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Businesses IBM Red Hat Software

Red Hat CFO 'Dismissed' From Company, Forfeits $4M Retention Award (wsj.com) 89

"Red Hat Inc.'s finance chief Eric Shander has been dismissed from the company, forfeiting a $4 million retention award that was agreed to ahead of Red Hat's acquisition by IBM," reports the Wall Street Journal: The Raleigh, N.C.-based software company confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Shander was no longer working at Red Hat. "Eric was dismissed without pay in connection with Red Hat's workplace standards," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. The company, which said that its accounting and control functions remain healthy, on Friday declined to provide specifics about what led to Mr. Shander's dismissal. Mr. Shander didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Shander was named Red Hat's permanent chief financial officer in April 2017 after a stint as acting CFO, according to the spokeswoman. He had served in various finance roles at IBM and Lenovo Group Ltd. before joining Red Hat in 2015...

His departure puts Red Hat in a difficult spot, said Ivan Feinseth, director of research at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, an investment banking firm. "The fallout for companies in these situations is not only the dismissal of an executive but also the litigation risk," Mr. Feinseth said. "Companies could be held responsible for not creating and maintaining a proper workplace environment."

IBM said it supports Red Hat's decision to dismiss Mr. Shander. "Our values are fully aligned in this area," a spokesman said.

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Red Hat CFO 'Dismissed' From Company, Forfeits $4M Retention Award

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  • RedHat need to openly source a new CFO.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      May I make a suggestion? Lenart Pottering.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 )
        If they hired Lennart, the budget wouldn't be bloated, that's a myth. It would do more than it used to, though.

        He would write a flight simulator in Excel, just to get it installed on all employee computers.

        To get reimbursed for a purchase, you could take a picture of the receipt, but you'd have to submit it in a new container. Watch the timestamp.

        Your paychecks would be in binary, but don't worry there's an easy way to read them with a special tool that got installed in the flight simulator with exce
  • by Anonymous Coward

    From TFA

    His departure puts Red Hat in a difficult spot, said Ivan Feinseth, director of research at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, an investment banking firm.

    "The fallout for companies in these situations is not only the dismissal of an executive but also the litigation risk,â Mr. Feinseth said. âoeCompanies could be held responsible for not creating and maintaining a proper workplace environment.â

    Think about the shareholder suits if you start canning skilled executives for failing to live up to some b.s. SJW code of ethics. The conduct is either serious enough to be chargeable, or at least made public to demonstrate the necessity of termination. Or, more often than not, an agreement is made between the subject to leave a position 'for personal reasons'.

    • by hwstar ( 35834 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @07:14PM (#59301290)

      The termination better be on solid ground as C- level executives and union employees in the United States have just cause employment contracts while the average non-union workers are at-will.

      At-will basically means you can terminate some one for any reason, or even no reason at all. It's VERY difficult to prove wrongful termination against an employer who has terminated an at-will employee.

        Not only are top level executives on a contract stipulating just cause, they also have the financial firepower to challenge a termination. The average joe is pretty screwed if fired for cause: No COBRA, NO unemployment benefits, probably blackballed for life. The executive can live off savings for years till people forget and will probably get employment elsewhere with minimal impact.

      • At-will basically means you can terminate some one for any reason, or even no reason at all. It's VERY difficult to prove wrongful termination against an employer who has terminated an at-will employee.

        This is usually true, but there are quite a few legal exceptions, including violations of public policy (e.g., taking time off to serve on a jury, military, etc.), discrimination (e.g., based on race, color, national origin, gender, religion, age, disability, pregnancy, or genetic information), retaliation for certain legally protected activities (e.g., filing a complaint or claim), fraud (e.g., based on false representations during recruiting or employment), and whistle-blowing.

        According to this website [coverwallet.com], "

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12, 2019 @08:40PM (#59301438)

      I work for IBM RedHat, so I am very disappointed by all these replies .

      Some of you Slashdotters are, rightly or wrongly, good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.....what you're saying is completely at odds with what's actually going on. I think you just want to pretend what's happening fits your preconceived ideological views, when in reality you just don't know what's actually happened.

      This is how false information gets passed around.

      If you don't know about the topic, please try to be careful how you word things and make it clear you have no inside knowledge. Because many Slashdotters believe anything they read.

      • by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @08:52PM (#59301468)
        Then why the fuck don't you tell us what's happening?
        • by Anonymous Coward

          Then why the fuck don't you tell us what's happening?

          What part of "Anonymous" "Coward" is unclear?

          • All the OP said was the contract was solid, so he must have done something bad, because they wouldn't risk a lawsuit over a "misalignment" of vision.

      • Some of you Slashdotters are, rightly or wrongly, good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about. But trust me.....what you're saying is completely at odds with what's actually going on.

        So what did he do? Genocide, or telling some women she had nice hair?

        • When you can't even keep straight the difference between the woman you're talking to and the women of your mind's eye, don't tell her anything. Don't talk about her hair.

          I saved your job, and made you more likely to be promoted. You're welcome.

      • Anonymous Coward asking us to trust them? Nice try.

      • This is slashdot; if you weren't disappointed in the replies you probably didn't read them very closely and missed something.

        Of course comments are completely at odds with whatever is actually going on, and fit people's preconceived ideological views. This is a place where it is discouraged to read the article (because it is advertising and clickbait) before commenting, and usually a bad idea to even read the summary. (as it will be misleading)

        And no, they don't believe anything they read. They only believe

      • by qubezz ( 520511 )
        What's going on is they figured out a way to save themselves a $4 million dollar payment.
  • Does anyone else think it's sensible that IBM was permitted to acquire RedHat and that this is going to be good for the enterprise and community OS worlds in the long run to have a former competitor in control of RedHat's destiny? It certainly must punch me below the belt for organizations as well as sysadmins who had specialized professionally as practitioners of RPM-based Linux distros for decades to now suddenly discover that now IBM holds the power and controls the narrative and strategy. It seems like
    • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday October 12, 2019 @07:44PM (#59301358) Homepage Journal

      Does anyone else think it's sensible that IBM was permitted to acquire RedHat and that this is going to be good for the enterprise and community OS worlds in the long run to have a former competitor in control of RedHat's destiny?

      Redhat was doing poorly without IBM. They let Poettering write an init system after he did a terrible job of writing an audio daemon. And they tell me that dependency hell is still a thing, but I haven't touched redhate since like 6 or something, because it was a thing then. If they ruin it badly enough, one of the other 232304723 other Linux distributions will become the corporate favorite.

      I'm concerned more for the redhat employees (except Lennart, of course.) I worked for Tivoli just post-acquisition, before they had ruined the corporate culture. First they decided to save some money by moving support away from the rest of the business, which broke it down substantially right away. Then we started getting support calls (I worked in support there, where all but maybe two people had been sysadmins previously — TME10 was that complicated) from IBM Tier 1 support, about the same time we hired our own Tier 1 team. The woman they brought in to run Tier 1 had no clue about anything, except how to get one of her relatives hired who also had no clue about anything. Calls started to show up in the queue with gems like "yowzij" (you figure that one out) or "dragon drop". Formerly when you called support, bang, you were talking to someone who knew what they were doing.

      Anyway, I guess it will be sad for both customers and employees, but employees will leave in droves. Some for other departments, some for other companies. Now they can put either Redhat or IBM on their resume, depending on who they're trying to impress. Inevitably, the most competent people will leave first. Others (and some of them) will be depressed by the change and start phoning in their work.

      IBM - the kiss of mediocrity.

    • Does anyone else think it's sensible that IBM was permitted

      Do you have any legal justification at all to say it wouldn't be "permitted"?

      • With a takeover at the level of IBM buying RedHat, it is always possible that it could be against antitrust laws. And the companies involved tend to ask for approval in advance, like this article shows:
        https://www.itpro.co.uk/acquisition/33876/ibms-acquisition-of-red-hat-on-track-to-win-unconditional-eu-approval [itpro.co.uk].
        So yes, there is some "permitted" involved.

    • Want to bet that a msft linux distro is coming in the next decade?

      I'll go further, want to bet that in 10 years, the OS if choice for developers will either be that msft linux distro or windows 10 (with wsl)?

      Is sad to see linux distros heading the Microsoft of old way while Microsoft seems to actually making effort to please developers...

      • by Chromal ( 56550 )
        I don't follow. Which way are "linux distros" headed? Why would a developer be pleased by using a Microsoft API over something that's portable to all platforms?
        • Install a "modern" distro. For example ubuntu, and type mount.

          Even fucking gnome is by default a snap package now.

          If look at init. Whatever your position on systemd is, one big interdependent program doing every thing is closer to Windows than linux.

          And when i say devs will use Windows, i mean that Windows will have all the tools we need and used to be linux only, on top of the few advantages of Windows (ad, better polished ui, ms proprietary stuff, etc.) Wsl is actually good, gnu tools start to work naive

    • If they had wanted to work with IBM tech or culture, they would have gone into AIX

      Reminds me of when I was a database consultant in the late 90s, and IBM was trying really hard to push their few remaining AIX customers to switch to Linux already.

      This is how stupid the haters are.

      By 2001 they were offering AIX customers discounts to switch, because they didn't want to support two *nix flavors.

      I also remember in 2003 or something when IBM was donating free Linux support to big international NGOs, because they were building out their Linux professional services department and they needed cu

      • by Chromal ( 56550 )
        Yes, AIX was a thing. It was a thing few small businesses could afford, certainly not the startup where my career began. At that time, IBM products and services were beyond the reach of small players, or people just wanting to learn the craft of Unix-like administration. The problem here is when these massive operators start acquiring the small ones and causing extinction in the computing ecosystem. I also prefer the diversity of the bazaar to the cloistered insular piety of the cathedral. I'm hardly origin
        • You don't seem to have comprehended that IBM abandoned AIX as soon as Linux could reliably run on all their supported platforms.

          AIX was not something that made money. AIX was something that DB2 customers would buy to run their database, or mainframe customers would buy to run anything at all. DB2 made real money. Mainframes made real money.

          AIX was expensive because everything had to be expensive in commercial *NIX, or the people with pointy hair would refuse to buy it for their company and you'd end up with

  • What is a suitable replacement for RHEL in the enterprise? Sorry, Ubuntu doesn't cut it for a number of reasons, one of which is no active support.

    RHEL downstreams don't cut it either. CentOS doesn't have commercial support. Oracle Linux? Most companies will not handle it.

    RHEL is the only game in town for some things, especially when you have to deal with a number of compliance things, and auditors will laugh you out of your job if you don't have some sort of vendor support contract.

  • ...Mr. Shander was named Red Hat’s permanent chief financial officer in April 2017 after a stint as acting CFO...

    And he said to himself "I can get away with anything [youtu.be]." Just on this limited information, sounds like he tried to pull a Weinstein. And since when does someone in technology get a permanent position?

    • Permanent in this context only means he was hired as the regular person doing the job. "Acting CFO" means he had not been hired to do the job on a regular basis; eg, he was a temp.

      Permanent is a direct synonym for regular in this context. It only means non-temp.

  • And so it begins: squeezing the life out of Redhat until all that remains is a withered husk. SOP for IBM, and all acquistions for that matter, but especially IBM. Not that Redhat doesn't deserve it.

    • Dude joined in 2015. It might be a little much to call him the "life of Redhat."
      • Yah, Redhat got a lot of dorks in recently, including Jim the CEO. No connection with or clue whatsoever about the community, just your stock anally retentive pencil pusher who values process over engineering. Grief.

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