RedHat to add at least 1000 jobs in 2012, CEO says

If they're looking to hire 1000 people this year, you better hope that their HR and hiring workflows have gotten better than what they were in 2008.<p>I sent my CV to a Sales Engineer in March. First phone screen went well, end of quarter happened, and the next thing you know it's June before my second and third round phone screens take place. They fly me to NC in August. Did more interviews, and received a verbal offer on-location, with a formal offer letter, along with stuff I needed to complete for my background check, etc, to arrive via mail.<p>Sent my receipts in for reimbursement...and then radio silence...for two months. I received my expenses back...so I just assumed that they had found a better candidate, or, something, and that they were no longer interested in me. I did get a phone call from someone at RedHat asking if I'd be interested in a different position, but, I opted-out, having enough of the interview rodeo.<p>Similar people that I know who have been hired directly by Red Hat have mentioned tales of similar woes with their hiring process, so, I'm somewhat confident that it's not me that's broken....

Just out of curiosity; I have moved from IT management to consulting and design. I haven't been running production systems directly for the last 3 years.<p>What is Red hat doing to support this many employees?<p>Who is using Red Hat most? When I was at Lockheed, I was deploying CENTOS - as well as at other startups. I also used Ubuntu in a number of cases.<p>Are extreme scale companies, such as Google Facebook and Amazon not using their own custom builds?<p>I just can't figure out what that additional 1,000 employees would be doing.<p>EDIT: Ok after reading that article, and a few others; they are going for a big cloud push. With the acquisition on Gluster, it would appear that rolling native cloud-specific features into their offering makes it a strong candidate for cloud infrastructure on which others build their business and services.<p>I can also imagine that with the federal cloud strategy, where they see the ability to shift several billion in annual spending on systems to cloud based services, that redhat will be selling to those who are trying for that federal business.

Nitpick: it's Red Hat. Two words.<p>I wish other Open Source companies adopted some of Red Hat's awesomeness, specifically open development of upcoming releases, a public bug tracker, and their patent promise.

I currently work for AWS in Seattle, but am wanting to move back home to the midwest in the next 6 months or so. I want to stay relevant and involved in a cloud related job like I have now. Does anyone know if Red Hat would allow me to work for them as a consultant but out of the midwest? Any help our advice would be appreciated.

Don't get too excited. The jobs will likely be focused on India and other cheap destinations where the hiring process is quick. Red Hat is a pretty average company. Having nearly all of the talent drained into first-tier companies (Google, Twitter, Amazon) and second-tier companies (Oracle, VMware, IBM) it's closer to a third-tier company now.