41–50 of 235 posts
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In every acquisition the Acquirer imposes on the Acquiree..... In this case, I'd bet that it's Arvind Krishna pulling people out of IBM Cloud (his old division) to run the rest of "big blue" And yes, IBM will basically bleed talent from Red Hat for the next 3 years until RHEL is a pale shadow of its former self.
I expect IBM will be an Irish or similar company soon.
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probably not. IBM haven't been that much relevant in tech for years. they pivot to the cut throat consulting services while kind of abandoned what IBM used to be. a tech leader. Microsoft was like IBM after Bill Gates. Not a tech leader for many years until Microsoft pivot to Cloud computing and software as services.
google "IBM phoenix payroll canada" for a fine example of what has gone wrong. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ibm+pho...
When I talk to former IBMers (including a VP), it seems much of the outward “success” there is financial engineering, yet the business is crumbling in reality. Jim leaving amidst a chaotic, failed email migration that is impacting sales is not surprising
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply causation here, but vast sweeping changes like this rarely happen in a matter of days - it's far more likely that this has been in the works for a while, and the email mess is coincidental.
I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech. Honestl…
> leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...] building inclusive company culture in tech. Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those that are different. This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and external observations can better be summed up as…
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IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name IBM was synonymous with PC for quite some time.
I'd really like to see IBMers talk about the past, present, and future of the company. It looks pretty pale to me. Back in the Thinkpad era, IBM had a lot of cool stuff going on. But now it seems like a shadow. Watson and IBM cloud look like flops. The email fiasco is weird and should never have happened. What did buying Red Hat accomplish? As an outsider, it doesn't seem to have infused any new ideas, and the change…
The chip business has so much potential, and they're wasting it all because they're so stuck in their enterprise marketing and sales model. There is so much demand out there for non-X86 workstations with high performance and large core counts, and they won't even touch it. There is so much demand out there for highly scalable and energy efficient cloud professors (to the point that they're developing them independent…
One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM". To what they said "what is IBM??" They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times". Time to get some wine.
IBM portfolio isn't targeted to consumers like Apple's or other companies, even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name. The only consumer facing product they had for the longest time were cash registers, and those aren't particularly hip as to live in consumer imagination Edit: in today episode, hacker news forget they're a niche cohort.
I like Whitehurst and have had the chance to meet him a few times. If you want to understand his ethos check out "The Open Organization". It details his transition from Delta to Red Hat and the transformation of his leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers and team players ready to constructively challenge each other. Good read for anyone interested in building inclusive company culture in tech. Honestl…
> leadership style being around a lot of smart engineers [...] building inclusive company culture in tech. Red Hat was certainly an open company. I don't know if "inclusive" is the right word though. "Inclusive" has strong connotations now of people being welcoming, especially of those that are different. This is largely anecdotal, but my interactions with Red Hat and external observations can better be summed up as…
Complaining that an engineering company is full of mostly white males (in an industry which is full of mostly white mails) is an example of nothing. Red Hat started programs to push LGBTQ+ people in 2014, women in leadership in 2017, neurodiversity acceptance in 2018, black leadership in 2018. You may think all of those things are late, but as driven company missions which they spend real money on (and real money on community involvement on), it's not insignificant.
A "good-old-boy's club" at a company where only 25% of engineering was even in the US is a little mindblowing. The vast majority of RH's engineers when I left were in Pune, Brno, Tel Aviv, and scattered across Europe (eastern and western), with a reasonable showing from Brazil.
Open source is, for better or worse, a place where a cult of personality matters. "This is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it" isn't personal. It's how the community interacts. It's an invitation to argue back and say "this is a good idea because XXX". This is basically how any upstream mailing list works also.
While Red Hat did have some cultural problems, they were primarily around resistance to establishing an engineering presence in China (and it's hard to fault them for that -- my team was truly geographically distributed, and adding someone in APAC would have meant we literally never could have met at the same time), and regional cultural attitudes.
I left last summer, along with a lot of other people, but your comment is apropos of nothing Red Hat was from 2013-2021.