev3 company, this was an old-school hedge fund with billions under management. IT support is just something that gets neglected if there isn't a contract that is enforceable. Clearly the company could afford a thousand systems worth of support, and could make it worth the money (autofs bugs galore!). There is a something missing in making the social contract of open source pay for the people needed to maintain open source.