Is It a Trap?
SO MY wife has just published this post not because of jealousy or cattiness (as in "cat fight") but because she is concerned about women being promoted not because of their skills but in spite of a lack of relevant skills. She mentioned this recent example and another, newer one. To me it sounds like Red Hat (IBM) replaced Ben Cotton with somebody less competent and technical, which makes no sense at all. They discard skilled staff. That leads to project stagnation, weaknesses, and a lack of coordination.
The new person said: "Since joining Red Hat, I have loved learning about the open source project world and the ethos of the FOSS community and I am so happy to have the opportunity to work with the Fedora Project full time!"
Read as: Red Hat hired a person who did not know the FOSS world but is now promoted to top of the Fedora 'community' (as Red Hat staff, wherein salary controls behaviour). Was this person using GNU/Linux when hired? For the record, my wife earned a Computer Science degree and works with GNU/Linux (KDE, Debian), not someone on Windows or a "Mac" something (like Jim Zemlin).
Does Red Hat hire people whom it deems possible to retro-fit into a role or people who meet the requirements for the role?
Also: how did Mr. Zemlin become a boss of Linus Torvalds? What had he achieved? Nothing.
"Killing the project," an associate has told me, and "on purpose it seems" (with such hires).
As I said here like a handful of times before (in very recent days), this isn't a simple topic to cover because it guarantees someone will call you a "sexist" (like before). We've noticed that after we covered it many others did too, perhaps because many people stared at one another, waiting to see who goes first. People are scared of the elephant in the room and the slurs "Shamanphobe" and "sexist" already get tossed around in Social Control Media (not real media, just gossip from mobsters and groupthink brigades).
To be sincere, this story did not start from me because my wife says she saw that last night already (and noticed the same thing). And she says that her initial reaction was, this was intentional to bait people like me and to then say "look, they attack women!" (this is a paraphrase of what she told me; I didn't know she saw it, but she just told me this because it actually bothered her).
So now we have a Red Hat-controlled GNOME whose chief comes from "energy" treatment hooey. Who benefits? Who is in charge of who?
This criticism has nothing to do with gender but actual background and/or qualifications because you don't want a quack to act like a real doctor, as that won't treat you but instead waste money and time.
My wife insists that Red Hat is "just using them" because they have no prior knowledge of FOSS and cannot participate in a deep technical discussion, passing the buck to the 'suits' with their RHEL "proprietary UNIX" agenda.
One person has told me that a long-term trend around the globe is to hire severely under-qualified and or incompetent people to lead projects which are to be wound down and damaged. The lack of qualification and competence does damage directly, of course. However, because everyone knows the new hire is completely inappropriate the flunky will do whatever those hiring want, said or unsaid, in order to hang onto a job which even they know they shouldn't have.
As a side aspect, salary expectations will be a lot lower if the job is offered to under-skilled people. But that's a minor issue, not the big issue.
If enough people get hired in spite of a lack of practical capability, it helps drive down the salaries of colleagues too. We saw that in Sirius. It's a collective thing. If you raise the salary of one very skilled person, there is expectation that colleagues too will receive a pay rise. If docked down, the company "saves", but at what cost to core skills? █