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Businesses IBM Red Hat Software

Red Hat Tries on a McKinsey Cap in Quest To Streamline Techies' Jobs (theregister.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Mutterings of alarm are emerging from the cloisters of Red Hat after the world's largest management consultancy was hired to help the IBM subsidiary focus engineers on their highest-value work. Red Hat confirmed the partnership with McKinsey & Company to The Reg, sharing this extract from an email from CTO Chris Wright to the Global Engineering Team:

"Hey everyone -- as I mentioned during the recent Q1 All Hands, my goal is to have Global Engineering recognized as the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization. This team is already doing amazing work, and we have several initiatives in progress to help us achieve the goal I've set. One of those is a partnership with McKinsey. The objective of this project is to help us understand and incorporate learnings on working models, development practices, and tooling from across the software industry.

"We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]. This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work â" to make your job better. The work with McKinsey is one piece of the overall plan to help us become the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization"
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Red Hat Tries on a McKinsey Cap in Quest To Streamline Techies' Jobs More

Red Hat Tries on a McKinsey Cap in Quest To Streamline Techies' Jobs

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  • NewSpeak (Score:3)

    by frank_adrian314159 ( 469671 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:16AM (#64353374) Homepage

    This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work to make your job better.

    Is this the latest corporate euphemism for "Mo metrics, mo better"?

    • I have a hunch it's the same old "more with less" crap.

      • It's McKinsey. So, anything unique will be homogenized; anything fun will be streamlined; anything good will be downsized. It's what they do.

      • Yes, but...

        This is Redhat we're taking about here. How much have they dumped into Wayland? It's so far taken 15 years to not replace the supposedly sucky X11 system despite that having been on life support for a decade.

        And it's not replaced it because of the opinionated zeal with which it is developed where the main arguments for why Wayland doesn't do an important thing that users need a desktop to do is yelling about how that's out of scope, against the security model, and failing that something that the

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rahmrh ( 939610 )

          Developers are always the "smartest" guys in the room. Just ask them and they will confirm it.

          They are so "smart" typically they disreguard all prior knowledge/code/parctices as wrong or poorly though out and/or unneeded because they know a "smarter" way.

          Often these "smart" guys go all in arguing against anything they believed was wrong even when give evidence that they were full of crap.

          The developers that act this way (and there are a lot of them) are piss poor developers. At least 90% of the devs see

          • Jesus dude, you're giving me flashbacks to my last job!

            I am not kidding that's a perfect description of way way too many developers I know.

            Don't forget the need to demonstrate their smarts by building the most over complex towering edifice imaginable.

            Also the arguing thing means arguing every last point to the death no matter how trivial. I swear half the time their pull requests get past code review when the reviewers just give up.

    • This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work to make your job better.

      Is this the latest corporate euphemism for "Mo metrics, mo better"?

      The wording makes me think it's exactly the opposite as the first glance would make you think. It'll be used to eliminate anyone not fully engaged with mundane bullshit, so that they can have fully engaged people working harder on the mundane bullshit. That's how corporate speak works.

  • Perfect example (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maineman ( 10367584 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:17AM (#64353376)
    Here we have management not telling their employees what they are thinking or doing and expecting a bunch of sweet talk to keep their employess happy. Does anyone else cringe at how stupid corporate culture and managers can be? It would be interesting to hear what expertise McKinsey brings "from across the software industry"!. Go with experts, not authorities.

    • I was thinking that perhaps RedHat could offer other companies advice about software... but this kind of makes me wonder. Is RedHat basically telling its customers, "We're no longer the experts..."

    • Cringe? Nah. I participate in our weekly bullshit bingo and get my free lunch from when I win again.

      Never enter a management meeting without a bullshit bingo card in hand.

  • The lesson to learn (Score:4, Informative)

    by VampireByte ( 447578 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:21AM (#64353384) Homepage

    "We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]..."

    In other words, if you complain then we send in the layoff experts. Thus, you should have just shut up and smiled.

    • "We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]..."

      In other words, if you complain then we send in the layoff experts. Thus, you should have just shut up and smiled.

      Yup. Sounds eerily similar to our last all hands results at Gateway before they started closing down entire divisions and selling the rest. "You people whine too much. We're moving to a better culture. Bye."

  • Once great company (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dragisha ( 788 ) <dragisha@m 3 w . org> on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:21AM (#64353386)

    And now this. I feel so sorry for Red Hat, and also for Cygnus and other teams they swallowed.

    R.I.P.

    • Yeah, id make a joke about it becoming the new IBM, but well its been IBM for a while both figuratively and literally.
    • Honestly, they were never really great. Back before "RHAS" and "RHEL" there was regular old Red Hat Linux. That was a bit janky (Debian and others were always better) but much much better than the Fedora-spawned garbage they have become.

      It's not just the OS that's a giant pile of shitty corporate tools (Satellite, I'm looking at you). It's not just that they've always tried to nickel & dime everyone every time for their development and test machines. It's not just their crappy license games, their ch

      • Red Hat - We make Microsoft look good and Oracle look cheap!!! Deprecating software by removing one useful feature at a time.

      • You sound a lot like somebody who rubs most folks the wrong way. Arrogant to the extreme.
        • Perhaps. However, if you came out and gave all my engineers a good "talking down to" on technology we specifically didn't like or want, then threatened to sue me like Red Hat did, I'd arrogantly throw you out, too. I'd probably laugh about it later, too, like I'm still doing at Red Hat.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Whether Debian was always better or not depended on what you were doing. But when Red Hat cancelled the professional edition, I moved to Debian immediately. I've rarely had any regrets, and when I did it caused me to try out Mandrake or Ubuntu or ...well, just about anything but Red Hat. The abrupt "we don't want you as a customer" left a rather bad taste in my mouth.

        • Did you remember their "Workstation Edition" right after they hit Red Hat 9.0 ? I never tried that, but it was an interesting idea they never put much energy into. I also had a lot of run ins with Red Hat Cluster Suite (RHCS) and that was often pretty nasty. It's just a hodge podge of open source HA clustering tools glued together without much engineering or vision as to how it was supposed to work. Give me Service Guard or VCS any day over RHCS.

  • BigBlueHat has some serious legal problems [aboutblaw.com].

    I don't see how anybody receiving Federal money can spend money on their products without also violating the Civil Rights Act.

    "Don't hire too many Asians"? In tech? Come on, now.

    Free association in the private market, I guess. Skokie and such.

    P.S. Asians are kindly welcome to be Debian contributors!

  • In this case, they are sending in the "business" experts to "guide" engineering. Isn't that what happened at Boeing?

  • This like means one thing: (Score:5, Informative)

    by Smonster ( 2884001 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:45AM (#64353428)
    Here come more layoffs.

  • Once you hear "McKinsey" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:57AM (#64353478)

    Fire up your job search extra hard. About all McKinsey knows to say is "I dunno, fire some people or raise prices or reduce spending?"

    They don't "know" the industries they consult about. Famously McKinsey told AT&T that cell phones were a bust and no one would get them. When GM consulted with them, they completely screwed the pooch in ways that folks in the know knew were stupid, but McKinsey *claimed* it was GM's fault for not following their advice closely enough. There's a long string of failures at McKinsey's "guidance".

  • Big Changes Coming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @11:04AM (#64353496) Journal
    Companies hire consultants like McKinsey when they want to make big controversial changes. Things like selling off assets, closing subsidiaries, or major layoffs. Full time executives don't want to take the blame for such major changes, so they outsource the decision to a consultant to take the blame. The consultant then moves on with a fat check.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      Especially true since McKinsey's former only other selling point, "being able to turn some already-decided-upon bullet point into a lengthy prose text that claims to blazon MBA wisdom", is now easily replaced with a simple ChatGPT prompt to do the same.
    • I have also been through this with a couple of companies that thought they were not making the money that they should be making and basically didn't know what to do or how to run the company in a better way. These companies all ultimately folded after trying to take the advice from the consultants who of course knew even less about the company than the executives.

      So it is either
      Option A: The executives hired McKinsey with a plan that will likely destroy the organization as we know it
      Option B: The ex

  • ... just to say "you're fucked"

  • ... if they offer you a severance package to join the first ones out. Mc Kinsey on premises is a red alert, no matter what they say they're doing.

    Red Hat is getting ready for its final clean out.

  • Excuse (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @01:22PM (#64353946)
    McKinsey is basically a way that management deflects responsibility. When what they do goes wrong, they say "we followed the advice of the experts". If you need consultants to tell you how to do your job, you should be laid off because you are redundant or incompetent. If you want your people to "focus on their highest value work", you do not need consultants. You need to stop asking them to do meaningless busy work. The employees know or should know what is important, they do not need a consultant to tell them that. If they do not know, it is because management has failed to communicate what the company is trying to do. This looks like using a consultant (at high cost) as an excuse for not fixing the issues with senior management.
  • I wish IBM did not own RedHat. I almost want to stop using Fedora because it is tied to Red Hat which is tied to IBM.

  • If McKinsey Shows Up, Your Company Is Fscked (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @04:51PM (#64354520) Homepage Journal

    John Oliver on Last Week Tonight did a whole show on McKinsey. The service they actually provide, as has been noted earlier in these comments, is a way for management to deflect responsibility for what they were always planning to do, anyway, which is usually budget cuts and layoffs, and/or massive boosts to executive pay packages.

    Here's the show. [youtu.be]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by haruchai ( 17472 )

      Ah you beat me to it; I didn't see your comment until after I submitted mine.
      the closing line of that video is terrific: "We're McKinsey: Capable of anything & culpable for nothing"

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