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At least it wasn't Oracle

chrisshort.net

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Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#121

Post by saghm »

imbusy111 wrote: post #24

Not sure why Chris felt so much anxiety about the acquisition. Red Hat was already a huge company and things change. After all, it is just a corporate job and he can find another one, especially in this climate. I can only understand his anxiety if he is an exec high up the chain and likely will be trimmed and his multi-million dollar salary is affected, and he has a huge mortgage, and lots of bills to pay and so on.…

> I can only understand his anxiety if he is an exec high up the chain and likely will be trimmed and his multi-million dollar salary is affected, and he has a huge mortgage, and lots of bills to pay and so on. Otherwise, life just goes on.

There are other sources of anxiety besides financial

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#122

Post by saghm »

gaius wrote: post #109
tome wrote: post #7

> after some consideration, I’ve decided to share my thoughts as a narrative timeline. Trust me when say that I have given this format considerable thought. It is likely the safest way (regulatory-wise) to deliver my thoughts on the topic. Does anyone have any idea what regulations might impinge on Chris's choice of format for sharing his thoughts?

Does anyone have any idea what regulations might impinge on Chris's choice of format for sharing his thoughts? None. People who learnt that their companies are being acquired via public news services are not in possession of any information the SEC would consider "insider".

The author did mention an all-hands with both Red Hat and IBM executives; there's a pretty good chance some "insider" information was shared there

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#123

Post by NikolaNovak »

Nrsolis wrote: post #116

The one thing I can't understand is why people aren't more excited about the possibility for IBM to completely transform into an open-source-forward organization. IBM does work for EVERY Fortune 100 company. I can't comment on the working conditions but as a person who regularly works with IBM I can tell you that they aren't much worse than any other 400K employee sized company. There are a lot of folks there that lo…

For whatever little is worth, I work for IBM (but I'm still a nice guy, I swear!:), and I'm hyper-excited by this.

[if I were a RedHat employee, I might feel differently... 0:-]

While I work on what HN lovingly refers to as "Enterprise" applications (very legacy, very slow, very 1970s... and yes, very Oracle - PeopleSoft, Weblogic, Tuxedo, Oracle 12g:), there are parts of IBM that are shockingly agile, and have completely embraced open source both internally and as offerings.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#124

Post by gaius »

saghm wrote: post #122
gaius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have any idea what regulations might impinge on Chris's choice of format for sharing his thoughts? None. People who learnt that their companies are being acquired via public news services are not in possession of any information the SEC would consider "insider".

The author did mention an all-hands with both Red Hat and IBM executives; there's a pretty good chance some "insider" information was shared there

It is very unlikely, because that's just not how this works. Remember all those execs have been in secret talks with each other for months without any employees having a single clue. They aren't going to divulge anything which could threaten the deal, not with billions on the line, not worth the risk that an employee would let something slip or even deliberately leak.

The company would likely be upset if anyone leaked and take disciplinary action, but the regulator isn't concerned with that.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#125

Post by chii »

apohn wrote: post #94
dkarl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting years are 2 and 3. That's when the parent company tries to optimize things (e.g. streamline the sales force), create synergies, etc and you start seeing the changes. In my one experience with acquisition, that's when upper management's bonuses got tied to "synergy" metrics and suddenly everybody had to learn a new relationship to reality. Almost everything we did for a whole year was dedicated to gami…

>Making and keeping deals was 15-dimensional chess to them I've supported sales cycles at small and big companies. I think this is one of the best one line descriptions of what really happens when big companies want to "sell to the CIO" or retain a large existing customer. Sometimes actually solving customer problems is not even 1 of those 15 dimensions.

It's dysfunctional all the way down.

The CIO being soled to isn't interested in "solving the problem" of their organization either. They have their own metrics, and so on goes the rabbit hole...

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#127

Post by bonzini »

tyingq wrote: post #37
imbusy111 wrote: post #24

Not sure why Chris felt so much anxiety about the acquisition. Red Hat was already a huge company and things change. After all, it is just a corporate job and he can find another one, especially in this climate. I can only understand his anxiety if he is an exec high up the chain and likely will be trimmed and his multi-million dollar salary is affected, and he has a huge mortgage, and lots of bills to pay and so on.…

I'm sure there's more than one reason, but he seems to indicate he works from home. IBM apparently changed their policy on that in 2017.

https://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-allow-all-of-its-employees-to...

> In the USA there was an edict last year for staff to work from specific offices based [on] their role

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#128

Post by bonzini »

dcosson wrote: post #88
gnulinux wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat was probably my top company that I ever wanted to work in, but this time around couldn't find good open positions so joined another company (only a few months ago). I feel blessed because I'd probably feel really bad if I joined RedHat and then it suddenly became IBM. Now, next time around (in a few years) I'll know more about this whole IBM acquisition deal, and if RedHat is still a good company to work in,…

Can I ask why? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding is their core business is selling Enterprise support for linux, which, no offense to them, doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. I know they also contribute a lot of open source stuff back, but in terms of working in open source Linux a company like Canonical seems more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because their main product is distributed u…

Canonical does much less upstream development than Red Hat. If you want to work on the upstream kernel, for example, Canonical is probably not the right place to work.

Also, RHEL is distributed under a free license; if you want it free as in beer there's always Fedora, and also CentOS which is also a Red Hat product.

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#129

Post by newnewpdro »

woodandsteel wrote: post #96
ChuckMcM wrote: post #49

Having been in Chris' shoes (being acquired by IBM) I found the reactions of different people in the company most interesting. Several people had the same sort of "Everything is different now that IBM owns us." reaction, but if you unpack that, the reality is a bit different. For a company like Redhat I can't imagine it will be largely changed in the first couple of years at least, so for that period of time you will…

>At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place and to profit off helping the world get there. No, no, no. A big company like IBM may have started out that way, but what almost inevitably happens over the long term is that selfish, greedy, ambitious, power-hungry, sociopathic people become employees and work their way up to the top (or get hired from other compan…

> Now it is true that sometimes you get a reformer at the top like Nadella at Microsoft who honestly wants to do things right, and has the brains to figure out how to do it.

What kool-aid have you been swimming in?

Re: At least it wasn't Oracle

#130

Post by AlexanderNull »

Having worked at both an IBM and an Oracle acquisition, once you hit year 2 they'll wish it had been the other way around. A kind of nice thing about Oracle is they don't really want you to become an "Oracle shop" after acquisition. They bought you because you were doing something right, and they want you to keep doing that... just fill out these 10 obscure webforms at each step of the way.
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