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.
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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I do have to acknowledge that this was an impressive amount of effort,
even if there's some dispute over that Rule of Acquisition.
Some sources tell me that Rules of Acquisition #4 is as quoted,
while others have #4 remaining unknown.
Some sources cite a closely related Rules of Acquisition #108:
A woman wearing clothes is like a man without any profits.
Somewhere there must be a still unnumbered Rule of Acquisition reading:
Confuse the enemy by never letting them know the true Rules of Acquisition.
Re:Shat did he do? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm almost more inclined to say that it's actually true that he did in fact do something inappropriate just because nothing more is being said about it.
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He leaves no question what he thinks of the company.
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He may have had a Biden-moment with one of his female subordinates.
It couldn't have been a Trump-moment because those have no repercussions.
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And Biden-moment does?
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if I wrote down any he'd have (legitimate) grounds for libel
He's a US person, not British. You'd only have to worry about libel if you were lying, not if you were speculating, or if you claimed to have secret knowledge. Saying horrible things when you obviously don't know if they're true, that's protected speech.
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Defend Stallman?
This is the funniest and silliest comment of the various speculative ones, we've got a bunch of other exciting comments. How about we also put in some (semi) normal ones
Hiring Issues (Score:2)
RedHat need to openly source a new CFO.
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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
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"sexual assault affirming judges"
I assume this means any judge who doesn't finish an accuser's first sentence of "I accuse him of..." with "Guilty!"
I'll be over here preferring concepts that have -some logical possibility- of reflecting reality, and not a self-contradictory knowing habitual lie.
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You misspelled "judges that remember the murder of Emmett Till and why lynch mobs and witch hunts are bad".
Re:He misbehaved? (Score:5, Insightful)
He will certainly sue for his four million dollars, and it will be up to Red Hat to prove he was fired for cause and so that red hat could save 4 million dollars.
If he did something illegal, financial or sexual hanky panky, he will most certainly NOT sue. He will be most happy to sweep it under a carpet, and let it rest. A lawsuit could bring in some pesky federal prosecutors in who will start snooping around.
4 million dollars is chump change for a guy like this anyway.
Re: He misbehaved? (Score:2)
âoeUh, itâ(TM)s âShiaâ(TM) Diamond,â the singer responded. âoePut that on the record. Yes honey, itâ(TM)s violence to misgender or to alter a name of a trans person so letâ(TM)s always get that right first.â
Pay attention to the source. The Washington Times is a well known ultra-leftwing pro-liberal outlet with a primarily transsexual audience.
Mx. Diamond represents the WasTim's core values and beliefs, so they are letting hir be heard, but I don't think they act
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your comment scares the everliving fuck out of me
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âoeUh, itâ(TM)s âShiaâ(TM) Diamond,â the singer responded.
Now say it three times, fast.
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Or maybe he did something serious and you should not speculate that every case in the world is automatically the most ridiculous outcome.
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This is a summary of your usual logic: some rando somewhere on the internet said something you don't like therefore no one is ever guilty of sexual assault.
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If you're arguing from ignorance, then you know you might be defending a sexual predator. And you choose to do so freely, you don't mind.
Disgusting.
What you know is that you don't know the reason. You don't know if the other person knows the reason.
If you think the accusation is premature, say so. But in that case, defence against an accusation is also premature.
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she was not able to provide any additional details about how Shander broke the company’s workplace standards
So why do you say you know the reason? Do you have inside information? Right now I see you and Serviscope claiming sexual assault - and there is no information about WHY he was dismissed. The accusation is premature, and that's why I wrote what I wrote - you're jumping to conclusions, and people who do that often do it as a form of projection...
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Why do you think I said I know the reason?
Is it
A) because you're stupid,
B) because you type out a response without reading, or
C) because you're aliterate and constitutionally incapable of reading complete sentences?
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It had better be egregious behavior (Score:2)
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'.
Re:It had better be egregious behavior (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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], "
Re:It had better be egregious behavior (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It had better be egregious behavior (Score:4, Funny)
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Then why the fuck don't you tell us what's happening?
What part of "Anonymous" "Coward" is unclear?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Anonymous Coward asking us to trust them? Nice try.
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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
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Neither here nor there (Score:2)
Re:Neither here nor there (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Neither here nor there (Score:1)
The issue with pulsesudio is that it was pushed everywhere like crazy while it was unknown, unfinished and buggy. It's still buggy.
But it didn't fundamentally changed the system and actually provided improvement over the existing situation for end users.
Systemd had the same issues, but none of the advantages. It was adopted en masse because it makes distro maintainers' work easier, without consideration for the end users.
And since when is the user base an argument for quality?
Re:Neither here nor there (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I see it is they asked him to write a modern init system that makes it simpler for maintainers to maintain,
Because redhat employees were shitty at writing init scripts.
and is event driven to suit the changing view that computers are no longer static boxes on a fixed network and location in a fixed state
Genuinely not a problem before.
and they gave him a job after the wrote an audio daemon that is also able to dynamically cope with system change and was deemed good enough that it was adopted by every distro.
Pulseaudio was adopted because ALSA didn't do the things it needed to do at the time. Now it does, but we're still stick with Pulseaudio. The right answer was to contribute the mixing technology to ALSA. Instead Lennart NIH'd.
The result was an init system that was adopted not only by Red Hat, but by several other distros, some of which were actively developing their own inhouse init system at the time,
First, appeal to popularity is a fallacy. Second, they wound up using it because it became mandatory to support other packages, like GNOME. Only now we have alternatives so we don't need it for that either.
I mean there's only been some 15 projects attempting to replace sysvinit over the past 10 years.
And what all of them had in common was that you could install only the init system, and didn't have to take on a bunch of other bullshit. Because that's the Unix way.
I'd be happy to discuss this with you over video conference, now that I no longer need to bust out a fucking config file to get sound because I dare plug a USB audio headset into my Linux laptop.
That wasn't a problem for me, but whatever. Sorry to hear you couldn't understand ALSA.
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For something as fundamental as an init system, I wish it had some time to be tested. It was foisted on people as "you will use this on your job, or you won't have a job."
The biggest problems with systemd is that it was never audited, never tested, found to have remote root exploits, and run as this huge code blob that has all but kernel privs. In reality, it should have been made into separate modules, all running at the least privilege, and none of them needing the ability to receive communications.
Yes,
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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"?
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No, if you ever learn English you'll find that was actually said was that permission shouldn't be, and in the US is not, something that you would need to seek in order to engage in a private activity like buying a company, or merging two companies.
Instead, if there is some reason that it is unlawful in a particular case, it is up to the government to sue the companies to prevent the sale or merger.
It is a basic difference in the level of Freedom that people experience in their financial lives.
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You thought an organizational mission statement was some sort of literally true controlling language?
That's absurd.
But even in that context, "prevent" is a bit abstract there. It doesn't imply that everybody needs their permission to do anything, it implies that they believe their enforcement efforts will prevent future abuses. It is more literally true that they don't directly attempt to prevent anything, like most regulatory and policing agencies they enforce laws or regulations once they become aware of
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It seems like a good idea from their point of view, but god only knows why because it is at the core of corruption everywhere.
You don't need a deity to explain it, you merely have to notice that that is how things are done in their country, and to suggest it might be done otherwise turns a person into a ghola [wikipedia.org].
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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.
Re: Neither here nor there (Score:1)
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...
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Re: Neither here nor there (Score:1)
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
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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
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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
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Lost me at the SJW (standard 4chan rhetoric)
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Even a child understands this. What's your excuse?
Children do not have irrational hate.
It takes years and years of self-destructive philosophy and cognitive dissonance to cultivate the particular flavor of mental illness necessary for blind, irrational hatred.
And so there are layer upon layer of pathetic excuses, intertwined over years of suffering. Don't expect a simple, clear excuse.
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No. When I say up, I do not mean down.
Don't be an idiot. I made a clear statement. If you claim to take the opposite from you, I have to suspect you simply disagree, and are lying about it and instead claiming that you didn't understand. Which is pathetic.
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Any production Linux other than RedHat's offering (Score:1)
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.
"permanent CFO" you gotta be kidding (Score:2)
...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?
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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 (Score:2)
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.
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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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Or maybe this person deceived IBM as to the financial condition of RedHat.
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