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Comment by oso2k | Hacker News Reader

Red Hatter since 2016, first in Consulting, now in Sales.

Oh the “synergy” rocket chat channel we had back then…

Things have been changing, for sure. So has the industry. So have our customers. By and large, Red Hatters on the ground have fought hard to preserve the culture. I have many friends across Red Hat, many that transitioned to IBM (Storage, some Middleware). Folks still love being a part of Red Hat.

On the topic of ridiculous expectations…there’s some. But Red Hatters generally figure out how to do ridiculous things like run the internet on open source software.

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Every time you say rocket chat, I have to appear.

FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.

Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years previously.

I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID happened shortly after so that also throws a wrench into the comparisons.

The point is, it's hard to point to any particular decisions or changes I disliked and say "IBM did that"

I do miss having Jim Whitehurst around. Jim spent 90 minutes on the Wednesday afternoon of my New Hire Orientation week with my cohort helping to make sure all of us could login to email and chat, answering questions, telling a couple short stories. He literally helped build the Red Hat culture starting at New Hire. Kind of magical when the company is an 11K person global business and doing 5B in revenue.

Cormier and Hicks have their strengths. Hicks in particular seems to care about cultural shifts and also seems adept at identifying key times and places to invest in engineering efforts.

The folks we have imported from IBM are hiring folks that are attempting to make Red Hat more aggressive, efficient, innovative. Some bets are paying off. More are to be decided soon. These kinds of bets and changes haven’t been for everyone.

>The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes.

Longtime Red Hatter here. Most of any challenges I see at Red Hat around culture I attribute to this rapid growth. In some ways it's surprising how well so many relatively new hires seem to internalize the company's traditional values.

Yeah, when I left I think there were something like 7x the number of people than when I joined. You can't run those two companies the same way no matter who is in charge.

cpitman!!!! Miss you a ton!!!

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