none of that has happened for us at Red Hat. Other than the one round of layoffs which occurred at the time that basically every tech company everywhere was doing much larger layoffs, that was pretty much it and there's no reason to think our layoffs wouldn't have been much greater at that time if we were not under the IBM umbrella.
Besides that, I dont even remember when we were acquired, absolutely nothing has changed for us in engineering; we have the same co-workers, still using all Red Hat email / intranets / IT, etc., there's still a healthy promotions pipeline, all of that. I dont even know anyone from the IBM side. We had heard all the horror stories of other companies IBM acquired but for whatever reason, it's not been that way at all for us at least in the engineering group.
Former Hatter here (Solution Architect Q2 '21 -> Q4 '22). Other than the discussions that took place around moving the storage/business products and teams under IBM (and the recently announcement transfer of middleware), I wouldn't have expected engineering to do that much interfacing with IBM. At most, division leadership maybe (this is just personal speculation). Finance and Sales on the other hand... quite a bit more.
We had a really fun time where the classic s-word was thrown around... "s y n e r g y". Some of the folks I got to meet across the aisle had a pretty strong pre-2010 mindset. Even around opinions of the acquisition, thinking it was just another case of SOP for the business and we'd be fully integrated Soon™.
They key thing people need to remember about the Red Hat acquisition is that it was purely for expertise and personnel. Red Hat has no (or very little) IP. It's not like IBM was snatching them up to take advantage of patents or whatnot. It's in their best interest to do as little as possible to poke the bear that is RH engineering because if there was ever a large scale exodus, IBM would be holding the worlds largest $34B sack of excrement we've seen. All of the value in the acquisition is the engineering talent and customer relationships Red Hat has, not the products themselves. The power of open source development!
It's heartening to hear that your experience in engineering has been positive (or neutral?) so far. Sales saw some massive churn because that's an area IBM did have a heavier impact in. There were some fairly ridiculous expectations set for year-over-year, completely dismissing previous results and obvious upcoming trends. Lost a lot of good reps over that...
Red Hatter since 2016, first in Consulting, now in Sales.
Oh the “synergy” rocket chat channel we had back then…
Things have been changing, for sure. So has the industry. So have our customers. By and large, Red Hatters on the ground have fought hard to preserve the culture. I have many friends across Red Hat, many that transitioned to IBM (Storage, some Middleware). Folks still love being a part of Red Hat.
On the topic of ridiculous expectations…there’s some. But Red Hatters generally figure out how to do ridiculous things like run the internet on open source software.
FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.
Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years previously.
I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID happened shortly after so that also throws a wrench into the comparisons.
The point is, it's hard to point to any particular decisions or changes I disliked and say "IBM did that"
I do miss having Jim Whitehurst around. Jim spent 90 minutes on the Wednesday afternoon of my New Hire Orientation week with my cohort helping to make sure all of us could login to email and chat, answering questions, telling a couple short stories. He literally helped build the Red Hat culture starting at New Hire. Kind of magical when the company is an 11K person global business and doing 5B in revenue.
Cormier and Hicks have their strengths. Hicks in particular seems to care about cultural shifts and also seems adept at identifying key times and places to invest in engineering efforts.
The folks we have imported from IBM are hiring folks that are attempting to make Red Hat more aggressive, efficient, innovative. Some bets are paying off. More are to be decided soon. These kinds of bets and changes haven’t been for everyone.
>The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes.
Longtime Red Hatter here. Most of any challenges I see at Red Hat around culture I attribute to this rapid growth. In some ways it's surprising how well so many relatively new hires seem to internalize the company's traditional values.
Yeah, when I left I think there were something like 7x the number of people than when I joined. You can't run those two companies the same way no matter who is in charge.
> They key thing people need to remember about the Red Hat acquisition is that it was purely for expertise and personnel. Red Hat has no (or very little) IP. It's not like IBM was snatching them up to take advantage of patents or whatnot. It's in their best interest to do as little as possible to poke the bear that is RH engineering because if there was ever a large scale exodus, IBM would be holding the worlds largest $34B sack of excrement we've seen.
We thought the same thing at VMware until Hock moved WITH THE QUICKNESS to jack up prices and RIF a ton of engineering staff.
That said, I'm in tech sales at the Hat now, and IBM is definitely around, but it's still a cool company that tries hard to treat their people right.
They also care A LOT about being an open-source company. Most of my onboarding was dedicated to this, and sales treats it seriously.
none of that has happened for us at Red Hat. Other than the one round of layoffs which occurred at the time that basically every tech company everywhere was doing much larger layoffs, that was pretty much it and there's no reason to think our layoffs wouldn't have been much greater at that time if we were not under the IBM umbrella.
Besides that, I dont even remember when we were acquired, absolutely nothing has changed for us in engineering; we have the same co-workers, still using all Red Hat email / intranets / IT, etc., there's still a healthy promotions pipeline, all of that. I dont even know anyone from the IBM side. We had heard all the horror stories of other companies IBM acquired but for whatever reason, it's not been that way at all for us at least in the engineering group.