We, Red Hat EU unions lend our support and friendship to our colleagues in China who were brutally dismissed.
We disagree with Red Hat’s decision to dismantle the engineering team in China and the way it was handled. Our colleagues were treated like mere lines on a spreadsheet. Their dismissal was announced to them last thursday and they were immediately cut from any access to the infrastructure at 10 AM local time while their colleagues in Europe were asleep. Some of us woke up without a manager, without some of their colleagues, and without a chance to say goodbye and show our appreciation.
The internal communication was very corporate — read heartless —, justifying it as a way to solidify our location strategy.
If it really was “a way to solidify our location strategy”, we wouldn’t have laid off few hundred of our colleagues that suddenly, including some high-profile experts that Red Hat will have hard time replacing.
If it really was “a way to solidify our location strategy”, we wouldn’t have closed our engineering branch in China right after a major reorganization that fused them more closely with international teams, causing huge amounts of organisational problems in its wake.
This was very likely a request from the current US administration or an attempt to please them that ended up in a soulless decision that impacted the lives of our colleagues, something that will deeply hurt our business in China, and our operations globally.