Tech Layoffs Hit Linux: Red Hat Laying Off 760 Employees
Tech Layoffs Hit Linux: Red Hat Laying Off 760 Employees
CEO of the largest Linux company: “We must continue to sharpen our focus and do fewer things better.”
Q1 of this year (January - March of 2023) saw the largest number of Tech Industry layoffs in history. 183,720 layoffs in just three short months — over three times the number of layoffs we saw during the Dot Com Bubble Burst of 1999.
Now, the wave of layoffs has hit the world of Linux. In a pretty sizable way.
Red Hat, the world’s largest Linux company, has announced that they will be laying off 4% of their total workforce — roughly 760 total employees.
And, when I say “Red Hat is the world’s largest Linux company”… I mean it in just about every possible way: The highest revenue, the most employees, and an absolutely mammoth number of contributions to Linux and Linux-related projects.
While it is reported that most of these layoffs will not directly impact development, it’s hard to see how this bodes well for the largest Linux firm in all the land.
Red Hat CEO, Matt Hicks, shared the following note with employees:
“This will be difficult for all of us; there is no way around that. How we treat one another always matters, and in this moment, we will treat our impacted teammates with respect and gratitude. What makes a decision like this hard is that we’ll be saying goodbye to passionate Red Hatters who contributed in significant ways and who made this a better company.”
Hicks also added:
“We must continue to sharpen our focus and do fewer things better.”
Red Hat parent company, IBM, has also been cutting jobs during 2023 — with over 4,000 jobs cut at last tally.
All of this raises several questions, some of which we aren’t likely to have good answers on right away:
How will these layoffs impact Red Hat’s overall success and Linux contributions?
How likely are there to be additional layoffs in Red Hat’s near future?
Considering the massive financial success of Red Hat, are we likely to see layoffs at the smaller Linux firms (such as Canonical and SUSE) which operate on smaller budgets?
Time will tell. But I certainly don’t like seeing Linux firms needing to lay off folks.
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I'm not sure how this would contribute kernel contributions, but the excess bloat makes you wonder where corners will be cut in which subsystems when these people/corps start to work on code bases like Linux less...if Red Hat and others cut any number of their kernel devs