I think many companies have moved from pensions to 401k over the last couple decades, but people who came into the company during the pension regime typically retain their pensions. Someone who is approaching 55 could well have a legacy pension.
Pensions used to be common in the US, IBM is from that era, but if you entered the workforce in the late 70s or early 80s then you probably missed that boat although the US stock market has benefited enormously since that time from all that money being put into securities backed retirement funds.
Financial services companies play the same game - bonuses get paid first couple months of the year so around Christmas they cut as many people as they can. Real jerk move but not as bad as working someplace thirty years and then losing your retirement three months before.
When people refer to a "pension", they're usually talking about a defined benefit plan that requires little or no funding from the employee's paycheck. The amount of money you get at retirement is determined upfront, and based on things like years of service and average wages over some prescribed time period.
I had employer match with a 3 year vesting period at one place. I've never had anyone else do more than 12 months, and not everyone did that. The matching is for the paycheck you just paid me for work I already did. Why is it tied to the end of the year? As an employee retention hook it's a lousy idea. It's too small, and lacks all of the dopamine of watching a stock price seesaw up and down, wondering what it'll be worth when you can finally spend it.
Owning a web search box is valuable because you have customers coming to you making some request that can often be satisfied by the sale of a product or service. It’s the perfect advertising opportunity - much more effective than throwing ads at customers that aren’t actively looking for your product. That’s why Google makes the big bucks. It’s also why Goggle pays Apple billions for the privilege of answering queries in the iOS search box - so it can sell ads on that traffic. And this is why Google had to make Android, so they don’t have to pay for all mobile search usage. Also, Amazon is now making billions selling ads on the Amazon product search traffic. There are other uses for the data from search intent, but none of it generates cash like directly selling ads on those searches.
Now apply this context to the voice assistant market. If computer interactions shift from the web to voice, the digital assistant is the new search box. Being the company who creates the leading digital assistant means you’re in the position of getting paid billions for that traffic, rather than paying billions to get it.
In short, I think the idea that voice assistants must exist to obtain new kinds of data misses the point. The creators of these services are going to want to collect data to train models, to debug, etc. but it’s all a means to an end. The end is to put a troll toll in place to extract a chunk of the value of any economic activity organized through the voice assistant. Imagine if AT&T could collect a tax on the value of any service sold over the phone - that’s the kind of economic opportunity we are talking about here. There’s no need to search for other hidden motivations.
Of course, other entities like governments would actually like the ability to listen to all your conversations, so they are going to try to get ahold of this data too.
Lawyers, ha - when IBM did it (years ago) there was an investigation by Congress! But of course the big corporation was found blameless and within their rights.
Just an anecdote but anyone I saw leave around that age had been @ msft in the 90s and was wealthy enough to stop working long before. Most had pretty colourful BillG stories.
>"Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested."
Don't pensions usually vest within 5/10 years of working for a company (possibly in tiers) rather than when reaching age 55? I'd assume anyone who has been at MS long enough to be eligible for a pension (which was probably last offered in the 90s or earlier) would have vested decades ago. You simply can't draw upon your pension until you reach 55 but you lose nothing. Makes me question the whole article to be honest.
I recall some of the first comments when it happened were questioning when the layoffs would begin. The most common answer was "about a year." It's been about a year, so here they come.
I guess that this is an example where corporate sponsorship of open source projects is both a blessing and a curse: it's fantastic while the corporation is doing great, and can get real bad real fast when priorities (or owners) change.
Unless you are in research and have a significant portfolio this is what you can expect from IBM. They are notorious for letting people go under dubious circumstances or telling people to relocate to a third world country and work for local wages. I worked for them on three different occasions in three different parts of the countries and it was always a really toxic environment and it didn't end well for everyone I've known from there.
A giant corporation buys a Silicon Valley company, the result is generally carnage. The old-boy marketing-driven process-heavy big company will roll out decisions like a bowling ball careening across a cafeteria, knocking over tables and chairs and sending people running for cover.
Since big companies are driven by managers not engineers, and the managers are always, always from the bigger company, the decisions are perceived as clueless. They are generally about optimizing or cannibalizing the small-company product for fit with the big company product space. With superficial understanding of the product itself, generally confined to marketing descriptions.
Enough with the digressions! An open-source-foundational company with roots in the microcomputer revolution, vs IBM? Is there anybody who doesn't see the difference?
And no, IBM did not invent the microcomputer revolution - far, far from it. They put out an expensive iron boat anchor using other people's chips and designs that saddled the industry with obsolete choices for a decade. Just like you'd expect from a giant corporation.
Well that ain't Silicon Valley! You're taking an extremely modern view and projecting it back! Silicon Valley was historically defence silicon and CIA contracts!
It absolutely is in the culture sense in which most people understand what that means, and how that those words are often used.
Words are not always used to refer to their literal dictionary definition. Instead, words can have multiple meanings, and people can use them to refer to coloquial definitions.
This is a common way of talking about these types of companies. I can't really help someone if they aren't able to understand the idea that words don't always refer to their literal definition.
Yeah, I was around, there were others before the PC, but it was the one named as such that sold millions and popularized the term. There's no point to being pedantic and bitter about it.
Disclosure: I worked at Red Hat from 1998 until 2004
I never experienced a "Silicon Valley" culture at Red Hat, not pre-IPO as a scrappy startup, or post-IPO as a growing company. Red Hat these days is an enterprise software company, and I think it retains a unique culture that I'm (mostly) proud to have been a part of cultivating in the early days even as a division of IBM today.
> A giant corporation buys a Silicon Valley company
I don't know what you mean by 'giant corporation' and 'Silicon Valley company' - do you think these groups are distinct?
RedHat isn't a 'Silicon Valley company' as far as I know. It's from the east coast - North Carolina isn't it? The Carolinas seem as far as you can get from Silicon Valley, culturally and geographically.
And many Silicon Valley companies are traditional giant corporations - Oracle, Intel, etc.
So, we don't think the linux community and companies are much different from century-old business-process company with 1/3 million employees? Is this really a question, or just pedantry?
I use management focused vs technology focused when talking about this distinction. For me it boils down to is the organization more concerned about choices in regards to process/organizational structures or technology.
That's technically true, but it doesn't do anything to advance the discussion of the issues the article raises. In particular, I really doubt that anyone who read the article was mislead by its use of the technically incorrect term "Silicon Valley."
I find connection redhat has with the Linux community about the same as Intel's since at least as far back as 2008. I also know people who were as likely to get jobs at redhat as and of the other big Corp techs, I.e. Dell, Cisco. Is there really something distinct about red hat beyond the trademark and distant memories?
North Carolina in general is spectrum opposite from Silicon Valley save a few islands of prosperity such as the so called triangle of which Raleigh, where red hat was based, is a corner.
Yeah, doesn't make sense to compare SV to "the Carolinas" any more than it makes sense to compare the research triangle in NC to "California". Both states contain proverbial multitudes.
I was referring specifically to the "culturally" part. The geographic difference between Silicon Valley and North Carolina is indisputable, but I'm curious about your take on the culture. I see a lot of similarities between Republicans and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, e.g. anti-regulation stances, anti-labor stances, etc.
That's an argument reducing to absurdity. Every company has an long chain of transitive contractors, and for every company you can work all your way down to the poorest person on Earth, so it's meaningless.
I could similarly blame you for the labor conditions of these people - you paid Apple or whoever to make your phone so are you responsible for their conditions?
The people that Apple employs are extraordinarily well treated and compensated, and that's a credit to Apple and their labor relations.
> you paid Apple or whoever to make your phone so are you responsible for their conditions?
Yes, absolutely, to some degree — do you think I'm not? Even if you don't think so, do you think Apple isn't to some degree responsible for the working conditions of nearly a million employees within the company that it knowingly contracts out to to produce about 200 million iPhones a year?
Follow up question: Which American political party do you think would be more likely to condone the above practice, Democrats or Republicans?
Basically I'm trying to figure out why you think there's a big cultural difference between Silicon Valley (50 square miles) and "The Carolinas" (85,839 square miles) and why that's meaningful to the wider discussion. Your original comment perplexed me as someone who is familiar with both regions. I agree that they are dissimilar but I definitely don't think they are "as far as you can get ... culturally." Happy to get back to that original subject if you are.
> If you mean 'liberal young open-source company' then say that
No. Most people are perfectly capable of understanding informal, non-literal definitions of words. And I see no need reason to bow down and change easy to understand phases, that nobody is confused about, in order to satisfy people who would basically have to have some sort of extremely hard to overcome language barriers or disorder such that they are not able to understand very common things that people say.
If someone claims to not understand what someone means, when they use informal, but common, words such as "silicon valley company", then it is very likely that this person either has some language problems (IE, they are just learning English as a 2nd language), or has some sort very serious autistic disorder such that they are unable to understand non literal definitions because of their mental disorder, or they are instead just being a troll.
And none of these reasons are a good enough reason for people to completely change how they talk in every day life, all the time, when they are not dealing with such individuals.
> If you mean 'liberal young open-source company' then say that! Because that absolutely isn't what 'Silicon Valley' means.
I didn't say that. I am a different person asking a different question. I recognize that it's a bit silly to call Red Hat a "Silicon Valley company" because they are not in Silicon Valley. Just like Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company.
My original question was in regards to this exact quote of yours:
> The Carolinas seem as far as you can get from Silicon Valley, culturally
And my question was:
> Why do you think that?
So far you have offered that "The Carolinas" are politically Republican and California is politically Democratic. However, (a) North Carolina's governor is a Democrat and (b) your original comparison was between Silicon Valley (a small geographic area) and "The Carolinas" (a much larger geographic area) — which does not seem like a fair or meaningful comparison.
Basically, due to the uniform nature of American culture and cities I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify many meaningful cultural differences between e.g. Raleigh, North Carolina and Mountain View, California. So I'm wondering if you have any unique insight to offer there or if you're actually just talking flippantly about something you don't actually know anything about, which is fine too.
I have yet to be in a buyout where I didn't end up feeling like livestock. The sale is good for people owning enough stock so that the only reason they show up tomorrow is because the new owners put conditions on the sale.
For everyone else it's not good news. Even the hope that they will fix things that have been bothering you? Those will all be open for debate. As will all of the things you've already gotten resolved. You'll be lucky if they fix as many things as they break.
>Since big companies are driven by managers not engineers, and the managers are always, always from the bigger company, the decisions are perceived as clueless.
Not only that. If they had a clue they wouldn't have needed to acquire the company in the first place.
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. was IBM CEO when Red Hat was founded in 1993 (plus or minus 6 months because I am lazy and I don't want to look up specific dates). Having a clue and having a time machine are very different things.
Yeah, uh to assume that Engineers have some special managerial ability that 'managers' do not is the wrong take.
Management is management. Some good, some bad.
We can be cynical, but without knowing the details of these layoffs, we shouldn't assume anything.
One of the advantages of M&A is ostensible synergy across many groups, for example, RedHat is unlikely going to need maintainers of its HR Portal, which will likely be rolled into the one from HQ. And probably some execs will be without jobs.
It's possible that the layoff was in the works otherwise, or that they were literally made at the recommendation of outgoing people who were unable/unwilling to do a re-structure at the time.
Right from the article: "The tricky thing is, IBM and Red Hat both have NC-based operations and a rather large number of workers there. It’s somewhat of a business hub. But we also know that IBM does not need two HR departments, two marketing departments, etc. Managers are sort of converging in duties, conflicting in terms of roles, overlapping in the workflow sense and so on."
I agree about the carnage part, but it happens regardless of the type of companies involved. There's a push to not have duplicate functions, products, etc. And people making decisions without having all the information.
How do the pensions work at Microsoft or IBM? I was under the impression once you vest into a pension you get it come retirement age regardless if at the time you are still working at the company. Otherwise that seems ridiculous, couldn't they just fire you at 54 and you get nothing?
I don't know about MS or IBM specifically, but often pension payouts will increase over time, e.g. when you hit a certain age (or years of service) your pension increases from 50% to 60% of your salary. So laying someone off at 54 wouldn't cause them to lose money per se but they wouldn't get that 10% bump (which is a lot of money multiplied by 20-30 years).
I really wish people wouldn't pay attention to anything coming from this "source". IBM _is_ indeed a terrible employer, but anything from this joke of a web site isn't to be taken seriously. Look at the history - it's all "X stole my giant ball of aluminum foil" written in quasi-English.
VMware has been one of the few companies to be bought by an old dinosaur of tech (Dell) and so far, managed to survive. It helps that they're much closer to equal with Dell than RedHat and IBM, but I'm pretty sure RedHat knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to let IBM in the door.
I have heard one rumor (only one, mind you) that Dell/VMWare was more of a reverse merger. If you end up in charge of strategy for the combined company, then of course things go better for you.
> but I'm pretty sure RedHat knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to let IBM in the door.
Call me cynical but isn't it possible that the people who were responsible for the acquisition on RedHat's side were also the ones who would benefit most from it financially so they simply sold out?
people are talking about pensions and what not. honestly, if you want a pension, go work for your local city or county government. in florida, frs is probably the best pension system out there. there are a ton of government position available right now that fall under frs benefits.
I recall at the time of the purchase some, I think it included Cringely, said that Red Hat culture was going to take over IBM and save it. Alas, it looks like that is not going to happen.
Any “gutting” is Jim Whitehurst doing it. Redhat acquired IBM, not the other way around regardless of what wall street thinks. IBM mgrs are not lording over the RH folks. These orgs are not integrated (or hardly integrated) and IBM did their covid layoffs in May.
RH’ers thinking they are immune to the covid reality can blame the blue side all they want but that is not how the company is structured.
The article is purely speculation based on the anecdotal evidence of one IBM acquisition "victim", someone who has been an IBM insider from what seems like pre-acquisition.
The rest are smears on the direction of Fedora for changing their default filesystem on their workstation variant, for developing (not replacing anything with) Silverblue - an "immutable OS".
The claim that the Btrfs push came from Facebook is ridiculous. I know Fedora some community infra engineers and leaders personally. The Facebook developers were there in their capacity as Btrfs contributors to speak about its stability. They did use their @fb.com email unlike what the article suggests. Not that that matters.
Does anyone else see this more likely to be “mere” reductions in staff due to a presumed decline in business due to the global pandemic, rather than some nefarious plot to gut Red Hat?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] thread>“Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested.”
>“Microsoft was twice as likely to lay you off if you were over 40.”
>“Cortana is an analytics and telemetry app that data mines people while pretending to be a digital assistant,”
Financial services companies play the same game - bonuses get paid first couple months of the year so around Christmas they cut as many people as they can. Real jerk move but not as bad as working someplace thirty years and then losing your retirement three months before.
When people refer to a "pension", they're usually talking about a defined benefit plan that requires little or no funding from the employee's paycheck. The amount of money you get at retirement is determined upfront, and based on things like years of service and average wages over some prescribed time period.
https://www.google.com/search?q=401k+vesting
I was going to fight you on that, but you're right. TIL.
I am stunned that anyone here believes that any of the digital assistants are anything other than data ingestion and analysis vehicles.
Now apply this context to the voice assistant market. If computer interactions shift from the web to voice, the digital assistant is the new search box. Being the company who creates the leading digital assistant means you’re in the position of getting paid billions for that traffic, rather than paying billions to get it.
In short, I think the idea that voice assistants must exist to obtain new kinds of data misses the point. The creators of these services are going to want to collect data to train models, to debug, etc. but it’s all a means to an end. The end is to put a troll toll in place to extract a chunk of the value of any economic activity organized through the voice assistant. Imagine if AT&T could collect a tax on the value of any service sold over the phone - that’s the kind of economic opportunity we are talking about here. There’s no need to search for other hidden motivations.
Of course, other entities like governments would actually like the ability to listen to all your conversations, so they are going to try to get ahold of this data too.
Don't pensions usually vest within 5/10 years of working for a company (possibly in tiers) rather than when reaching age 55? I'd assume anyone who has been at MS long enough to be eligible for a pension (which was probably last offered in the 90s or earlier) would have vested decades ago. You simply can't draw upon your pension until you reach 55 but you lose nothing. Makes me question the whole article to be honest.
I looks like the site may have been hugged to death. Anyone have a mirror?
Since big companies are driven by managers not engineers, and the managers are always, always from the bigger company, the decisions are perceived as clueless. They are generally about optimizing or cannibalizing the small-company product for fit with the big company product space. With superficial understanding of the product itself, generally confined to marketing descriptions.
Thus, carnage. Been through it twice.
Redhat is not a Silicon Valley company.
Oracle is a traditional Silicon Valley company. But presumably that's not what they mean either?
And no, IBM did not invent the microcomputer revolution - far, far from it. They put out an expensive iron boat anchor using other people's chips and designs that saddled the industry with obsolete choices for a decade. Just like you'd expect from a giant corporation.
Well that ain't Silicon Valley! You're taking an extremely modern view and projecting it back! Silicon Valley was historically defence silicon and CIA contracts!
It absolutely is in the culture sense in which most people understand what that means, and how that those words are often used.
Words are not always used to refer to their literal dictionary definition. Instead, words can have multiple meanings, and people can use them to refer to coloquial definitions.
This is a common way of talking about these types of companies. I can't really help someone if they aren't able to understand the idea that words don't always refer to their literal definition.
You: Oh you got a pet! Is it a dog or an apple?
Him: Apples aren't really house pets.
You: Oh brother, are you going to pretend nobody knows the difference between dogs & cats?
You mean the IBM that invented the PC? The distinction you're trying to make here is far from clear.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/did-ibm-invent-t...
and IBM... hmmm...
I never experienced a "Silicon Valley" culture at Red Hat, not pre-IPO as a scrappy startup, or post-IPO as a growing company. Red Hat these days is an enterprise software company, and I think it retains a unique culture that I'm (mostly) proud to have been a part of cultivating in the early days even as a division of IBM today.
I don't know what you mean by 'giant corporation' and 'Silicon Valley company' - do you think these groups are distinct?
RedHat isn't a 'Silicon Valley company' as far as I know. It's from the east coast - North Carolina isn't it? The Carolinas seem as far as you can get from Silicon Valley, culturally and geographically.
And many Silicon Valley companies are traditional giant corporations - Oracle, Intel, etc.
Silicon Valley is also huge old companies built with massive defence contracts. If you think Silicon Valley is mostly small startups you're mistaken.
When people refer to silicon valley, it is partially a reference to a place, but also partial a reference to simply culture.
Most people understand this, and quibbling over the exact physical location is just valueless pedantry, when the meaning was fully understandable.
Why do you think that?
They're also geographically literally the other side of the country.
I don't know any companies, anywhere in the world, that compensate, pamper, and accomodate their labor as much as Silicon Valley.
I could similarly blame you for the labor conditions of these people - you paid Apple or whoever to make your phone so are you responsible for their conditions?
The people that Apple employs are extraordinarily well treated and compensated, and that's a credit to Apple and their labor relations.
Yes, absolutely, to some degree — do you think I'm not? Even if you don't think so, do you think Apple isn't to some degree responsible for the working conditions of nearly a million employees within the company that it knowingly contracts out to to produce about 200 million iPhones a year?
Follow up question: Which American political party do you think would be more likely to condone the above practice, Democrats or Republicans?
Basically I'm trying to figure out why you think there's a big cultural difference between Silicon Valley (50 square miles) and "The Carolinas" (85,839 square miles) and why that's meaningful to the wider discussion. Your original comment perplexed me as someone who is familiar with both regions. I agree that they are dissimilar but I definitely don't think they are "as far as you can get ... culturally." Happy to get back to that original subject if you are.
Original point is:
- RedHat has nothing to do with Silicon Valley - geographically nor culturally
- RedHat isn't representative of typical Silicon Valley companies
- IBM is more of a 'Silicon Valley' company than Red Hat, because it's an old traditional government contractor
Therefore the original comment had it backwards, which is confusing.
If you mean 'liberal young open-source company' then say that! Because that absolutely isn't what 'Silicon Valley' means.
No. Most people are perfectly capable of understanding informal, non-literal definitions of words. And I see no need reason to bow down and change easy to understand phases, that nobody is confused about, in order to satisfy people who would basically have to have some sort of extremely hard to overcome language barriers or disorder such that they are not able to understand very common things that people say.
If someone claims to not understand what someone means, when they use informal, but common, words such as "silicon valley company", then it is very likely that this person either has some language problems (IE, they are just learning English as a 2nd language), or has some sort very serious autistic disorder such that they are unable to understand non literal definitions because of their mental disorder, or they are instead just being a troll.
And none of these reasons are a good enough reason for people to completely change how they talk in every day life, all the time, when they are not dealing with such individuals.
I didn't say that. I am a different person asking a different question. I recognize that it's a bit silly to call Red Hat a "Silicon Valley company" because they are not in Silicon Valley. Just like Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company.
My original question was in regards to this exact quote of yours:
> The Carolinas seem as far as you can get from Silicon Valley, culturally
And my question was:
> Why do you think that?
So far you have offered that "The Carolinas" are politically Republican and California is politically Democratic. However, (a) North Carolina's governor is a Democrat and (b) your original comparison was between Silicon Valley (a small geographic area) and "The Carolinas" (a much larger geographic area) — which does not seem like a fair or meaningful comparison.
Basically, due to the uniform nature of American culture and cities I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify many meaningful cultural differences between e.g. Raleigh, North Carolina and Mountain View, California. So I'm wondering if you have any unique insight to offer there or if you're actually just talking flippantly about something you don't actually know anything about, which is fine too.
My peers in medicine work 24-hour shifts and earn a quarter of what they do in Silicon Valley and the only catering they get is a dirty microwave.
People in Silicon Valley are driven to work, work eight hours, get three catered meals, and take home more money.
For everyone else it's not good news. Even the hope that they will fix things that have been bothering you? Those will all be open for debate. As will all of the things you've already gotten resolved. You'll be lucky if they fix as many things as they break.
Not only that. If they had a clue they wouldn't have needed to acquire the company in the first place.
Yeah, uh to assume that Engineers have some special managerial ability that 'managers' do not is the wrong take.
Management is management. Some good, some bad.
We can be cynical, but without knowing the details of these layoffs, we shouldn't assume anything.
One of the advantages of M&A is ostensible synergy across many groups, for example, RedHat is unlikely going to need maintainers of its HR Portal, which will likely be rolled into the one from HQ. And probably some execs will be without jobs.
It's possible that the layoff was in the works otherwise, or that they were literally made at the recommendation of outgoing people who were unable/unwilling to do a re-structure at the time.
Right from the article: "The tricky thing is, IBM and Red Hat both have NC-based operations and a rather large number of workers there. It’s somewhat of a business hub. But we also know that IBM does not need two HR departments, two marketing departments, etc. Managers are sort of converging in duties, conflicting in terms of roles, overlapping in the workflow sense and so on."
You mean Red Hat?
Call me cynical but isn't it possible that the people who were responsible for the acquisition on RedHat's side were also the ones who would benefit most from it financially so they simply sold out?
https://www.myfrs.com/
https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?l=Florida
RH’ers thinking they are immune to the covid reality can blame the blue side all they want but that is not how the company is structured.
The rest are smears on the direction of Fedora for changing their default filesystem on their workstation variant, for developing (not replacing anything with) Silverblue - an "immutable OS".
The claim that the Btrfs push came from Facebook is ridiculous. I know Fedora some community infra engineers and leaders personally. The Facebook developers were there in their capacity as Btrfs contributors to speak about its stability. They did use their @fb.com email unlike what the article suggests. Not that that matters.
Here's the whole mailing list archive for that discussion: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...
Disclaimer: I work at Redhat as a Software Engineer, and what I write here represents only my perceptions.
I assume this is common knowledge