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IBM Is Already Gutting Red Hat and Firing Employees Without Warning
- thrownaway954 6y agopeople are talking about pensions and what not. honestly, if you want a pension, go work for your local city or county government. in florida, frs is probably the best pension system out there. there are a ton of government position available right now that fall under frs benefits. https://www.myfrs.com/ https://www.myfrs.com/ https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?l=Florida https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?l=Florida
- woodandsteel 6y agoI recall at the time of the purchase some, I think it included Cringely, said that Red Hat culture was going to take over IBM and save it. Alas, it looks like that is not going to happen.
- CrankyBear 6y agoTechrights is not a reliable news publication.
- alexktz 6y agoUnsubstantiated bullshit. The entire 'article'. How this passes for 'journalism' is baffling.
- marmaduke 6y ago“This is why we can’t have nice things”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hindsightbias 6y agoAny “gutting” is Jim Whitehurst doing it. Redhat acquired IBM, not the other way around regardless of what wall street thinks. IBM mgrs are not lording over the RH folks. These orgs are not integrated (or hardly integrated) and IBM did their covid layoffs in May. RH’ers thinking they are immune to the covid reality can blame the blue side all they want but that is not how the company is structured.
- yipbub 6y agoThe article is purely speculation based on the anecdotal evidence of one IBM acquisition "victim", someone who has been an IBM insider from what seems like pre-acquisition. The rest are smears on the direction of Fedora for changing their default filesystem on their workstation variant, for developing (not replacing anything with) Silverblue - an "immutable OS". The claim that the Btrfs push came from Facebook is ridiculous. I know Fedora some community infra engineers and leaders personally. The Facebook developers were there in their capacity as Btrfs contributors to speak about its stability. They did use their @fb.com email unlike what the article suggests. Not that that matters. Here's the whole mailing list archive for that discussion: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/IOPR2R3SCKOFUCKPLMS4MDD5664SGQFR/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe... Disclaimer: I work at Redhat as a Software Engineer, and what I write here represents only my perceptions.
- siliconpotato 6y agoI have a rule of never clicking on a techrights link, and it serves me well.
- LordOfWolves 6y agoDoes anyone else see this more likely to be “mere” reductions in staff due to a presumed decline in business due to the global pandemic, rather than some nefarious plot to gut Red Hat?
- animalgonzales 6y agonot just IBM, but the link to the microsoft layoffs is kind of mind blowing: http://techrights.org/2020/08/02/microsoft-layoffs-secrecy/ http://techrights.org/2020/08/02/microsoft-layoffs-secrecy/ >“Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested.” >“Microsoft was twice as likely to lay you off if you were over 40.” >“Cortana is an analytics and telemetry app that data mines people while pretending to be a digital assistant,”
- marcinzm 6y ago>"Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested." Don't pensions usually vest within 5/10 years of working for a company (possibly in tiers) rather than when reaching age 55? I'd assume anyone who has been at MS long enough to be eligible for a pension (which was probably last offered in the 90s or earlier) would have vested decades ago. You simply can't draw upon your pension until you reach 55 but you lose nothing. Makes me question the whole article to be honest.
- gesticulator 6y agoWhat pension? I don’t think that’s a common US benefit. https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/usbenefits https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/usbenefits
- tibbydudeza 6y ago401K I think is what we consider to be retirement funding.
- tssva 6y agoMicrosoft 401K matches vest immediately which leads me to think they may be an untrustworthy source of information.
- floren 6y agoI think many companies have moved from pensions to 401k over the last couple decades, but people who came into the company during the pension regime typically retain their pensions. Someone who is approaching 55 could well have a legacy pension.
- catsarebetter 6y agoDidn't they just acquire them last year? Is it b/c they're trying to cut costs or did they want to kill the company from the start?
- wmf 6y agoIBM doesn't "want" to kill anything but they definitely have a habit of "optimizing" acquisitions by cutting R&D and letting the product(s) coast.
- cptnapalm 6y agoI recall some of the first comments when it happened were questioning when the layoffs would begin. The most common answer was "about a year." It's been about a year, so here they come.
- cyb_ 6y ago"Error establishing a database connection" I looks like the site may have been hugged to death. Anyone have a mirror?
- hddherman 6y agoI guess that this is an example where corporate sponsorship of open source projects is both a blessing and a curse: it's fantastic while the corporation is doing great, and can get real bad real fast when priorities (or owners) change.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoUnless you are in research and have a significant portfolio this is what you can expect from IBM. They are notorious for letting people go under dubious circumstances or telling people to relocate to a third world country and work for local wages. I worked for them on three different occasions in three different parts of the countries and it was always a really toxic environment and it didn't end well for everyone I've known from there.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- IronWolve 6y agoLucky it was archived @ http://archive.is/oUbQZ http://archive.is/oUbQZ
- tibbydudeza 6y agoGut and outsource ... that has been the IBM way for a while now.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoA giant corporation buys a Silicon Valley company, the result is generally carnage. The old-boy marketing-driven process-heavy big company will roll out decisions like a bowling ball careening across a cafeteria, knocking over tables and chairs and sending people running for cover. Since big companies are driven by managers not engineers, and the managers are always, always from the bigger company, the decisions are perceived as clueless. They are generally about optimizing or cannibalizing the small-company product for fit with the big company product space. With superficial understanding of the product itself, generally confined to marketing descriptions. Thus, carnage. Been through it twice.
- jariel 6y ago"driven by managers not engineers" Yeah, uh to assume that Engineers have some special managerial ability that 'managers' do not is the wrong take. Management is management. Some good, some bad. We can be cynical, but without knowing the details of these layoffs, we shouldn't assume anything. One of the advantages of M&A is ostensible synergy across many groups, for example, RedHat is unlikely going to need maintainers of its HR Portal, which will likely be rolled into the one from HQ. And probably some execs will be without jobs. It's possible that the layoff was in the works otherwise, or that they were literally made at the recommendation of outgoing people who were unable/unwilling to do a re-structure at the time. Right from the article: "The tricky thing is, IBM and Red Hat both have NC-based operations and a rather large number of workers there. It’s somewhat of a business hub. But we also know that IBM does not need two HR departments, two marketing departments, etc. Managers are sort of converging in duties, conflicting in terms of roles, overlapping in the workflow sense and so on."
- tyingq 6y agoI agree about the carnage part, but it happens regardless of the type of companies involved. There's a push to not have duplicate functions, products, etc. And people making decisions without having all the information.
- FanaHOVA 6y ago> old-boy marketing-driven process-heavy big company You mean Red Hat?
- solinent 6y agoInteresting, I just saw a posting for Red Hat. Doesn't IBM have an automated HR system now? Perhaps that's not functioning as well as they'd hoped.
- opencl 6y agoThey could be gutting all the current employees to make room for new people hired at lower pay.
- euix 6y agoHow do the pensions work at Microsoft or IBM? I was under the impression once you vest into a pension you get it come retirement age regardless if at the time you are still working at the company. Otherwise that seems ridiculous, couldn't they just fire you at 54 and you get nothing?
- wmf 6y agoI don't know about MS or IBM specifically, but often pension payouts will increase over time, e.g. when you hit a certain age (or years of service) your pension increases from 50% to 60% of your salary. So laying someone off at 54 wouldn't cause them to lose money per se but they wouldn't get that 10% bump (which is a lot of money multiplied by 20-30 years).
- awinter-py 6y agohow does a site called techrights not have a working SSL cert
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThe last time this was posted it was quickly flagged into oblivion for being a highly unreliable source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049672
- pinewurst 6y agoI really wish people wouldn't pay attention to anything coming from this "source". IBM _is_ indeed a terrible employer, but anything from this joke of a web site isn't to be taken seriously. Look at the history - it's all "X stole my giant ball of aluminum foil" written in quasi-English.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AcerbicZero 6y agoVMware has been one of the few companies to be bought by an old dinosaur of tech (Dell) and so far, managed to survive. It helps that they're much closer to equal with Dell than RedHat and IBM, but I'm pretty sure RedHat knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to let IBM in the door.
- hinkley 6y agoI have heard one rumor (only one, mind you) that Dell/VMWare was more of a reverse merger. If you end up in charge of strategy for the combined company, then of course things go better for you.
- s1t5 6y ago> but I'm pretty sure RedHat knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to let IBM in the door. Call me cynical but isn't it possible that the people who were responsible for the acquisition on RedHat's side were also the ones who would benefit most from it financially so they simply sold out?
- renewiltord 6y agoVMWare was bought by someone considered even more dinosaur, EMC. EMC <-> Dell was dinosaur union.
- freddy418_sc 6y ago"A good engineer is replaceable in 3 months But a chicky [sic] manager, hard to find. :)" I assume this is common knowledge
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoI hope this means red hat goes away sooner.
- dan_quixote 6y agoWhy? What could you have against Red Hat? Even when I worked for a direct competitor, I had nothing to hate at Red Hat!
- notacoward 6y agoOne part of this rings true to me. I left Red Hat a bit over three years ago, and part of the reason was container-itis was sucking all of the oxygen away from everything I cared about there. The rest of the OP might well be BS, but that part seems very likely.
- LaSombra 6y agoThis has been flagged before.