RedHat to add at least 1000 jobs in 2012, CEO says
wraltechwire.com
wraltechwire.com
I sent my CV to a Sales Engineer in March. First phone screen went well, end of quarter happened, and the next thing you know it's June before my second and third round phone screens take place. They fly me to NC in August. Did more interviews, and received a verbal offer on-location, with a formal offer letter, along with stuff I needed to complete for my background check, etc, to arrive via mail.
Sent my receipts in for reimbursement...and then radio silence...for two months. I received my expenses back...so I just assumed that they had found a better candidate, or, something, and that they were no longer interested in me. I did get a phone call from someone at RedHat asking if I'd be interested in a different position, but, I opted-out, having enough of the interview rodeo.
Similar people that I know who have been hired directly by Red Hat have mentioned tales of similar woes with their hiring process, so, I'm somewhat confident that it's not me that's broken....
What is Red hat doing to support this many employees?
Who is using Red Hat most? When I was at Lockheed, I was deploying CENTOS - as well as at other startups. I also used Ubuntu in a number of cases.
Are extreme scale companies, such as Google Facebook and Amazon not using their own custom builds?
I just can't figure out what that additional 1,000 employees would be doing.
EDIT: Ok after reading that article, and a few others; they are going for a big cloud push. With the acquisition on Gluster, it would appear that rolling native cloud-specific features into their offering makes it a strong candidate for cloud infrastructure on which others build their business and services.
I can also imagine that with the federal cloud strategy, where they see the ability to shift several billion in annual spending on systems to cloud based services, that redhat will be selling to those who are trying for that federal business.
Companies like Williams Sonoma outsource their entire e-commerce presence to them.
Just curious, was it to save money or was it just easier to go that way?
I wish other Open Source companies adopted some of Red Hat's awesomeness, specifically open development of upcoming releases, a public bug tracker, and their patent promise.
Some of us are working on doing just that[1]. We have an open issue tracker, code on Github and a commitment to real Open Source development. We haven't done a "patent promise" yet, but we don't have any patents, and it's just something that we haven't gotten around to yet.
Of course, I'm an ex Red Hat guy myself, and have been a fan of theirs for a long time, so it comes pretty naturally for us. We're also in their backyard geographically so I guess it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
In any case, even the standard you're trying to apply is ridiculous. People at Google or Facebook might believe that their puzzle-solving interview process ensures that they get only the best employees (how ego-gratifying such a belief must be) but I also know dozens of people who've gone to Google so I know better. On average those people are pretty good, probably even a little better than the Red Hat average, but only a little. By the standard of actual talent that's acquired, Red Hat does just fine. It's simply not true that "nearly all" of the talent goes to any three or four companies, no matter how big or prestigious. The Red Hat contribution to the Linux kernel alone shows that they can match or exceed anyone when it comes to talent in some areas.
In fairness, I should point out that it's not all daisies and starlight at Red Hat either. It's a billion-dollar global company. Yes, they (we) hire quite a few people in other parts of the world, because - believe it or not - engineering talent is not an exclusively US trait. Like any company we try to get the best bang for the buck, and sometimes that means hiring elsewhere. It's not Red Hat's fault that wage scales in the US are unrealistically high. When you have the ability to coordinate teams in many locations, and talent is available in many locations, you take advantage of it. This can be difficult to deal with as an employee, as can the fact that the average level of social ability at Red Hat seems a bit lower than average, but it's not an issue of low technical ability as you portray it.
Oracle, IBM and VMware are some of the top companies where redhatters go to work after Red Hat. Due to their size Oracle and IBM have to allow less talented people in, that's what puts them in second tier and not first. I agree that Red Hat shares some of the talent pool with Oracle and IBM, but unlike Red Hat, Oracle and IBM share some talent pool with first tier companies as well, which puts them in the superior second tier.
I think you have the realistic picture, but you are presenting it a bit more positively than it should be.
Everyone can do the math for NumberOfH1Bs/TotalEmployees or compare the normalized inflow/outflow of employees between the companies. You can take rough (but unbiased) numbers from myvisajobs and linkedin company statistics page. Last year on both accounts Red Hat was losing by far more than 1:2.
It doesn't matter how Google or Facebook hire, what matters is if a Red Hat employee is asked to move to Google or Facebook even without pay raise the number of those who say yes will be significantly higher than those from Google asked to move to Red Hat.
I apply this rule, account for the salaries, the H1B visas and other indicators from linkedin to purify the results (exclude non-engineering employees).
Even if you throw away workforce analytics and look at innovation opportunity both Oracle and IBM make cooler things than Red Hat which attracts top talent - Watson, IBM Research, Oracle Labs and so on. You have to give them credit for that.
Engineering talent may not be US trait but again it all boils down to asking someone in an asian country to stay home or move to US. The answer predominantly will be yes. When you hire talent in Asia you demonstrate that she is less valuable to you than companies who do H1B or other. This is one of the reasons H1B is a good indicator about talent level in a US company.