From Software Developer To CEO: Red Hat's Matt Hicks On His Journey To the Top (zdnet.com) 17
ZDNet's Stephanie Condon spoke with Red Hat's new CEO, Matt Hicks, a veteran of the company that's been working there for over 14 years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from their discussion: Matt Hicks, Red Hat's new CEO, doesn't have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company's new leader, Hicks says. "The markets are changing really quickly," he tells ZDNet. "And just having that intuition -- of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering -- I know that's intuition that I'll lean on... Around that, there's a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition."
Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference -- they really start to define people's careers."
Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier -- then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO -- moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...] "As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge," writes Condon. "Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It's working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and it's partnering with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025."
"There'll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that," Hicks says. "And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries -- because it's newer, and it's evolving."
Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference -- they really start to define people's careers."
Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier -- then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO -- moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...] "As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge," writes Condon. "Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It's working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and it's partnering with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025."
"There'll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that," Hicks says. "And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries -- because it's newer, and it's evolving."
You can't just be the best coder in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career.
Captain obvious CEO...
Re:You can't just be the best coder in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
I never aspired to become a manager or CEO (I've done some management and it sucked. Also, I'm just not very good at it). And early on in my career, I focused solely on technical stuff, because that's where my strengths lie. But a few years in, after doing some in-company soft skills training, I realised that while I still don't like soft skills very much and that I will never really be any good at them, training them up a little has made me a far better engineer. It has also increased my enjoyment of my work, because even doing the crappy parts of the job is nicer when you're at least somewhat competent at them.
Re: You can't just be the best coder in the room (Score:3)
I just got hired at a top tier company, and they required giving a presentation as part of the interview process.
Re: (Score:3)
There is nothing wrong being "just" the best coder in the room. You like coding, you don't like being a CEO or a top manager, good for you.
I've known a few people who had a decent claim to best coder in the room, they could deliver really solid code in a short deal of time.
But the ones who were best also had the communication and interpersonal skills to communicate to explain their ideas to others. They had a lot of support when they thought something needed to be done (or not done), and some of their effectiveness rubbed off on others.
The few who didn't really work well with others. They might have been delivering good code, but they seemed t
I learned what I didn't do well, and I'm glad (Score:2)
I learned a couple skills that made my work much more pleasant. The same skills just happened to also make my paycheck much bigger.
Since I was in about second grade, I've really enjoyed programming, and learning about programming. While other kids played video games, I was learning how to write a simple hangman game. Other people learned to play guitar, I learned relational algebra for databases.
In most rooms, I may well be the worst singer, worst athlete, and best coder. Sometimes by far.
It could get REALL
"Build impactful partnerships" eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy sure picked up the marketing rah-rah in a hurry. He's CEO material alright.
Re: (Score:3)
They have a systemd module for that.
Can he rein in the exciting powerpoints? (Score:2, Interesting)
The CentOS "let's merge with the volunteers, turn them into our beta testing platform, and break the whole reason for their existence", along with driving out the head of CentOS, Karanbir Singh, was one kind of stupid. CentOS is dead. No one has a use for it anymore, since it's no longer even remotely stable.
Compelling clients to "suck by stream" by hiding the point releases they all use internally for build stability was another.
Hiding the devel packages used to compile uttilities like Samba, even they the
How unusual (Score:2)
Someone who actually knows what it's about running the company. As opposed, say, to the former head of an airline (Delta), who I'm *sure* knew all about... MBA, and not one thing about software, or operating systems, and who killed CentOS.
Let's hope the new guy fixes things.
Re: How unusual (Score:1)
Unimpressed with Red Hat these days (Score:2)
As Red Hat, now IBM, became more corporate, it's products because worse.
JMHO.
Re: Unimpressed with Red Hat these days (Score:1)
The From Software makes the title funnily ambigiou (Score:2)
It can be read as a developer from From Software talking to the CEO about the Red Hat's Matt Hicks Journey's To the Top
Elden Ring is a great stepping stone to Linux ceo (Score:1)