[ale] Who'd'v thunk it?

[Scott McBrien]

Being both a Red Hatter and a manager, I think this may be getting distorted by the register.  (They do have some history at strategically selecting quotes to support a narrative designed by the author which Red Hat has experienced before.)  Or also maybe they’re writing an article about an 18,000 person organization based off the experiences of one person, which might not be a good sample size.

My own team grew by 100% this year.  We have been told to not expect additional head count in the upcoming year. But frankly, given the growth I had this year, that’s not unreasonable and I feel well positioned to execute on our projects.

I’d dispute several of the “facts” of the article like associate software developers or software developers having limited mobility.  If anything they are more able to move around the company because managers don’t have to have a huge stockpile of budget to accommodate them.  I was just having this conversation with someone who is Senior Principle level about going to Consulting level.  Essentially, if he’s a Sr Principle, while it’s difficult for him to change to another team if he’s unhappy, it can be done.  At Consulting level the $$ of the headcount are going to be beyond the level of other teams to get money to fund (those job prefixes are probably meaningless, but both are late in career, relatively high level positions for individual contributors, conversely associate or non-prefixed jobs are generally early to early-mid career positions).

Also the financials reported by the article are off.  I would point out that in last quarter’s earnings call, Arvind called out Red Hat as being a bright spot in earnings.  Why would IBM mess with that?  Especially given the fact that they took on A MOUNTAIN of debt to acquire Red Hat?

I have seen some changes since the acquisition, but they are very minor.  Things like we used to get an annual budget and we could spend that money anytime in the year.  Now we still get an annual budget, but that is further broken into a quarterly budget.  We’re expected to land spend in the quarter for which it’s allotted, which is not an unreasonable ask.  However, we were used to being very loose with project management and the like so if it slipped a quarter, meh.  Now we have to care, and it’s caused some (better) behaviors for project and vendor management.

We were asked to put together a 3 year strategy.  What??? A 3 year Strategy??? The nerve of IBM to ask for such a thing!  Of course that’s sarcastic. My team already had a multi-year strategy, which we fit into the 3 year format IBM requested, but for some groups, who didn’t have an idea of what they were going to do multi-year, it was more disruptive.  But again, probably a good thing, ultimately.

If IBM was really intent of absorbing Red Hat, several things would happen.
1) you’d see IBM executives replacing Red Hat executives
This is not happening.
2) they’d collapse the corporate structure
IT, HR, Finance, Legal, and Marketing would be the first departments absorbed into IBM.  That has not happened.

-STM

> On Nov 5, 2021, at 8:17 AM, Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/05/red_hat_jobs/
> 
> IBM starts the finance choke on RedHat. Did anyone think it wouldn't happen? 
> 
> Forget about systemd for a moment.
> 
> RedHat sold support for Linux systems and that got Linux systems into businesses. Then they used those funds to expand the capabilities of and add new tools to the Linux environment. They hired programmers and trainers. They got Linux visibility outside of the Linux world.
> 
> And now the zombie shell of a former technology titan has acquired them and has begun the systematic vampire sucking of capability. 
> 
> Wondering if Mike Warfield thinks this ISS familar. :-)
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