"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

"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."