Red Hat tries on a McKinsey cap in quest to streamline techies' jobs

Some staff are worried – can't think why

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:

Hey everyone – as I mentioned during the recent Q1 All Hands, my goal is to have Global Engineering recognized as the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization.

This team is already doing amazing work, and we have several initiatives in progress to help us achieve the goal I've set. One of those is a partnership with McKinsey. The objective of this project is to help us understand and incorporate learnings on working models, development practices, and tooling from across the software industry.

We've heard your feedback in person, during All Hands, and through RHAS [the annual Red Hat Associate Survey]. This project will help us to identify and remove mundane tasks that drain your energy so that you can focus on the most engaging and highest value work – to make your job better.

The work with McKinsey is one piece of the overall plan to help us become the world's greatest open-source software engineering organization.

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. ®