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Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

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Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#21

Post by CoastalCoder »

louniks wrote: post #16
mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

From what we were told this morning, this is a purely Red Hat decision not influenced by IBM, primarily intended to reduce our spending and save cash in light of the increased cost of money caused by rising interest rates. Roles affected will be "general and administrative" (apparently this is a GAAP - Generally Accepted Accounting Practices - term), and folks directly involved in developing or selling products (my i…

For the causes of R&D layoffs, I'm curious about the split between (a) increased interest rates, vs. (b) changes to U.S. tax code that disallow 5-year amortization of software-development costs.

I'm only hearing people mention (a). So maybe (b) is less relevant than I'm imagining?

CORRECTION: I think I stated (b) exactly backwards. IIUC, previously a company could fully expense the cost of software development in the year it occurred, but now it must be amortized over 5 years.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#22

Post by mroche »

For those jumping to comments, this is an important note not apparent from the title:

“We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products,” Hicks wrote.

Also see louniks comment about what Hatters were told directly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688331

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#23

Post by loudmax »

marcodiego wrote: post #9

Hope it doesn't hurt the GNOME project. The IBM-Redhat buyout should have been something similar to Apple-NeXT.

I hope it doesn't hurt any open source projects, but if there's there's one project that has bloat to trim it's GNOME. It's good that there's experimentation happening with Linux desktops, but that experimentation should not be happening on an "enterprise" distribution. The default RHEL desktop should be boring and reliable, not flashy and experimental like GNOME.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#24

Post by mathattack »

foobarian wrote: post #7
mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.

Keep in contact with everyone who thinks highly of your work. A strong recommendation (“you must hire person X, they’re perfect”) is the best defense against age discrimination. You can’t help it if your employer moves your job to India. You can lay the ground to make the transition faster.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#25

Post by candiddevmike »

oofta-boofta wrote: post #15
foobarian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.

Work multiple jobs that you do the bare minimum at. Always be interviewing, Q1->Q3 is the best time.

Before the recession, it was a well-known secret among coworkers who was doing this, now when budgets are being slashed these folks are the first to be let go. Please don't do this, you're ruining remote work for everyone. If you really want to, become a contractor and be honest about your situation.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#26

Post by pcurve »

foobarian wrote: post #7
mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.

At least where I used to work, older engineers were kept on payroll by working only 3-4 days a week. Some of them also got lower title. I'd imagine the title 'adjustment' happened when there was a round of layoffs and some were offered to stay on conditionally.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#27

Post by iLoveOncall »

mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

> expensive (old) employees

This legend needs to stop. It has been demonstrated time and time again that employees that stay the longest are the leaat paid.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employee...

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#28

Post by orra »

loudmax wrote: post #23
marcodiego wrote: post #9

Hope it doesn't hurt the GNOME project. The IBM-Redhat buyout should have been something similar to Apple-NeXT.

I hope it doesn't hurt any open source projects, but if there's there's one project that has bloat to trim it's GNOME. It's good that there's experimentation happening with Linux desktops, but that experimentation should not be happening on an "enterprise" distribution. The default RHEL desktop should be boring and reliable, not flashy and experimental like GNOME.

Look, I soured on GNOME when GNOME 3 was released. But it's unfair to call GNOME "flashy and experimental". Modern GNOME looks contemporary to its peers. GNOME 2, in contrast, would look very dated.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#29

Post by iLoveOncall »

foobarian wrote: post #7
mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.

Don't worry, it's not true. All studies show that the employees that stay the longest are the least paid.

If they had to replace you with a new hire at the same level, they would have to pay the new hire a lot more than they pay you.

Re: Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees

#30

Post by reaperducer »

foobarian wrote: post #7
mathattack wrote: post #6

Welcome to life under IBM. They’re in the business of a financially engineered shrinkage. This is what happens when innovation and growth stops. What you see from IBM: - Cut expensive (old) employees. - Market everything as the New thing. (Watson) - Audit your customers. Settle by forcing them to buy the New thing even if they don’t need it. - Current and former execs go on book tours. - Buy back shares. This is all…

> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.

Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen

Make your self invisibly essential to the company. Do things or have skills that nobody else does. The sorts of niche items that the company needs, but not enough to hire a second person to do them.

But also be "invisible" — as in, higher-up bean counters won't know you do them, so they can't be outsourced or reassigned. But still remain known to your immediate managers, and one level above, that you're the person who takes care of some mission-critical task, and so will ensure you don't get cut.

It's hard to find that thing, and not every company has this particular weakness. Volunteering to help out with projects in other departments is one way to explore the company for these flaws.

As a broad illustration, think about all of the thousands and thousands of employees that financial services companies have shed over the last decade. Then remember that they're still eagerly hiring COBOL devs.

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