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:
Red Hat also pointed out that it’s hiring for roles in engineering.
Some techies expressed concern to us because they interpret talk of improving productivity as potentially cutting jobs, as when Red Hat’s parent company IBM hired world number three consultancy Bain in 2018, just under two years before it spun off its services division, a year later renamed to Kyndryl.
We are not suggesting Red Hat is anythin but loved by IBM, and OpenShift is the basis for Big Blue’s hybrid cloud. Nevertheless, some are a little worried.
McKinsey got the number one consultancy spot thanks to some very lucrative contracts such as this one for the UK government. It’s a big believer in quantum computing, but 15 years ago was skeptical about cloud computing – as decades earlier it was about mobile phones.
Red Hat already made job cuts this time last year, although it faced union push back in France. This time, staffers told us that they fear cuts in the US. ®
