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Early redhatter here. I will always have mixed feelings about Jim. On the one hand, I fully respect him, what he does, and how he does it. I think he was a good

• jhickok 5y ago
  I feel that is normal in the lifecycle of a growing business-- at some point you have to exit startup mode and get corporate, no?
  • markus_zhang 5y ago
    Yeah but then the fun ends unless you are into the manager mindset.
• pm90 5y ago
  Could you expand on that? Did he centralize planning or tighten budgets or something?
  • ghaff 5y ago
    As someone who was following Red Hat as an industry analyst at the time, it was growing a lot and everything that implies came with it. To the sibling comment's point, that meant moving away from "everyone" knowing everyone else, moving away from a lot of people being involved with and knowledgeable about most of the company's technology (though JBoss was still sort of its own island at the time), and lots of things being sort of ad hoc. A lot of people had pretty flexible roles. I won't say things totally changed but, as is necessary as you grow, more process was put in place, there was a more deliberate use of data, a shift from "random acts" that made sense in isolation to more programmatic ways of doing things. These things weren't bad and were in fact needed. But, even if Red Hat wasn't really still a startup when Whitehurst took over, it wasn't really a mature large company either.