Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup.
Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans.
Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it was ready and I was one of hte damned QA people), the robust internal transfer system meant, I could just move to a team where I felt my contribution was more valued even from non-programmers ;)
No, product/dev disconect was there quite often for years. Red Hat has kinda been living off the unix-to-linux migration that happened in early 2000s, and because I think we didn't wan to become the kind of company that just maintains legacy kernel for banking mainframes, we spent most of the 2010s comming up with ideas to see what gains traction. And sometimes these ideas were ... oversold ... to our potential customers?
Despite how nice I find the culture at Red Hat, it definitely isn't lacking in some of the corporate disconnects that sometimes happen. Like, I think we are working on it and it differs from team to team, but it still is there :)
Other than that, I don't see much change in the culture in general.
Well, there was lot of jokes at the start, people comming in to work in blue ties for day or two.
In reality, nothing changed, for better or worse, we did kinda speculate that this was kind of an expensive acquihire of one James M. Whitehurst and if the have to buy this profitable company alongside with him, might as well :D
Another speculation is, that we are one of the more profitable parts of IBM, so the rest of the company doesn't want to f- with that, but if we stop being the golden-goose our management was selling us as, more interference might comme our way.
Worked there as an intern during college, continued for few more years and returned there after a brief stint at a startup.
Work/life balance is great, most code public has so many advantages and colleagues are friendly and decent humans.
Some teams might be worse than what I experienced, but even if I was growing mildly frustrated (i.e. pressure from product people to push product out of hte gate before it was ready and I was one of hte damned QA people), the robust internal transfer system meant, I could just move to a team where I felt my contribution was more valued even from non-programmers ;)