Red Hat Back-Office Team Moving To IBM From 2026 (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0179096020
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/0039236/red-hat-back-office-team-moving-to-ibm-from-2026
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/08/red_hatters_to_be_big/
> According to a communication sent to employees, those in General & Administrative areas will join IBM, including the lion's share of the people working in the HR, finance, accounting, and legal units at Red Hat. A source told us the switch will be "implemented this year," although in some countries "it might take longer due to legal constraints." The leadership running those teams will remain within the Red Hat fold. Some are nervous about the move, with tech companies -- notably IBM -- eliminating duplicated roles to consolidate back-office functions. In January -- as has happened in recent years -- IBM again forecast annual savings of $3.5 billion, partly through job cuts.
>
> There is no public data on the size of the G&A population within Red Hat but the total workforce is understood to be about 19,000 worldwide, with the bulk of those employed in the engineering, sales, and support divisions. The team remaining at Red Hat will be part of the central Strategy & Operations group managed by Mike Ferris. As such, engineering, product, sales, and marketing personnel will be unaffected. For now at least.
"Culture has been dead for at least 1 year now," [2]said Reddit user Purple_Afternoon 966. "The experience might be different depending on the department, but there is nothing left from the open culture praised. We have now micromanagement, decision making from middle management that clearly have no idea of what we do and how and trying to implement ideas that they read somewhere, with no context, data and not giving answer or addressing feedback."
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/08/red_hatters_to_be_big/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/1n7fcx8/people_finance_accounting_legal_plus_the_it_teams/
Goodbye Red Hat (Score:5, Funny)
IBM has a corporate culture where innovation, free thinking, moving fast etc are alien concepts. It's managers all the way up (and down). Sales and contracts matter more than ideas. Everything is grey. I assume that's why Red Hat has managed to survive semi independently until now because total assimilation would be the kiss of death. Not to mention IBM's penchant for getting rid of people or making their life so intolerable with petty rules they leave of their own accord.
Re: (Score:1)
It's an all-too-typical example of a good tech company that became driven by "business" types and marketers, seeking short-term sales and profits. GE is another example, and we all know of many other examples (certainly including Microsoft). There are so many (most) that have gone belly-up.
IMHO Apple, Google, Amazon, and others have done well because they've remained tech-oriented. It's easy to list Apple's many failures, but that's the price of trying product / tech ideas.
Some pretty worrisome moves... (Score:2)
On HR, IBM has been known in the industry for eroding their formerly respectable benefits to substandard. So they expect to apply IBM HR principles to RedHat, and that's going to be terrible for attrition. Don't know anyone that would actively *want* to work for IBM anymore after the changes they've put into place.
And Legal, oh boy. IBM's legal team last I dealt with them were horrific for a company trying to do open source. If any of that remains, expect RedHat to really screw up their bread and butter
Typical M&A activity (Score:2)
Back office functions (HR, Finance, etc.) are typically one of the first things to be combined after M&A. Most of the back office functions are standard (in some cases regulatorily standard) across all industries, so combining them eliminates a number of duplicate functions, and as such, achieves some of the promised "synergies" (i.e. layoffs) across some existing staff. Everyone in those back office positions know this from every other M&A that they have been part of (RH itself acquired some comp
Re: (Score:2)
Problem being that IBM HR and Legal direction is actively bad for business. So it's a little less mundane than usual. Especially IBM legal has a habit of painfully intervening in open source engagement by IBM personnel.
Coming Soon to a Galaxy Near You! (Score:2)
Intergalactic Business Machines: Vaporization of our own business from space guaranteed!
Here's what you're seeing (Score:4, Interesting)
As a former IBMer, let me explain the acquisition process.
> Starting in 2026, Red Hat's back-office staff in HR, finance, legal, and accounting will be transferred to IBM, while engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams remain at Red Hat
Those back office teams are what IBM values the 2nd most from the acquisition. They didn't buy Red Hat for the people, they bought it for the Intellectual Property.
Once the IP is inventoried and audited, the layoffs will start for the engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams. Wait for an announcement for a small layoff sometime between March and June of 2026. The sales team will likely see one at the end of the year when IBM wants to find a way to avoid paying bonuses based on meeting sales targets.
If you want a real world illustration, look what IBM did to Lotus after their purchase.
Implies more plaintext database breaches from 2008 (Score:1)
Which will snarl up Windows 11 at the airports.
No Surprise (Score:2)
I'm sure this all comes as no surprise to anyone. When IBM bought Red Hat, we all knew it was the beginning of the end for the latter. This is just a continuation of the IBM M.O.: buy and destroy.
Re:No Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
> I'm sure this all comes as no surprise to anyone.
It's a surprise to me.
Running separate HR, legal, and accounting departments makes no sense. I thought they were all merged years ago.
As for the "death of culture", if Red Hat relies on HR for its culture, they don't have much to lose.
Disclaimer: I use Ubuntu.
Re: No Surprise (Score:3)
IBM works slowly, like all bureaucracies.
They usually also wait until it's proven that the new company is working under their light touch before they go all heavy handed on it, for some inexplicable reason.
The beginning of the end is when the IBM sales teams start selling the product instead of the original sales team, because they are looking for any sale, not just the ones that make sense.
Re:No Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
> As for the "death of culture", if Red Hat relies on HR for its culture, they don't have much to lose.
It's not "relies on" it's "actively destroyed by".
The massive civil rights violations by Redhat/IBM HR are the subject of multiple lawsuits and DoJ actions now. Other tech press sites cover them frequently.
I pulled the cord on Redhat when they broke BIND in an update and ignored a community fix (which was posted to rhbz in a day or two) for about a year. IIRC they said if you want this fixed in distro (was it EL6 or Fedora?) get a contract and talk to your support person. It was clear to me that the Redhat I'd installed over Slackware twenty years earlier was gone.
Little did I know that they were in talks with IBM at that point.
On the plus side I learned Puppet first to distribute that patch to multiple machines. Ironically Puppet seems to have gone the same way so I've got OpenVox on my winter TODO now. The pattern predicts IBM will buy Puppet. ;)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I left RH 10 years ago for the reasons described. I saw that EMTs were dressing up the company to sell, they were abandoning what made us unique (the eat-your-own-dog-food way of using OSS for email, etc.), and things like that.
Now, 10 years later, I see I wasn't wrong.
Also, I worked with Mike Ferris before he was in any sort of leadership role at RH. He's a fine example of what's wrong with the company, and one of the few people I don't miss from my time there.