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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

#61

Post by CoastalCoder »

hawk_ wrote: post #50
CoastalCoder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't (b) forcing 5 year amortization? Which I believe doesn't affect large long running steady businesses. It's mostly about cashflow.

Sorry, I think you're right. I've updated my original comment.

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

#62

Post by jstx1 »

drumhead wrote: post #53

All they ever do at IBM it seems is cut staff and product lines. Do they actually do anything of value anymore or are they just Redhat now?

IBM (without RedHat) still have hundreds of thousands of employees doing work and generating tens of billions of revenue. Whether it's of value depends on how cynical you feel today but IBM is very far from being just RedHat.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

binarymax wrote: post #54
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! FIRE as fast as you can so you’re not at the whim of this class of people (management class, broadly speaking). There is no security, no one is coming to save you except you. I speak from experience.

What’s FIRE? This is an impossible to find acronym.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by jzb »

twiclo wrote: post #3

I'm sure this is mostly due to the economy but I would be interested to find out how much of this is due to lack of funding after the CentOS Stream thing.

Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what "lack of funding after the CentOS Stream thing" is really supposed to mean.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

tmaly wrote: post #13
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…

What will happen to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product if they cut all the knowledgeable grey beards?

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by namelessoracle »

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.

Whats weird is that I've heard the opposite too. That being an old employee is a suckers game for taking the 2 to 4 percent each year.

For instance the staff level who was with the company from junior and climbed the ranks is probably making alot less than the staff who came in as a staff, because climbing the ranks means you get percentage based increases or reset to the floor for the rank, and the staff who came in could negotiate higher than that. (You cant really negotiate comp for a promotion, its take it or leave it). Even though the junior to staff probably has more institutional knowledge, domain knowledge and political connections to get stuff done in the company.

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

#67

Post by patmorgan23 »

binarymax wrote: post #54
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! FIRE as fast as you can so you’re not at the whim of this class of people (management class, broadly speaking). There is no security, no one is coming to save you except you. I speak from experience.

What’s FIRE? This is an impossible to find acronym.

Financial Independence/Retire Early

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

#68

Post by aeyes »

rwmj wrote: post #43
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! FIRE as fast as you can so you’re not at the whim of this class of people (management class, broadly speaking). There is no security, no one is coming to save you except you. I speak from experience.

Rates of pay are so high in tech that I wonder if there will come a crisis when many people take early retirement. (Obviously I'm not saying this is a bad thing)

The amount of new grads and people coming in from other trades because they want a piece of the cake is high enough to keep supporting the flywheel. It would be interesting to see median age of engineers at tech companies, here it's definitely well under 35.

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

#69

Post by edgyquant »

tmaly wrote: post #13
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…

What will happen to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product if they cut all the knowledgeable grey beards?

They won’t do that

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

#70

Post by pphysch »

neilv wrote: post #34

> “We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products,” Hicks wrote. What does "building" mean here? If an enterprise running RHEL has an urgent mission-critical problem, can they get the same world-class experts parachuting in?

Red Hat has a lot more products/initiatives than just RHEL, which I assume is their golden goose
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