Pros

Great opportunities for learning, good benefits, great people!

Cons

It's easy to get lost in a place like RedHat. If you're a consultants you are expected to be 'on the road' nearly 100% of the time. If you go to work there and be a consultant expect to be living in cheap hotels and eating on a low end budget. You wouldn't believe some of the crummy hotels I had to stay at. Business travel is bad enough to begin with, fighting with a rat to keep yoru snickers bar in the hotel room is just too much on top!

Advice to Senior Management

Consultants are people too, with homes and families; understand the need for some balance between work and life.

Pros

-Engineers tend to have a lot of freedom when it comes to what they work on
-Open source culture is incredibly strong, how the community will react is frequently considered in decisions
-Really smart/hard working dev's

Cons

-RH tries to act like a big company from the process perspective but just ends up with a lot of misplaced bureaucracy.
-"silo"d mentality across business areas, not much time spent looking at opportunities for different divisions to work together
-Community/developer focus has resulted in a lot of projects being carried by RH employees but which don't contribute to the bottom line

Advice to Senior Management

-Need to empower staff more to get their work done, e.g. better spec'd standard laptop, better internal apps.
-Should try to unite employees around a more specific focus than OSS

Pros

Fast growing company with a lot of ambition and a great name on the market

Cons

Management lacks consistency. Even though the company is growing, not enough opportunities to progress are given to existing employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop better your employees to grow with the company.

Pros

The recruiter was very diligent in getting back to me about the status of the role which is rare in times like this where jobs are always going back and forth between open or closed

Cons

The jobs are always open or closed and that stinks but I think every employer to an extent is in the same situation.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a hiring plan together and stick with it

Pros

Good engineering staff. Friendly and easy going work environment.

Cons

Horrible, terrible, awful health benefits. Must be amongst the worst in the industry ..... if it isn't _the worst_.

Advice to Senior Management

FIX OUR DAMNED HEALTH BENEFITS.

Pros

Cutting Edge place to work

Cons

Management pays lip service to their employees, as management belief is there is a never ending resource so a younger person could be trained to replace you. You will be paid 10 to 30 thousand dollars less then other companies. Global services has many issues and is very dysfunctional, for a professional service organization. People have been moved to other countries to take promotion only to find out when in country they have taken a lesser role , since some one else has that job. Also past employees it took two years to get their expense report taken care of.

Small company , so there is very little internal infrastructure to support gs org. No funding for infrastructure, so most back office task are handle by hand , on 4 to 5 different silo of data.

Learning on the fly is lip server to the dysfunction of the organization, as the people are sharp to over come.

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of your people , for your people will find out the mis deed of management, and wonder if they are next.

Pros

The work environment is great, people are passionate and care. On top of that the level of competency is high for employees. The company respects employees personal time and projects are managed well, it's rare that something will require working very late or on weekends. Working here it's easy to have a good life/work balance.

Cons

Problems are not overly interesting, large portion of work is maintenance related, so you will spend a significant portion of time doing bug fixes instead of developing new code. Compensation is lower than I have seen at other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Can't think of any, management seems to be doing a good job.

Pros

Good company for learning about and participating in open source. Lots of room for creativity. Salaries are competitive when you negotiate. Benefits are reasonable. The company is filled with a variety of top-notch developers and creative thinkers all over the world which really makes for a diverse group.

Cons

Benefits seem to get sparser each year with increased pricing. Organization runs at 100% capacity. Difficult to train new employees in the culture of Red Hat because the company is growing very quickly.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't forget your past. Unless you worked somewhere where you didn't work in open source, in which case, PLEASE forget your past, because you don't work in that world any more.

Pros

Great offering. Great brand recognition.

Cons

Company needs to focus on individual productivity. Company needs to focus more on the success of employees. The company needs to become more customer focused.

Advice to Senior Management

Feedback: Schedule more time to connect with customers and individual contributors.

Pros

There is never a dull moment at Red Hat. If you like having a new challenge each day, this is a great place to work.

Cons

It can be a bit hectic and you must be self motivated to enjoy it.

Advice to Senior Management

Alex Pinchev is not leading Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst is. I think senior management is generally doing a good job. Areas of improvement include facilitating better internal processes and communication between organizations, but these efforts are underway and bearing fruit. I approve of Jim's leadership.