IBM pauses counting its billions to trim Red Hat staff On Monday, Matt Hicks, CEO of IBM-owned Red Hat, said the Linux distro maker plans to lay off just under four percent of its roughly 20,000 person workforce, which amounts to less than 800 people. In a published note, Hicks said the staff reductions will occur over the next few months. "Our reductions will focus on general …
If only there was some legitimate hope that systemD would go down along with Red Hat, it might actually be worth it.
Some of Red Hat's other "innovations" might be forgiven -- even the gutting of CentOS and pulling the rug out from CentOS 8 support lifespan, though those were a hard pill to swallow at the time. But the damage from poettering spawn is deep and apparently long-lasting.
"...gutting of CentOS and pulling the rug out from CentOS 8 support lifespan"
Two new and (apparently) well-funded clones sprung up to fill the void created with great suddenness.
Perhaps those inside knew what was coming down the pipe? Radical move to stimulate the ecosystem? Ensure that clones with foundation-like wider participation mechanisms in place?
Blind bungling at Red Hat, followed by swift Linux community(ies) response.
Maybe some (ex-?)CentOS folks knew Red Hat's plans beforehand, or at least had a good view of the wall writing, but I doubt they were able to influence management's decisions either way. Maybe some helped smooth over the messaging etc. afterwards, but damage was already done by that point. Not least to Red Hat's reputation and trustworthiness.
I suspect, without evidence, that Ubuntu & Debian populations may have grown more, due to Red Hat's actions, than Alma & Rocky Linuxes did when getting off the ground, or since. I like my Alma system just fine, but I had already started switching to Debian circa RHEL/CentOS 8, and the Stream and CentOS 8 EOS rug-pull simply reinforced the path forward for me.
"It was only a question of when, not if, IBM practices invaded RedHat."
Not now in the Redhat orbit but I was pretty suspicious of the some of the recent licensing changes. Any organization that uses a combination RHEL *and* CentOS (or Alma-/Rocky/Springdale Linux) to minimize licensing costs may find they might be billed a "deemed" license for each of these recompiled distro installed in the organization. Where do you think the inspiration for Oracle's licencing skulduggery originate?
Gosh, HAL, sorry, IBM has taken to killing off the crew members? Absolutely no one, repeat no one, ever saw any possibility of that coming...
"I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you."
"cutting all the HR talent recruiters who lived beyond a certain distance from Raleigh. That way they couldn’t be blamed for discrimination, but wow, what a way to lose talent indiscriminately."
That depends. The distance might be one beyond which, entirely coincidentally, only some older recruiters lived.
Probably firing people over 40, since that's what IBM does. The only thing they've innovated in recently is age discrimination. Why keep an experienced guy on staff who knows your last 20 years of mistakes when you could hire someone right out of college who can make them all over again for half the price?
This isn't enough people to achieve that goal... but they will get there.
"HAL, given these arbitrary parameters associated with our staff which parameters and criteria will eject the maximal number of dinobabies while maintaining plausible denial of the objective?"
"I can't do that Dave."
"Then can we talk about the new model 10000 series?"
"On reconsideration I believe these parameters can be optimized."
Given Redhat isn't that old ~20 years? I would not have thought it would have too many OAPs on their payroll.
"Given Redhat isn't that old ~20 years? I would not have thought it would have too many OAPs on their payroll."
RedHat was founded 30 years ago. They hired many experienced software engineers in the first couple years of their existence. Some of those folks are now in their 70s. I have no idea how many still work for RedHat, though ... The few I personally know got out many years ago.
True - I lasted about 8 months. They decided to make me redundant after many years at the previous mob which meant I got to leave, cash a very large cheque and walked into a better paid and less stressful after a lovely short holiday.
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