I do miss having Jim Whitehurst around. Jim spent 90 minutes on the Wednesday afternoon of my New Hire Orientation week with my cohort helping to make sure all of us could login to email and chat, answering questions, telling a couple short stories. He literally helped build the Red Hat culture starting at New Hire. Kind of magical when the company is an 11K person global business and doing 5B in revenue.

Cormier and Hicks have their strengths. Hicks in particular seems to care about cultural shifts and also seems adept at identifying key times and places to invest in engineering efforts.

The folks we have imported from IBM are hiring folks that are attempting to make Red Hat more aggressive, efficient, innovative. Some bets are paying off. More are to be decided soon. These kinds of bets and changes haven’t been for everyone.

>The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes.

Longtime Red Hatter here. Most of any challenges I see at Red Hat around culture I attribute to this rapid growth. In some ways it's surprising how well so many relatively new hires seem to internalize the company's traditional values.