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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

#141

Post by EvmRoot »

nickstinemates wrote: post #140
EvmRoot wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Paul was the worst RH CEO until 2 minutes into Matt talking in that role.

Why?

Hicks has what would otherwise be an impressive ability to say absolutely nothing, even when responding to direct questions. He describes the RH purpose as "a north star", which is about as useful as the real cowboy in City Slickers saying "one thing"; its circus tent level preaching of empty platitudes. He believes going from intern to CEO was something other than luck, which is about the most dangerous position I can imagine. Zero humility, zero self awareness.

He is Elon, if Elon was slightly less crazy and ran only one company.

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

#142

Post by op00to »

nickstinemates wrote: post #140
EvmRoot wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Paul was the worst RH CEO until 2 minutes into Matt talking in that role.

Why?

His words as ceo were empty and devoid of meaning. I have no idea how he says so much with communicating so little.

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

#145

Post by foobarian »

ghaff wrote: post #114
oofta-boofta wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait until you get laid-off/fired unjustly. I had this same attitude until I got laid off even though I was a high-performer (4/5 and 5/5 on all my bi-yearly reviews). Now, I'm in it for me and only me. Fuck these companies, they don't care about you so why should I care? I perform to the expectations of my job description but forget going above and beyond.

I honestly don't understand why someone with your attitude doesn't become a freelancer/consultant. If I hated working for companies that much, pretty much no amount of incremental salary would persuade me to not go my own way.

I don't know about you but I think my price is somewhere in the mid-high six figures TCO :-)

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

#146

Post by ghaff »

foobarian wrote: post #145
ghaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand why someone with your attitude doesn't become a freelancer/consultant. If I hated working for companies that much, pretty much no amount of incremental salary would persuade me to not go my own way.

I don't know about you but I think my price is somewhere in the mid-high six figures TCO :-)

I guess I don't care enough about money to spend my time in a situation I find horrible.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

mroche wrote: post #22

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

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by parasense »

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…

Yeah, but also keep in mind the previous quarter announcement about the complete revamp of performance evaluation, and bonus payout. They have setup a situation where it's much easier for managers to under-evaluate employees. They are creating the future where it's much easier to layoff so-called "under performing" associates, while making it much easier to label average folks as under performing, or performing folks as average.

The 4% figure they have given is a very low figure compared to other tech firms doing 10% ~ 20%, and while one might optimistically say the progressive nature of Red Hat trying to keep the percentage low, while the pessimist might say this is just the first round. So it's possible that during Q2 performance is being looked at closely, and now is the time to shine.

As usual, all opinions are my own personal.

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

#149

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #21
louniks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is so much misunderstanding about the amortization of software dev costs rule (and yes, I see your correction).

I've worked in large and small companies in my career, and nearly every large company desperately wanted devs to count as much time as possible as capex (vs. opex). Reason being that, if you're a growing software company, counting dev salaries (often your largest expense) as capex can make you look a ton more profitable, which is of course good for your stock price and valuation (indeed, counting opex as capex is one of the oldest frauds in the book - it's what brought down WorldCom 20 years ago). It's just that, in a modern software company, it's really hard to separate any individual dev's time into separate capex vs opex buckets. The reason I hated capitalizing my time as a software engineer is because the line between capex vs. opex is gray beyond belief for modern SaaS companies that do continuous delivery.

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

#150

Post by trabant00 »

orra wrote: post #105
trabant00 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I said it with any certainty. I said "sounds like". The rest of your argument can be true, or not. It all depends on how useful the work of the lade off people was. You know there are positions in large corporations who basically just don't do anything, don't you?

> You know there are positions in large corporations who basically just don't do anything, don't you? Sure, but my default assumption isn't that layoffs effectively target folks pretending to be busy.

My assumption is the leadership must know at least a little bit what they are doing.

But I'm also sure that you can't really judge perfectly on a case by case, so absolutely good people will be affected by this.

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