Perpetuating the Lie of "No Red Hat Layoffs" Because of the Bluewashing (Red Hat Became Just "IBM")
Six days ago a marketing person wrote in Microsoft's social control media:
The weird part is further below, wrongly implying that since 2023 there have been no Red Hat layoffs. Here's the key part (and then some more examples; other companies):
And now, in November, they announced thousands of more layoffs. No one seems safe, regardless of job title. Those cut include positions in "artificial intelligence, marketing, software engineering and cloud technology."Next, IBM has had a mixed record as a steward of acquisitions. Red Hat has doubled in revenues since their 2019 acquisition. For a while its headcount continued to grow, as much as 19,000 by 2023. But then it was forced into layoffs by parent IBM in April of that year [edit: they have been unaffected by layoffs since, for now], even while it remains one of the highest margin businesses in their portfolio.
SoftLayer — "IBM Cloud Classic" — also suffered significant layoffs in early 2025, with offshoring sending jobs to India.
DataStax had layoffs in 2023-2024, even before its acquisition was announced. Maybe they were "trimming the fat" to get into a shape to be acquired.
As a person with a long career in marketing, I know that many of the first roles to be jettisoned at a newly-acquired company tend to be in go-to-market organizations. Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations, Documentation, Training, Community, Customer Service. These tend to be seen as "nice to haves" by upper management. But their loss guts organizations and hollows out user-facing teams and open source communities.
My hope is that Confluent is spared as much of the pain and turmoil as possible. That, like Red Hat, it is run autonomously as much as possible.
Many Red Hat employees were pushed out and/or removed lately, but "technically" they are IBM now, so Red Hat as a 'company' (subsidiary being bluewashed) won't say a single word about it.
This exemplifies a severe issue with today's media. It just parrots lies, it has no courage or thirst for information (beyond PR, i.e. deceit).
Consider this new fake journalism, a puff piece about IBM Red Hat, paid for by IBM. Red Hat then links to its own paid-for piece.
This isn't journalism but corruption thereof - part of an international trend [1-2].
Apropos, considering how media fails to report on EPO crimes (because the person who bribes the media commands the media), this is a familiar issue in the US, where Bill Epsteingate is protected from potent allegations connected to abuse of underage women, a Microsoft employee arrested for strangulation is apparently not newsworthy, and all sorts of other important things "go under the radar".
Consider that the EPO is now a headless chicken. Journalists in Europe are aware of it, but they tell me they're afraid to write about it. How much will EU and Germany compromise (their own reputation) to protect the criminal enterprise that EPO became? Without this much COMPLICITY of the media, this much EPO corruption would not be possible.
Why are layoffs at Red Hat being overlooked? And why has nobody done investigative journalism into the true extent of IBM layoffs? Society is drowning in evasions and lies told by corporations. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The Guardian UK ☛ ‘It’s not a coincidence’: journalists of color on being laid off amid Trump’s anti-DEI push
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] How White House attack on journalists affects US press freedom
"I figured most journalists would not disclose their sources." -How Sean Combs' Latest Move Is a Threat to Journalists Worldwide (Source: Rolling Stone)
"Former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Richard Branson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Alan Dershowitz and Woody Allen are also pictured, as well as sex paraphernalia, including a photo of a pile of Trump-branded condoms for sale." -Photos of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Bill Clinton Featured in New Epstein Document Dump (Source: Allbritton Journalism Institute)
"The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well." -Politico’s Union Journalists Win Key Ruling In Battle Against Lazy, Undercooked AI (Source: Techdirt)