Red Hat Forced To Hire Cheaper, Less Senior Engineers Amid Budget Freeze (theregister.com) 133
Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. The Register reports: An internal email sent on Wednesday by Timothy Cramer, SVP of software engineering, to Red Hat managers directs hiring requisitions to be made at a lower level of seniority than usual. "All new plan reqs should be opened at a level below senior (e.g., Associate Software Engineer or Software Engineer)," the message says. "While this change allows us to use our budget more effectively, it also helps us balance the organization as we have many engineers with senior titles. We recognize that this will mean we need to plan for training and mentoring, promotions, and internal mobility as well, and we are here to support you in that."
The hiring budget update also says that current requisitions and backfills -- positions vacated that need to be filled -- should be offered at a reduced level. "All current reqs and future backfills will be down-leveled by one level by default (e.g., Senior Software Engineer to Software Engineer)," the memo explained. [...] Our source expressed concern that this decision, which applies to new hires, will harm the company. If Red Hat is unable to offer competitive pay or hire senior people, our source suggested, that's likely to limit the company's access to talent and to make it more difficult to retain existing skilled employees. "The best talent wants to work with other like-minded and skilled people," our source said.
The hiring budget update also says that current requisitions and backfills -- positions vacated that need to be filled -- should be offered at a reduced level. "All current reqs and future backfills will be down-leveled by one level by default (e.g., Senior Software Engineer to Software Engineer)," the memo explained. [...] Our source expressed concern that this decision, which applies to new hires, will harm the company. If Red Hat is unable to offer competitive pay or hire senior people, our source suggested, that's likely to limit the company's access to talent and to make it more difficult to retain existing skilled employees. "The best talent wants to work with other like-minded and skilled people," our source said.
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, they got purchased by IBM.
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In other words, they got purchased by IBM.
yup, my thoughts exactly. IBM isn't supporting Linux internally - legacy product road maps used to include linux, but no longer. If they aren't supporting RedHat or Linux internally, why should they support it anywhere else?
Re:LOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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What a mess.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
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There goes the neighborhood (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not corporate ownership. The problem is that when it comes to engineering, there is nothing more expensive than cheap engineers. The engineers who can get a job done well have first a choice of which company they want to work for and get compensated well.
You lower your compensation enough, and you get two pools left. Pool one is engineers who are for some reason in love with your company and the field and are willing to work for peanuts. Pool two is monkeys. Guess which pool is bigger.
And those monkeys you hire for your peanuts? They will cost you your ship. They will be more expensive than you can ever imagine, their cost coming in low productivity, failing products, lost sales and damaged reputation.
Re:There goes the neighborhood (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not corporate ownership. The problem is that when it comes to engineering, there is nothing more expensive than cheap engineers.
And that is exactly it: Cheap engineers are exceptionally expensive, because they cause more problems than they solve and may even completely destroy your product because they do not understand what is important. In fact, cheap engineers usually have massive _negative_ productivity, i.e. it is better to hire nobody than to hire them. One thing MBA-morons do not understand. I have seen this effect in action multiple times, including some projects that fortunately failed before the completely crap code produced could go into production. I have also earned quite a bit of money fixing some things screwed up by cheap engineers, at a much, much higher rate, of course.
Re:There goes the neighborhood (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is exactly it: Cheap engineers are exceptionally expensive, because they cause more problems than they solve and may even completely destroy your product because they do not understand what is important.
Kind of. Cheap can be just junior or can be cheap & nasty. Junior engineers aren't a problem if they have decent senior engineers to mentor them and keep things level. In fact the only way of getting a brand new senior engineer is to start with a junior and train them. Good juniors can be great, and often beginning of the career can be the only time they're available on the open job market.
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It depends on whether there's a path for them to go beyond junior engineer. I have been at a company where they care merely about 'cheap', and on multiple occasions we lucked into great people that were early in their career. Lots of potential, but also a lot of investment in helping them learn things. Then when they had a good resume going, the company would never promote them and they had no choice but to go elsewhere.
The requirement is that low cost hires must be in the cards, but also high cost hires t
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Indeed. And the job market for good engineers in the CS/IT space is pretty good these days. Usually you do not even have to look for a new job, the offers will come to you.
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That _can_ work, but it needs a specific corporate culture and very careful hiring. After all, you need to hire people that have the definite potential to become good senior engineer.s If you primarily hire "cheap", that is unlikely to happen. If you have all senior people that resent the new "junior" people because they threaten their jobs, that is not good either.
My take is that Red Hat is done for in the longer run, because the IBM fuckups will decide after a year or so that nothing bad happened (and tha
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That has been true in my experience. For example, I'm a senior (mechanical) engineer and lost my job in the 2009 crash. My boss referred me to a company looking to hire in spite of the bad economy (a lot of local government work). But after the interview they said they were looking to hire younger, less senior position. Two months later they ca
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I think this is in general why most professions/trades have some sort of structure in place beyond just being a worker. The skills/development/technical area is hard for outsiders to grasp. Trades have their own system (apprentice, journeyman...). Lawyers, doctors, and nurses have various restrictions on who can own things, practice, unions. Traditional engineering firms have a professional association; many are employee owned or cooperatives.
The problem is hardly 'MBAs'. MBAs and business people are in eve
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Well, it certainly is the case that the "MBAs" do not get enough push-back and that the IT/CS/Coding field has abysmally failed to make itself a solid engineering field so far. So there is definitely blame to go around. On the other hand, other engineering fields also needed a century or two before they could consistently do a good job and knew how to keep wannabees out. Sure, there is the occasional bad engineering failure. But usually established engineering disciplines are doing a good job and it is easy
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In this case it's not consulting (Score:2)
It's core RHEL systems engineering for a key product. It's a terrible idea to hire low quality labor in that area. As mentioned before, they can have negative productivity.
If they want to hire juniors for something like this, they ought to pay the highest for the best juniors, and be ready to promote them quickly. But those people are going to FAANGS and well funded startups.
Re: There goes the neighborhood (Score:2)
Seriously, I expect its nothing more sinister than a senior exec waking up one day, looking at the red hat org chart and wondering why they have a 10:1 ratio of "senior" software engineers to plain old "software engineers" or even "associate software engineers" - it can not be the case that EVERY issue requires a Senior Software Engineer, an, as noted in previous comment, where do you think Senior Software Engineers come from? From associate and plain old software engineers that have proven their talent and
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The problem is not corporate ownership. The problem is that when it comes to engineering, there is nothing more expensive than cheap engineers.
And that is exactly it: Cheap engineers are exceptionally expensive, because they cause more problems than they solve and may even completely destroy your product because they do not understand what is important. In fact, cheap engineers usually have massive _negative_ productivity, i.e. it is better to hire nobody than to hire them. One thing MBA-morons do not understand. I have seen this effect in action multiple times, including some projects that fortunately failed before the completely crap code produced could go into production. I have also earned quite a bit of money fixing some things screwed up by cheap engineers, at a much, much higher rate, of course.
Presently watching this happen to the company I work for. Slowly outsourcing to India and then earlier this year "we're gutting the US and UK based teams". Customer service has been on the slide for ages, but took a nose dive after that with tickets being ignored or shuffled around queues as no-one knows how (or wants) to work them. The Indian staff don't want to ask for help on record (I.E. Email or IM) as that will show that they are incompetent and as long as they can keep their stats up by shuffling tic
Re: There goes the neighborhood (Score:2)
This isn't about outsourcing, its about hiring a few talented people for less than absolute top dollar and letting them grow and learn your company's methods and practices.
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In other words, they got purchased by IBM.
The scenario you describe to avoid is precisely IBM's playbook. Coast on historically valued brand at cut-rate costs to yourself but charging premiums to customers. Sure, the brands get eroded, but as an exec if you play your cards right that's somebody else's problem in the future, and in the meantime you are greatly enriched.
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> there is nothing more expensive than cheap engineers.
Esconced "principal architects" who insist on bad habits, having risen on their sound skills to a level of inompetence where they cannot be overruled, can be even more damaging. They teach very dangerous habits to the younger engineers, habits like "the code itself is the only documentation".
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What is actually happening: continued and accelerating shift in the data center from RHEL to Ubuntu.
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Booted before end of vesting period, he must have been a colossal fuckup.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, they got purchased by IBM.
Yes, and now they are being destroyed by IBM executives with Harvard business degrees and 'innovative business models' ... kind of like Boeing.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Never have business people "lead" a tech company. They just do not understand how things work and that in tech companies the most important job of the "leadership" is to not get in the way.
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Indeed. Never have business people "lead" a tech company. They just do not understand how things work and that in tech companies the most important job of the "leadership" is to not get in the way.
It really needs to be a two way street. I've worked with companies where the techies were so in love with their product they failed to see the market was moving away from it and thus refused to adjust. Then they wondered why they went out of business. There is a balance that needs to be established.
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It really needs to be a two way street. I've worked with companies where the techies were so in love with their product they failed to see the market was moving away from it and thus refused to adjust. Then they wondered why they went out of business. There is a balance that needs to be established.
No argument. But observing the market and its demands is not "leadership". It is just something that needs to be done as well. The "leadership" task here is to make sure good people are in both roles and that they actually talk to each other. And if, and only if, they cannot agree on a strategy, then there needs to be an executive decision as a last resort. But executives making such decisions really is an indication of leadership failure. If things work right, the executives just sign off on what the actua
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It really needs to be a two way street. I've worked with companies where the techies were so in love with their product they failed to see the market was moving away from it and thus refused to adjust. Then they wondered why they went out of business. There is a balance that needs to be established.
No argument. But observing the market and its demands is not "leadership". It is just something that needs to be done as well. The "leadership" task here is to make sure good people are in both roles and that they actually talk to each other. And if, and only if, they cannot agree on a strategy, then there needs to be an executive decision as a last resort. But executives making such decisions really is an indication of leadership failure. If things work right, the executives just sign off on what the actual experts decided.
Exactly. The problem is far too often the techies think the suits are clueless and vice versa. If that's the case, failure is not only an option, but a likely result.
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In other words, they got purchased by IBM.
Yes, and now they are being destroyed by IBM executives with Harvard business degrees and 'innovative business models' ... kind of like Boeing.
I was waiting for the Boeing reference, because it is spot on. MBA's and accountants making lead technology and engineering decisions based on shareholder value, not on technology or engineering.
That works for a very short time, then you have the 737 Max and Starliner as the almost inevitable result
While there are exceptions, like junior engineers coming in and being so competent they make an immediate positive impact, and some not so competent seniors that managed to play games to advance, in general,
Re: LOL (Score:2)
737 Max debacle was nothing more than making optional something that should have been included in the price of the jet, and some questionable training at some sec one-year airlines.
You do realize that the 'fix' for the problem was to install an existing option on the plan that the buyers chose not to include initially?
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737 Max debacle was nothing more than making optional something that should have been included in the price of the jet, and some questionable training at some sec one-year airlines.
You do realize that the 'fix' for the problem was to install an existing option on the plan that the buyers chose not to include initially?
You need to read a little more on the background because there is so much more - the jet was designed with larger engine nacelles that added lift at high angles of attack because Boeing wanted to have a "new jet" quickly and cheaply The larger engines had to go up because there was no more distance to go down - the 737 was already at the point of having the nacelles squared off at the bottom.
They might have increased clearance via the landing gear, but that would have been a large expense.
The MCAS syst
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MBA's and accountants making lead technology and engineering decisions based on shareholder value, not on technology or engineering.
That works for a very short time, then you have the 737 Max and Starliner as the almost inevitable result
A problem is that for good engineering products, this always works for a time. And the MBAs always misunderstand why that is and think they are doing something right. The real reason is that any good engineering product has a lot of redundancy built in. That gives it resilience against the unexpected. Cut that redundancy out one bit at a time and at some point you end up killing 500 people because of a somewhat minor change, because that redundancy is _needed_.
Of course, the absolute crap thing here is that
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MBA's and accountants making lead technology and engineering decisions based on shareholder value, not on technology or engineering.
That works for a very short time, then you have the 737 Max and Starliner as the almost inevitable result
A problem is that for good engineering products, this always works for a time. And the MBAs always misunderstand why that is and think they are doing something right. The real reason is that any good engineering product has a lot of redundancy built in. That gives it resilience against the unexpected. Cut that redundancy out one bit at a time and at some point you end up killing 500 people because of a somewhat minor change, because that redundancy is _needed_.
Of course, the absolute crap thing here is that those at Boeing really responsible for that completely expected mass-murder did not even get punished.
Yup - The people that made the decision to eliminate simulator training, and hide the existence of the MCAS system - they'll probably be promoted soon.
The 737 Max isn't even a bad airplane. It just handles differently because the engine placement makes it a different plane, but the cheap ass criminals at the top demanded that it pretend was a regular 737.
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There are absolutely zero executives from IBM involved at RedHat. Paul Cormier reports directly to the CEO of IBM.
They remain a largely independent entity.
These decisions were taken by Redhat's leadership, not IBMs.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
I love these posters that insist that unless RedHat only hires Senior Software Engineers, their product is doomed and they will soon find themselves out of business.
Wanna bet most of them are "Senior Software Analysts"?
Where do they think " Senior Software Analysts" come from?
Apparently, hiring software engineers right out of college is a bad idea?
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Actually, redhat is well on its way to irrelevance, they currently have .9% server share vs 35% for ubuntu and 15% for Debian, and that too is slip slip slipping away. That's why they had to sell out.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, getting bought was the corporate death sentence for redhat. Just may take a while for the corporate body to fully necrotize. Can't say I'm terribly sad about it, redhat has fucked around with the community a lot. Quite possibly better off without it. There is no shortage of productive homes for good kernel hackers.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
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Anyway Red Hat will find its corporate cultu
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It's 100% IBM's model, though. Have a few expensive consultants that can come in when shit really hits the fan, but otherwise produce a very slow walk to the bottom by hiring lower and lower, but raising the 'consultancy fee' higher and higher, right until the customer can no longer take it, then renegotiate the contract.
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Yes, however it is important that a company doesn't get too top heavy.
1. Advanced Engineers don't want to do the simple stuff. For the Engineer who is ambitious, they want to get better and be put onto more complex and interesting projects. If the company only hires the Best of the Best and Senior Engineers they will all be fighting to get the interesting project, while the really good engineer will feel dejected if they are stuck on the simple stuff. Younger engineers are often intimidated by these b
Re: LOL (Score:2)
Red hat wants to grow and nurture their own Senior Software Engineers - the horror!
This should go well... (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the ETA to redhat support being some dude on an awful VOIP link from Hyderabad whose script only covers running through running a default install?
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Its 'Windows Support' script that dude runs after hours against your grandma that makes all the money.
Re: This should go well... (Score:3)
Does red hat put Senior Software Engineers on their support lines?
Of course not - but glad you got to spew your off-topic, kinda racist offshore tech support dribble on slashdot, you must be tired, why don't you go take a rest?
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Linux is free; but access to expert support is valuable, so we've decided to start chipping away at our internal expertise. How could anything possibly go wrong?
You misunderstand. The support process is now: Hire an IBM consultant to "fix" your "problem". It is working as intended.
Why not ⦠(Score:2)
Hire fewer developers overall ⦠say 1 senior = 2 junior.
Oh, waitâ¦.itâ(TM)s IBM and they need to import more H1Bs instead of hiring local talent.
Once upon a time, people wanted to work for IBMâ¦.
Surprise! (Score:2)
You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
Re:Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)
You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
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You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
And you'll get exactly what you pay for.
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You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
Not really. The good engineers that used to be in Mumbai have higher paying jobs elsewhere. The mediocre ones charge more. Last time I checked, about 2x that. All you can get for $15 is people that cause more problems than they fix and hence have negative productivity.
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For $15/hr you can get telephone support types, actual knowledge costs extra.
Re:Surprise! (Score:5, Interesting)
Managers think they can, and for a lot of companies, that's all that matters.
Not India, but at another company saw management go hard after some other obscure offshoring destination. The issues were obvious, that we were still paying below the target market and some 'recruiters' were basically grifting the company with random high school grads and fabricated academic credentials as made painfully obvious in the technical interviews where we were unable to find a single applicant vaguely qualified. Management's fix? The technical interview facet was discontinued and managers, the candidate, and the recruiter were the only ones involved in the hiring process. The executives declared this strategy was viable and middle-management view was it either had to look like a success or they would get fired.
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Indeed. The arrogance and abysmal stupidity you routinely find in "management", especially in the middle and upper, is legendary. I am convinced that lots of companies survive or do well not because upper and middle management, but despite of it. Lower management is sometimes surprisingly good and if it is not you usually can work around them easily.
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Problem being is that those in charge of a company are largely optimizing for short term gains. The compensation is such that it works better to endanger a company for fat profit and move on to the next plump opportunity or even retire. We had one exec who's resume was full of once great products that failed miserably. He proceeded to launch this hugely ambitious but stupid project and then jumped ship before it launched. That product made about $500,000 in revenue for first time purchasers, with all expr
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Problem being is that those in charge of a company are largely optimizing for short term gains.
Indeed. Extremely perverted incentives and lots of C-levels with zero loyalty to the company. This has to stop.
Anyone you want to hire has other job offers (Score:5, Informative)
You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
I thought this myth died 15 years ago. Nope, sorry buddy, we have a massive office there. We pay relocation if they want to work elsewhere and even offer remote work. We can't hire talented engineers. There are a ton in India, but they're already employed because the labor shortage is global. Anyone with talent is already snagged by Google, Apple, Microsoft, at a higher salary and much better perks. I've been involved in hiring Indians in India for 20 years now. It's a clusterfuck, on a good day.
You can find frauds for that price, or some really really broken individuals. However, competent software engineers cannot be found for that cheap in India. I've had to interview dozens. The resume fraud there is appalling. You write whatever you want on your resume and they know foreigners aren't all that likely to check.
An example...Hmm...20 years of Java and a Master's Degree from IIT. Great, and your resume say your last job, some local company even the my Indian coworkers have never heard of has EVERY buzzword from our job listing?!?!...wow, imagine the luck...OK, so let's have a simple coding test.
Here's an online IDE, 2 classes already written: 1 an empty implementation, 2. a unit test with the expected result. The first unit test: Print the length of each String in this list, feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear....The second is just print the 10 Strings as 1 comma-delimited String
If you've ever written a program of any sort, you know this is a insultingly stupidly easy question. I feel embarrassed asking it. Half our candidates fail it, all of which claim to have worked with Java heavily in the last 10 years. They can't write a loop in Java, a 25yo language. My standard? As long as it works, I don't care how. Our hardest question is build a map from 2 fields from a collection of beans. If you know your way around Java, you can complete the coding in 5 min and let's assume 10-20 min of asking questions, primarily...there's no way your coding test is this stupid, right?...I must be missing something because I've never seen anything so insultingly easy...yet maybe 1/3 of candidates, with senior level Java experience on their resume, can complete it.
My favorite a long time ago was a woman 15 years ago, from India. Had like 5 really impressive Java certifications and like 20 Industry ones between Oracle and Microsoft, and a few others. Her experience was amazing on her resume. She was a VIP rockstar with a masters degree from IIT. I was very excited to interview her. As soon as she walked in, I knew something was off. She looked a bit young for that resume, smelled like she hadn't showered in weeks, and you could see she didn't wash her hair or face...like visually obvious patches of shine all over her face and hair that even the guys noticed. Yeah, it's just looks, but IMO, that's really telling. I know guys are gross, but women typically would at least shower the week of an interview, particularly those who have been working for awhile. It takes weeks of bad hygiene to look and smell like that. It was bad even for Indian standards
So I arrange my chair about 5' further than normal because of the smell and ask her basic questions. "You have 3 Java Web development certifications, that's really nice. Can you tell me the pros and cons of JSPs vs Servlets?" (this was 2005)...her response "I don't know. What are those?" It was on her resume, listed as a bullet point. She claimed to have a Sun Certified Web Component Developer certification in servlets/JSPs. I was embarrassed for her and figured it must be a language barrier issue, so tried rephrasing the question a few different ways, and it was just more awkward. I asked her about her certification. She got nervous. I got out my laptop and looked up her name (you can verify online). She claimed to have taken
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You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
I thought this myth died 15 years ago.
Sorry mate, but the myth endures.
Not that I disagree with the gist of your post. You're quite right that the good Indian engineers are already employed and wont work for peanuts... In fact you'll find a lot of them over here in the UK working legitimately for UK wages (not H1B's or the like, they migrated and hold residency if not citizenship), hence I've always said if you want good Indian engineers, you're better off searching in London than Mumbai.
These facts do not stop managers from being sold an
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If you can sum up IBM at all, it's always short sightedness.
(My relevant creds: I worked for IBM for 15 years, before leaving to join Google.)
The thing you have to remember about IBM is that it is not a technology company, it's a sales and marketing company. It looks like a technology company, because what they sell is technology, and they do have some world-class R&D labs, but their primary asset and strength has always been their sales team, and the deep relationships they cultivate with CIOs and CTOs, etc. Every major corporation in the western world has a
Re: Anyone you want to hire has other job offers (Score:4, Insightful)
So, to be clear, your company hires barely competent software engineers in India because you can't find enough barely competent software engineers in the US?
I suspect if you stopped trying to compete with dot.com companies seeking top talent at top dollar and instead offered fair pay for lower level hires and spent some money on training instead of headhunter placement fees, you'd do better in the long run. There is an endless sea of 50-somethings that find themselves unemployable in IT that could really do some great work with a little help, rather than doing grubhub, Uber, or delivering Amazon packages, but, you know, instead keep hiring barely competent software overseas, and those 50somethings will just keep delivering your orders.
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Yours is an interesting, insightful reply.
But I honestly thought the remark you were replying to (you can hire good, cheap talent in Mumbai) was sarcasm!
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what would you say are your greatest strengths?
I'm really good at making up shit on resumes.
why can't McKinsey hire in Pakistan? (Score:2)
Why do they hire from Harvard & Stanford and pay them so much?
Because in terms of delivering revenue to McKinsey the employees from elite universities are smarter and significantly better at it.
Why we need new categories (Score:2)
You can't hire senior, much less junior engineers for $15 an hour.
You can in Mumbai.
Your comment is modded 5 "Funny". It really should be 5 "Sad".
Penny wise, pound foolish (Score:2)
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Indeed. Looks like RH is a has-been. Will just take a few years to become blatantly obvious. No loss.
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A lot of the quality people left a while ago. I started to notice this when they released a change to BIND in EL7 that broke hundreds of thousands of nameservers worldwide. A community member submitted a patch, but they wouldn't accept it, marking it WONTFIX. It wasn't even a EL point release.
That's when I started to experiment with Debbie Stretch. Since then almost everything that I manage has been moved over to some type of Debian, and the IBM deal only sealed that fate.
I know some ex-Redhaters and this
Re: Penny wise, pound foolish (Score:2)
Oh, if only RedHat offered small companies/users an alternative when they 'killed' free CentOS... Oh wait, they did:
Weâ(TM)re addressing this by expanding the terms of the Red Hat Developer program so that the Individual Developer subscription for RHEL can be used in production for up to 16 systems. Thatâ(TM)s exactly what it sounds like: for small production use cases, this is no-cost, self-supported RHEL. You need only to sign in with a free Red Hat account (or via single sign-on through GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts) to download RHEL and receive updates. Nothing else is required. This isnâ(TM)t a sales program and no sales representative will follow up. An option will exist within the subscription to easily upgrade to full support, but thatâ(TM)s up to you.
So make everything more expensive? (Score:2)
At least for the customers, that is. Red Hat has already make some bad tech decisions (systemd, e.g.), and they now apparently plan to make more and have their customers shoulder the cost by increasing the frequency and severity of issues.
Stupidity of the "save a penny lose a million" variant. Time to move away from Red Hat, if you have not already done so.
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I don't think many people run red hat or fedora at home any more, that ship sailed a while back. But corporates love the corporate pretense side of DeadRat with their support contracts aned help lines etc and of course being owned by IBM doesn't hurt when the C suite do their 5 mins of due diligence before signing a cheque.
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Yes, pretty much. Red Hat is mainly a pain these days when you have to run it. Fortunately, you can still develop on a sane platform and just pull the stuff over for the final testing.
As to the "support", I made the experience in a large enterprise that you had to go through specific "vendor contacts" for Red Hat and that took just far longer than finding and fixing issues yourself. (Fortunately, I needed root permissions for what I was doing there, so I was able to fix things. I was also able to hide stuff
IBM short sightedness (Score:3)
You can bet your ass that the budget will never unfreeze and they'll never restore the necessary levels of budget required to keep something like Redhat going. Development takes real skills, and not the bullshit IBM internal training.
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IBM is only slightly higher up the slow slide to irrelevance than HP but the destination is the same. I imagine in 20 years it'll go bust, be bought up by a chinese conglomerate who'll sack the useless C suite MBAs and relaunch the branch from china.
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IBM will probably eventually sell its mainframe business to HCL in India. HCL is still interested in providing what customers still want in reliability, whereas IBM leadership is trying to turn IBM into Apple, Google or Facebook.
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IBM is only slightly higher up the slow slide to irrelevance than HP but the destination is the same. I imagine in 20 years it'll go bust
People have been saying IBM is 20 years from bust for at least 50 years. I wouldn't bet on it. IBM is still among the best in the world at what it does, which is building strong relationships with IT execs and directors and then using those relationships to sell safe solutions to business problems. If you're evaluating IBM's business products by looking at IBM's technology and technological expertise, you don't understand IBM's business.
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If you can sum up IBM at all, it's always short sightedness.
I'm not sure that's accurate. They are still selling mainframes running COBOL, after all.
Reserve judgement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You nailed that one. Way too many managers are using the economic disruption to scale back wages. I've seen way too many job listings for entry level jobs at entry level wages that require 5 years of experience.
And my kid just landed a job after a year and a half of looking as a Scientist 1 at a lofty $18 an hour. That job officially requires 2 years experience, but they decided to waive the experience requirement because they are a bit short handed. Gee, I wonder why.
IBM should sell Red Hat (Score:2)
IBM cannot afford to maintain Red Hat so it should sell it off while it's still worth buying.
I mean, that's SOP, right? (Score:2)
It's vaguely amusing to me that Red Hat (ergo IBM) seems to want us to think that these somehow aren't standard cost-cutting practices across the industry, and that they've never ever done anything like this to their employees before, pinky promise!
So hey... a show of hands: who here has not seen this crap before?
(crickets chirping...)
Did they ever think of hiring cheaper PHB? (Score:3)
The arrogance of management to think they are all code monkeys and all monkeys are interchangeable, get someone cheap to do the damned coding.
But their mid level management "talent", generic one, transplanting health care mid management to applied math mid management to landscaping supply company mid management to women's clothing midmanagement is somehow imagined to be unique deserving huge stock awards and options and salary and boni.
I'm Shocked! Shocked! (Score:2)
This has been a pattern in industry for a few years. Pass over qualified internal candidates to hire "Senior" positions externally based on impressive backgrounds, and then when the new hires are incapable of producing at that level, make them the junior employees' burdens to mentor/train.
Management doesn't believe the junior employees will quit, but the salary discrepancies in a tech area are going to be too significant to ignore.
This merits market punishment. (Score:2)
Recommend against using Red Hat for the many valid reasons, discourage anyone hoping for positive change, do not reward IBM for sabotaging Red Hat, and do advocate other distros.
Re: (Score:2)
Coincidentally, our marketing has informed us that over the last few months there's been a significant increase in SuSE users among our customers. It's unclear if it's due to more people going SuSE than before or alternatively if we happened to acquire customers who happened to be SuSE users, but would be interesting if someone like SuSE gets a bump up out of this. The possibility is at least nice that if RedHat becomes problematic, there are capable alternatives.
Because that worked so well for Best Buy (Score:2)
Snark aside, you need a mix of both. You need some Eager Young Space Cadets and a few grumpy dinosaurs to tell them why their bright ideas won't work. And to point out why indentation matters.
Tonight's movie feature (Score:2)
Office space.
IBM (Score:2)
I've Been Mismanaged
This makes me wonder how they'll get their h-1bs (Score:2)
Just another way for IBM... (Score:2)
... to weed out older (read: expensive) employees that's not so obviously going to present them with legal problems.
the Boeing effect (Score:2)
He was their first cheap hire (Score:3, Interesting)
No one who comes up the design and implementation of SystemD and treated user bug reports as annoying inconveniences could ever be considered an experienced senior engineer. Hacking together a few half working sub systems beforehand doesn't count.
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And yet all major Linux distros adopted it, and all the rival systems fell by the wayside.
Pottering is an asshat, but nobody else has managed to build anything more compelling. Quite why that is is a matter for debate.
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Herd mentality. When systemd was first released RedHat was the go to corporate distro and all the wannabes followed their lead because whatever they say, few of them really give a damn about the home user or frankly what sysadmins think.
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And yet all major Linux distros adopted it, and all the rival systems fell by the wayside.
Note: his method of writing startup scripts was adopted by many Linux distros. His init system (and other portions) came along for the ride.