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Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees
- seanw444 3y agoReally hope this doesn't affect their development of VirtIO drivers and related virtualization technology. Although being realistic, it probably will.
- stephencoyner 3y ago“However, layoffs are off limits in some areas. “We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products,” Hicks wrote.”
- rwmj 3y agoThis isn't going to affect virtio at all. The drivers are vitally important to virtualization and anyway the layoffs affect back office staff like IT, not product development or customer support. In fact it's rather the opposite, virtio is being implemented in more and more hardware.
- topspin 3y ago> virtio is being implemented in more and more hardware Would be interested in more information on that.
- rwmj 3y agoHere's an older article: https://lwn.net/Articles/805235/ https://lwn.net/Articles/805235/ I believe it has accelerated since then and there are now multiple manufacturers making virtio devices.
- twiclo 3y agoI'm sure this is mostly due to the economy but I would be interested to find out how much of this is due to lack of funding after the CentOS Stream thing.
- jzb 3y agoCare to elaborate? I'm not sure what "lack of funding after the CentOS Stream thing" is really supposed to mean.
- ipaddr 3y agoLosing revenue after Centos died
- ghaff 3y agoCentOS was never sold or supported by Red Hat.
- jzb 3y agoSo all the $0 that CentOS brought in wasn't replaced by the $0 charged for CentOS Stream? I know people love the idea that CentOS was somehow bringing business to Red Hat and/or the change to CentOS Stream caused Red Hat to lose revenue but ... not so much. If people moved from CentOS to Rocky or Alma, they weren't likely to hand money to Red Hat in any event. I have no idea whether or how many people were converted from CentOS 8 to RHEL, but I doubt that was a huge bump either. (Full disclosure: Former Red Hatter, no longer there as of last year. Not directly or even peripherally involved in CentOS for a lot longer than that.)
- dralley 3y agoEngineers aren't being laid off, administrative and management staff are.
- CoolGuySteve 3y ago> The layoffs come after IBM reported last week that Red Hat quarterly revenues had increased 8%. However, that was far below recent performances. “Red Hat had been averaging at least a 15% revenue growth, every quarter since IBM purchased it in 2019,” Looks like the enshittification of Red Hat is hitting its stride.
- ohthehugemanate 3y agoCare to elaborate? Why do you blame enshittification instead of the macroeconomic factors that have caused everyone else's revenue growth to slow, too?
- CoolGuySteve 3y agoBecause 8% growth in a single quarter is fucking fantastic.
- edgyquant 3y agoYet it’s more than a 50% drop from the average of the last twelve quarters.
- oefnak 3y agoWhy would you fire people if you're still growing?
- samstave 3y agoBecause FUCK YOU, thats why... #GoldenParachute [THIS ~~PAGE~~ CUBICLE INTENTIONALLY LEFT ~~BLANK~~ UNSTAFFED]
- rpgbr 3y agoAs if high level growth could be perpetual. Capitalism expectations are unachievable by default and yet people use them as an excuse for shit decisions and everybody are supposed to accept this craziness as “rational”.
- mathattack 3y agoWelcome 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 rational when you can’t put capital to good use anymore. It just sucks to be a customer or employee of them.
- foobarian 3y ago> - Cut expensive (old) employees. Anyone have tips to avoid this? I keep getting promotions and raises and it's all very nice but makes me worried about being closer to the top of the list when the next round of cuts needs to happen... Just this year I got an unsolicited bump because I was "below market avg TCO." You can't just say "no thanks" to that.
- jrockway 3y agoLive frugally and fully fund your 401k.
- phkahler 3y agoMake it a Roth 401k so when unusual things like housing collapse you can pull your principal back out to make a purchase without penalty. Assuming the stock market didn't crash simultaneously.
- javanissen 3y agoThat is the rule with a Roth IRA - pull out up to your contribution value without penalty. Early withdrawals from a Roth 401(k) are different: if your account is 80% contributions and 20% earnings, any early withdrawal you make will be prorated to be 80% contributions and 20% earnings. The earnings chunk will be added to your gross income and subject to a 10% penalty (in this case, 2% of the overall withdrawal). Given that most people here are high-ish earners, I’d say a traditional 401(k) is still the most appropriate choice because of the tax arbitrage. If you need to tap it, a 401(k) loan is an imperfect but probably decent enough choice.
- marcodiego 3y agoHope it doesn't hurt the GNOME project. The IBM-Redhat buyout should have been something similar to Apple-NeXT.
- loudmax 3y agoI hope it doesn't hurt any open source projects, but if there's there's one project that has bloat to trim it's GNOME. It's good that there's experimentation happening with Linux desktops, but that experimentation should not be happening on an "enterprise" distribution. The default RHEL desktop should be boring and reliable, not flashy and experimental like GNOME.
- orra 3y agoLook, I soured on GNOME when GNOME 3 was released. But it's unfair to call GNOME "flashy and experimental". Modern GNOME looks contemporary to its peers. GNOME 2, in contrast, would look very dated.
- rwmj 3y agoAt least GNOME 2 was usable.
- orra 3y agoI don't think it's fair to call GNOME unusable, even if I prefer it with Dash to Panel extension, or frankly, even though I prefer KDE Plasma.
- edgyquant 3y agoAs is gnome 3
- tapoxi 3y agoGNOME these days is pretty great. Quick tap of the super key and then type to launch something. Super left, right, or up arrow to snap to the side or maximize. Ctrl-alt left/right to switch workspaces. Doing that while holding shift will move the current selected window to the next workspace. Plus GNOME 3 introduced the concept of extensions, which are as powerful as the old Firefox extensions were. You can change literally anything about the shell to suit your needs.
- trabant00 3y ago> He said the layoffs would be “just under 4% in total.” > “We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products,” Hicks wrote. They are not touching development or sales. Sounds like they are trimming some fat.
- orra 3y ago> They are not touching development or sales. Sounds like they are trimming some fat. I don't think you can say that with such certainty. This could lead to developers spending more time doing admin, that was previously done by other people. Regardless, it sucks for the people being lade off, even if they are not touching development or sales.
- trabant00 3y agoI 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?
- orra 3y ago> 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.
- trabant00 3y agoMy 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.
- vaidhy 3y agoJust muscles and bones without fat is also dangerous. I think we should get out this thinking that only thing needed is engineering and sales. It works for a company just starting up.. but as you grow larger, there are many other roles that are equally critical.
- mroche 3y agoFor 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688331
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y ago> “We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products,” Hicks wrote. What does "building" mean here? If an enterprise running RHEL has an urgent mission-critical problem, can they get the same world-class experts parachuting in?
- pphysch 3y agoRed Hat has a lot more products/initiatives than just RHEL, which I assume is their golden goose
- drumhead 3y agoAll they ever do at IBM it seems is cut staff and product lines. Do they actually do anything of value anymore or are they just Redhat now?
- jstx1 3y agoIBM (without RedHat) still have hundreds of thousands of employees doing work and generating tens of billions of revenue. Whether it's of value depends on how cynical you feel today but IBM is very far from being just RedHat.
- hnarn 3y ago> Do they actually do anything of value anymore or are they just Redhat now? IBM is a behemoth. They bought Red Hat in 2019 for $34B. At that point Red Hat had an annual revenue of ~$3.4B. How much is $34B for IBM? That year their annual revenue was $77B. They literally spent less than half of their annual revenue that year to buy the company. Even if we assume that the revenue stemming from Red Hat in IBM has doubled since then, that's still less than 1/10th of IBMs revenue the year they bought Red Hat (it's about $60B today). So no, IBM is not "just Red Hat".
- timetraveller26 3y agoEt tu, Brute?
- nickstinemates 3y agoI didn't notice Matt Hicks became CEO of Red Hat. Congrats to him. We worked together on the Docker / Red Hat Partnership 10 years ago when he was in Engineering leadership. From an Engineer to CEO. Says a lot about Red Hat and its priorities.
- op00to 3y agoI'm not so sure now is the time to congratulate the guy at the wheel for Red Hat's first major layoff.
- nickstinemates 3y agoI think it lends more credence to the words in the article; this is a reduction in G&A while R&D is unaffected. I've never been accused of being a RH fanboy. Layoffs are tragic to hear and observe. This one seems limited.
- EvmRoot 3y agoI thought Paul was the worst RH CEO until 2 minutes into Matt talking in that role.
- nickstinemates 3y agoWhy?
- EvmRoot 3y agoHicks 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.
- zxcvbn4038 3y agoThe article says IBM has laid of 5,000 and has hired 7,000 - sounds to me like typical IBM shenanigans to replace expensive employees with cheap ones. When I was there the gimmick was that you either relocated to a third world country and took a local wage, or you resigned.
- tky 3y agoExactly. As good a time as any to fold RH into the regularly-scheduled “Resource Action” cadence and deflect upset onto general economic factors. No matter the sense of autonomy given by IBM, acquired companies will inevitably be subject to the mighty “RA” (aka layoff) cycle.
- thomasjudge 3y agoI feel like industry-wide the cuts & "fiscal discipline" is virtue signalling to Wall Street
- stbenjam 3y agoIf it is they didn’t care. IBM stock is stagnant today.
- jossclimb 3y agoThis will impact RH in the long term. Red Hat have always been on the low end around salary / TC, their draw has been seeing them as the good guys who care for their people, its a nice culture setup. This is the first set of layoffs they have ever carried out in their 30 year existence. They will likely need to start paying more when things can't pick up, as they can't play the good guy card as much anymore.
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- butz 3y agoWill this impact development of Fedora Linux?
- rwmj 3y agoNo, not at all. Fedora is the upstream of RHEL, where it is integrated and new ideas tried out. Plus engineers are not being let go.
- za3faran 3y agoIs Quarkus [quarkus.io] affected?
- mrtweetyhack 3y ago[dead]
- pelasaco 3y ago“Many businesses have been coping with the emerging attitudes of workers – particularly young workers – about the work-life balance. As the economy rapidly expanded after the pandemic and a labor shortage emerged, companies accommodated the new attitudes in order to attract workers,” Walden told WRAL. “Now that he labor shortage has narrowed – indeed, as many firms have released workers – companies no longer need to be as accommodating.