A lot of people are panicking at the office and here about many, many layoffs we are looking at with the IBM acquisition, but I think people are overreacting. If anybody is going to face major layoffs, it will be IBM. We are being acquired for a reason, I don't see them gutting us before we can prove we can be useful.
Just my 2 cents.
@8bgm: Simple. IBM only wants RedHat for its cloud capability. It will be subsequently "bluewashed" and ruined when IBM adds it to their existing (and unreliable) cloud infrastructure. Just ask any of the former SoftLayer employees (if any are still with IBM at this point) about that. There is a reason IBM is dying.
Why buy a company with no IP only to lay off the people who actually have the talent then?
Dear @VTljECw,
You don't think it will be that bad for you and your colleagues ! Believe me when I tell you the party is over.
I am not sure if you are old enough to remember a company called Lotus Development Corporation ( of Lotus Notes and Lotus 123 fame) but they were a once vibrant and growing company with a bright future...until IBM Blue Washed them out of exitstence. Google it and weep.
Blue Washing is a gruesome and painful process my friend, for some reason you think Red Hat will be the first company in history NOT to get Blue washed?
The problem is when companies like IBM make acquisitions, ultimately existing upper management cannot keep their hands off it, as in the independence they purport they will have after the merger. The curious snakes will slither in pretending to be allies but in reality trying to escape to what they believe is the safer side, ruin the existing culture, and putting their stakes down. Remember, the goal now is to prop up the IBM name, not RH.
Stodgy old companies like IBM cannot innovate and grow so they have to acquire companies to grow the top line. Since they bought YOU they are obviously the smarter people at the table. Once they implement their methods over the dead bodies of the people who built Red Hat the new company starts to perform as poorly as IBM. Sales and Income plummet and IBM has to go out and acquire MORE companies to make up for the shortfall.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
If you are not in Middle or Upper Management and you are over 40 you need to get out as soon as you can. IBM is ruthless about cutting the heads of anyone over 40. If you are over 50 you have, at best, a year left.
What a previous poster is assuming is that positions will be eliminated outright. What happened to my company after the acquisition by Watson Health was that all the well-connected IBM'ers from other divisions came scrambling over from their respective sinking ships. NONE of them knew anything about healthcare but they replaced people with decades of institutional knowledge. Your area will be reorganized and your position eliminated, but, a NEW position will be created with very similar responsibilities and a loyal IBM'er will take over.
IBM Quadrupled the number of field managers at my company and filled the extra nine slots with "True Blue" IBM folks. Now, the remaining original field managers are being picked off one at a time and their geographies combined with areas run by IBM'ers.
LMAO i see bright future for SUSE. RIP Fedora!
Execs and seniors will be on retention bonuses. So you wont see much change for 1 yr plus. After that ... all bets are off. Your current departments will get merged into IBM. It will start with sales and support. They will be asked to eventually support the muddled IBM stack along with your products. Finance, your own IT support and admin will all be jettisoned very early on. No need for them. Then they will start messing with PM and R&D. Then the cuts come. Then you're just another part of IBM. Save yourself the misery and get out now.
Wishful (some would say naive) thinking my friend. Forewarned is forearmed. Look at the history of previous companies who've been bought out by IBM to foresee the future. Lots of smiling IBM execs, high-fives and positive talk for first 6 months and then the pain starts. Typically, you'll start to see key senior people leave as they clash with their IBM counterparts. Then there'll be an exodus of your most skilled and poachable techs as the reality of the toxic IBM culture hits home with their roles pushed out to a third-world coding shop. Consequently, your product and its support structure starts to degrade but IBM show zero concern as prime focus is "shareholder value". Phase #3 - you'll all be invited onto a conference call where a senior IBM puppet will hurriedly read a prepared statement which will include the immortal phrase "....to align with our business objectives". During the next few weeks, some will receive phone calls from their manager with some more prepared b---s--- announcing that your role is no longer required or similar. As your market share and revenue declines, the RA cycle becomes quarterly as IBM try to maintain their margins and the perception that they're "growing". This has been happening for decades so please don't think Red Hat will be any different.
Not to scare you guys, but SoftLayer was acquired by IBM for its "BlueMix" unit, and so far, the returns are not so good:
"A Reg reader whose biz runs more than three dozen servers within the SoftLayer cloud told us the platform has been out all day and the management portal website has been inaccessible. In addition, the @SoftLayer twitter account and Facebook pages that had been referenced as support links both lead to dead or inaccessible pages...
...Our tipster said that these sorts of blunders and bouts of unreliability have become an all-too-common occurrence since Big Blue took over SoftLayer and rolled the service into the BlueMix platform-as-a-service offering.
'Since IBM came along there have been loads of outages, planned and otherwise,' our reader in the field told us.
'In the three years of service prior to this we had only one outage, in the six months after they took over we have had one outage that knocked out their AMS [Amsterdam] data center for four hours, [and] their entire global virtual server platform has had to be rebooted three times on separate occasions.'"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/ibm_softlayer_having_meltdown/
My former company was acquired by IBM several years ago and became part of what is now known as Watson Health. This past May, about 50% of my former colleagues were laid off en masse, even though Watson Health is considered to be the IBM's "moonshot" (I personally bailed before all that happened as I had already worked for IBM in the past and knew what they were all about).
Further, two other acquisitions that were made as part of Watson Health saw 70-80% of their respective workforces laid off right around the same time. Hopefully Red Hat fares better, but I'd keep my résumé updated and at the ready.