Red Hat Tries on a McKinsey Cap in Quest To Streamline Techies' Jobs (theregister.com) 56
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"
"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"
Re:This is a smokescreen... (Score:5, Informative)
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RedHat just had a huge PR nightmare with their woke DEI stuff. They need a way to get rid of it without saying they're getting rid of it.
Hiring a bunch of consultants to "streamline jobs" is the way to have a politically correct excuse for focusing on merit again. DEI disappears without a ripple in the HR dept.
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RedHat just had a huge PR nightmare with their woke DEI stuff. They need a way to get rid of it without saying they're getting rid of it.
Hiring a bunch of consultants to "streamline jobs" is the way to have a politically correct excuse for focusing on merit again. DEI disappears without a ripple in the HR dept.
I didn't know they had a PR issue. But PR issue vs an actual issue caused by so-called "woke DEI stuff" are two different things. The vast majority of people railing against this perceived issue can't even define what that means. Ironically, Ron DeSantis has given the best definition [fox13news.com] via his lawyers.
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Well, the PR issue exposed their illegal racist hiring practices. Legal liability is an actual issue.
And, it's pretty simple - you can't discriminate against people based on their race. You're not allowed to exclude candidates from consideration based on their skin color.
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I mean its probably fine for a big useless company like IBM to hire people based on race and gender instead of skill level. The majority of cis white people were useless there too. Least they have good diversity metrics while they circle the drain into irrelevance in the industry.
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In theory this sounds admirable. In practice it just results in for example: underqualified female workers being picked over qualified men because they are "underrepresented". yes this still seems fair to some people. and those people are happy. and good for them.
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Qualified minorities succeed on merit.
DEI sets up a system of incentives that introduces unqualified minorities, and make all of us minorities look bad.
That may not be the *intent*, but it is the *consequence*.
Too many people truly believe that systems always work as they are intended.
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I mean its probably fine for a big useless company like IBM to hire people based on race and gender instead of skill level. The majority of cis white people were useless there too. Least they have good diversity metrics while they circle the drain into irrelevance in the industry.
Since you are mentioning worthless employees ... then I guess DEI actually stands for Didn't Earn It ?
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I see what you did there.
I like coffee too :)
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NewSpeak (Score:3)
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"?
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I have a hunch it's the same old "more with less" crap.
Re: NewSpeak (Score:2)
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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
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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
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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.
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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)
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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..."
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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)
"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.
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"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)
And now this. I feel so sorry for Red Hat, and also for Cygnus and other teams they swallowed.
R.I.P.
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Re:Never really was a good company. (Score:3)
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
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Red Hat - We make Microsoft look good and Oracle look cheap!!! Deprecating software by removing one useful feature at a time.
Re: Never really was a good company. (Score:1)
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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.
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Legal Problems (Score:2)
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!
Boeing as an example (Score:2)
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)
Once you hear "McKinsey" (Score:5, Informative)
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".
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There's a long string of failures at McKinsey's "guidance".
KcKinsey is such a colossal cluster, John Oliver did an entire entertaining episode about them. [youtube.com]
Big Changes Coming (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
Whole lotta words... (Score:2)
... just to say "you're fucked"
Take the money and run ... (Score:2)
... 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)
IBM (Score:2)
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Well, this is a good time to find a different distro. SUSE has an enterprise distro, I'm sure there are others. https://www.techtarget.com/sea... [techtarget.com] And if you don't need an "enterprise level distro" (which is basically a promise of support) then there are plenty of other options. I, personally, prefer Debian. https://distrowatch.com/ [distrowatch.com]
Re: IBM (Score:2)
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I was looking at alternatives to Kubuntu; Fedora seemed like a good choice until IBM bought Red Hat.
Bailed on that for OpenSUSE.
If McKinsey Shows Up, Your Company Is Fscked (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
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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"
McKinsey? Obligatory John Oliver (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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"Capable of anything; culpable for nothing"