Yep, we know a bunch of you are thinking, “nope, no C-suite for me today.” Managing people dynamics? Doing things other than coding? Being responsible for a P&L, accountable to a board, and managing headcount? Before you stop reading, consider the case of our guest, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks, who began as a developer, got his start tinkering in open source, and was ultimately driven by the unstoppable force of curiosity to take on roles as coach and chief officer. Matt reflects on the highlights of his career journey, how he managed tradeoffs between his love for coding with his momentum through managerial ranks, and how his passion to be a mentor has been the driving force behind his progress. Cassidy Williams, who recently joined the C-suite herself, helps to steer the conversation.
Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.
He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.
Imagine trying to navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.
We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.
Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.
Follow Matt, Ben, and Cassidy.
[intro music plays]
Ben Popper Where do companies go for trusted remote engineers? They go to turing.com where talent is vetted through over five hours of technical tests and interviews. Spend less time hiring and more time building, choose Turing today. Enjoy a no-cost two-week trial at turing.com.
BP Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, joined as I often am by my wonderful collaborator, Cassidy Williams. Cassidy, how are you doing today?
Cassidy Williams Hello! I'm excited to be here today.
BP Yeah, we have a great guest today– Matt Hicks, who is the CEO over at Red Hat. We're excited to have him on and to chat about his journey from developer to executive. So Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Hicks Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
BP So the first thing we always ask folks to do to the degree that you're comfortable is to date yourself a little. How did you first touch a line of code? What got you started in this world and hooked on software or working with technology?
MH Code is a pretty probably wide one for this. The first attempt at code was on an IBM 8086 when I was I think six years old, with no understanding of computing trying to make the computer do something and failing but just being fascinated with that interaction. And since then, after that age, it was starting to take whatever programming classes I could in school and just absolutely fell in love with it. I did computer engineering in school but was constantly drawn to software. It was in the dotcom craze and pull at the time, but I’ve just loved every aspect of that from learning it to finding open source and really getting the pull from that as well.
BP Very cool.
CW That's awesome. When would you say you got into open source? Because relative to technology things it's kind of new, but not really. It kind of started as more of a manifesto before it became a more mainstream thing.
MH For me, it was with Linux itself, so you're dating me saying it's fairly new. I'm like, “Well this was in the mid-90’s,” but really you're right, there wasn't a tremendous gravity around things outside of Linux. It was a very practical, “I can compile this and make it work on my machine.” I actually have one of Robert Love’s Linux Kernel Development books behind me where it was this combination of being able to see the code and learn from the code with just enough explanation that was available around it to really make you appreciate it, and I fell in love with that. And that was years and years before GitHub and Stack Overflow and access to it but I think all of that helped amplify what I found so fascinating with open source and seeing how that could work in the early days of it.
BP Right. Yeah, you make a good point. What did you do? You found listservs, you went on bulletin boards, you bought books. When you wanted to learn something new from open source and Linux to something at work, how did you figure out that stuff since we didn't have the internet we have today with everything at your fingertips?
MH It really was mailing lists, listservs, and I bought more technology books, like actual physical books, no Kindle. Get them, stack them up at home all the way through college. The Borders, Barnes and Nobles of that time. It kills me today because it was probably a bit of an inefficient way to learn. But to your point, that is really what was accessible and that actually is what I loved about open source– you could learn from the code itself. I probably didn't have access to that style of programming until I was at university for that. And so that was just early exposure to things that you didn't have the same resources to be able to find in a book. But yeah, that was a different style of learning I think than what you might do today.
CW I feel like anybody who learned more than 15 years ago had to do some level of that, where for myself even, it was viewing the source code of websites and being like, “So that's what this tag does in HTML,” and then messing with it a little bit.
MH Absolutely.
BP Yeah. A lot of book reports got written thanks to Microsoft Encarta. There was no plagiarism checker back then. Matt, tell us a little bit about some of your first jobs before you moved into the executive stuff and then we'll talk about that transition. You mentioned the dotcom boom. What was your entry into working in this world and what are some of your best memories of that time?
MH When I was in school before I had graduated I loved computer engineering, but it was much more hardware based. And at that point the goal of that was sort of to end up in a bunny suit doing chip fabrication, and I didn't love that aspect or I didn't have the same passion as I did for software so I actually started consulting for various companies when I was in school. And I remember I had to buy my own laptop to be able to reproduce environments. These were in the early, early days of Java and servlets and how you make environments work for training teams and I loved it. I mean, it was from making eCommerce work for alumni organizations; I worked in a startup at the time to help them go through that. But what I loved about it was a very fundamental understanding of what makes the web work today, and I appreciate to this day getting to live through that period and learn by mistakes and trial and error of how you actually operate in that type of environment. Whereas I think today we take a lot of that for granted. We just utilize it, but during that time period you got to participate a bit in the building of it. So consulting was my first foray before I graduated that led to actually consulting as my first job that I took when I graduated. Very similar style. The economy was a little rougher then because that was after the crash of the dotcom boom. But the same approach– get in, understand what companies are doing with software, try to help move them along on that journey, and I've never looked back from that really. I really enjoyed it.
CW And so what was the transition like when you decided to go from developer to manager to executive?
MH It was interesting for me, and that started actually when I was in IT. Actually I started in Red Hat in the IT group because I had done IT consulting quite a bit. And moving from engineer to manager, one of the first lessons I usually tell people is I realized that you weren't going to be a great manager by being the best coder, because that was my background, that was my domain. You sort of want to be on the team and be credible with that, and yet that doesn't go very far as a manager. You really have to make this shift into using that experience to be a great coach with it. That was my first team, “Wow, this is what it means to be a manager.” But I loved the outcome of that of actually being able to teach some, being able to stay current myself, but then really work to get others to be the best programmer on the team. That was when probably the managerial bug caught me. And I went in and out of manager roles in that. Actually, when I switched to engineering in Red Hat, I went back to an individual contributor role on what is OpenShift now, and I found my way back into management again on that. So I've done this shift back and forth, but for me it was always the balance of currency, like, am I still relevant? Do I know these skills? And being a manager, can I be a good coach with them instead of continuing to pursue the skills just directly on myself?
BP Yeah. One thing you said there that really interests me that I've been thinking a lot about is how much learning you need to do as a developer, especially an independent contributor, because new technologies and frameworks and languages are coming around that your organization is trying to adopt or that are just interesting to you. Maybe this could help us get ahead or do something innovative we haven't done before. But it's hard to find the time to balance those two things. So when you put yourself more in that coaching role, as you said, that's a great time to do extra learning and to sort of do that in partnership with the folks you're working with because you don't have as much on you in terms of, “Oh, I’ve got to deliver this project or this feature or I’ve got to fix this bug on deadline.” That's very cool. In your current role what are you focused on? Are there things happening right now at Red Hat that you'd like to talk about?
MH Yeah, in my current role I still love the core connection to what we do. I love that Red Hat is a very technical company, we build platforms, and so I still get to keep that connectivity to the technical side even though there's a lot of just culture focus, business outcome focus. The exciting thing I think with Red Hat right now though is that Red Hat is generally known for making customers successful on premise with software where they run their own software. I think the customer challenge, we call it hybrid cloud, but customers are ending up on premise, they're almost all in some migration of utilizing public clouds or multiple public clouds, and then there is an astounding amount of innovation in what we would classify as the edge. Like, put a 5G tether between your public cloud or your data centers and your autonomous cars or phones or drones or any other devices there. And at Red Hat I think the opportunity for us we're excited about is that Linux is at the core of all of those because of the hardware that you use. It might be big iron hardware in the data center, it might be virtual hardware in the public clouds, and it might be embedded systems at the edge. But our view is that it's going to be open source because that's the innovation model that works, is sustainable, lets a whole planet of people contribute, and it's probably going to be Linux based. And then you get into things like Kubernetes that lets you take a lot of Linux instances and make them work as units and how do you manage them? But that is squarely where Red Hat is in this point in time. We think it's an incredible market. We often have a participatory type view that we're not the end solution usually, because we are a platform company and I love getting to work and partner with other companies and co-create with customers, but it is an exciting time. I'm usually telling my children this, like, “You have no appreciation for how exciting it is to be alive right now.”
BP You don't understand the cloud! Yeah, old man shouts about the cloud. That’s really cool.
CW It's so exciting to see, because in general, I very strongly believe that open source is going to eat software just as much as software has kind of eaten the world. And so a company like Red Hat is kind of pioneering that direction and has been for so long because it's one of the big ones that people think of when you think of commercial open source software.
MH Yeah. I do think with the model, it's been a while now. When we were talking about how I started in the mid-90’s with this and we're in 2022 and it has only grown in scope. I think companies have started to figure out patterns of how they can use it well and still contribute back to really make it sustainable. And it's still a bit of an art of how do you do that well where it benefits you as a company, but then you've also got to be comfortable with that you've got to keep feeding that original system that made you successful as well, and I love that. It's probably what I love about Red Hat more than just any software company. Not just building great software, delivering great products, but it's in finding that art and balance where you feel like you're contributing to something bigger in the work that you do every day, and it changes competition, it changes a lot of aspects. But I agree with you, I think it's the model that in the end is probably one of the best ways that software can be written. And if you couple that with a lot of crazy hardware changes going on right now as well, that's that intersection that I think will be a fun 10 years to see what companies and people do with it because they have access to the technology. The access to the hardware is wild to me compared to what you had in the early-2000’s at your fingertips so I think we'll see a lot of innovation with that combination.
CW Yeah. I think with so many things it almost feels cyclical because it's technology that kind of has existed for a while, but the access to it has increased tremendously. And so things that only big enterprises could do in the early-2000’s now someone could do on their home computer.
MH Yeah, I agree. I was recently telling my daughter about this, which I don't think she appreciated totally or much at all, but just of the power that's in a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino and what you can get on Adafruit and how you can put together almost anything that you can imagine, where I was giving the ‘when I was young, you had to purchase 100,000 units of this sensor’. But you’re right, that access is probably the biggest thing that's changed and it changes prototyping, it changes that cycle of taking something in your head and making it real which is fun. I still spend a lot of time, as you might be able to tell, on my own time to keep pursuing that learning path to build the intuition for where I feel like users are going to go or the market will go as well.
BP That's very cool. I recently got a 3D printer so I could save a little money on all the plastic toys my son demands and then breaks. Now I can riprap them. What are you noodling on in your spare time, Matt?
MH So, I would say I have done a deep dive, but I think in reality it is touching the surface around AI and machine learning. And I always love the practical, “How can I make this work for real?” We had an old phone system that when you have to buzz somebody in– we live in the city– it would do a shrill ring, but you couldn't hear it anywhere in the house. And so I built a little machine learning that learned that ring versus my kid screaming or anything else and then would play it over Sonos nicely through the whole house. And still I get excited every time that pleasant bell goes through the house and no one else in my family appreciates it. I'm like, “That is an AI doorbell.”
BP The sound of a problem solved.
MH Yeah. But that was a neat journey of just getting that hands-on experience with machine learning and getting a feeling for the Python ecosystems around it and where ARM worked and then didn't work for me with Fast Fourier Transforms, and just a lot of that. That's what I've been diving into recently. It's a key space for us as a company and trying to get a feeling of what customers are going through, the good and the bad there too.
CW That's a whole other thing that is so much more accessible now, which again is exciting in that there's a lot to learn too.
MH Yep, absolutely.
BP So Matt, as you look ahead to the future, what are the things that Red Hat is doing for its employees and developers to sort of figure out this new world we're in? Remote, hybrid, like you said, often done maybe asynchronously and open source. How do you think developers are most productive and most happy in the workplace these days?
MH It's tricky. Luckily I don't think anyone has this figured out. So at Red Hat we were pretty comfortable with remote anyway because so much of our culture is just based on that contributor style. Whether it's kernel patches on a mailing list or GitHub, you don't need to be in person to do that so we dealt with Covid pretty well. Everybody was home, we operated fine. What I have noticed coming back though is the younger earlier career engineer specifically coming in, that mentoring experience of, “I don't want to ask everything on a Slack channel or an IRC in front of everyone. I want to turn my head and be able to ask a question from someone that knows.” There is I think a hunger for us in those earlier careers. They network, they connect, they get together in person, that I didn't know if I would've expected that. And yet we do struggle at I think the mid, more comfortable with their career engineers. They're fine being home. And so a lot of what I've tried to reinforce is how do we find that balance of what we're accountable for individually, like how much did I code, versus what are we accountable for collectively? If I help train the next generation and the earlier associates coming in that I think a lot of us have benefited from, I have no idea how that ends up, but that has been the balance we're trying to strike as things open a little back up, making offices work well for associates, making them purposeful, but I think we're pretty early on that journey. But it was fascinating, that isn't where I would've guessed the challenge point or outcome would be for us, but it's exciting. I think it's all workable and I would say we are much, much better at doing hybrid these days than we were before. We had an in person audience community and we had a remote population. We're infinitely better at bridging those two worlds which I think will only get better from that. Now we just have to figure out how to close these gaps.
CW Yeah, and I've definitely seen similarly it's very 50/50 where some people, especially people earlier in their careers said, “The last two years of my university I was all remote. I want to be in person.” And then other people are just like, “I kind of liked being remote and I want to stay that way.” And it's a very interesting dynamic that I didn't even consider, but it's true because it changed so much of their early life experience and early career experience.
MH Yeah. For me, I focus on the culture of the company a lot. I believe goal number one is if we can be passionate about why we're here and what Red Hat means, the software industry and how we contribute to open source, we'll have the time and flexibility to find that new balance. So I usually start with let's be passionate about the right things, and then I wish I had more answers for how do you make this work for, Cassidy, to your point, that 50/50 split? For me, it's how do you find the 10% or so that might be able to bridge across the two where you're giving people that want to connect and be there who are like, “I'm tired of being home. I want to be here,” and they want that. I think for me, the early career experience I had, which a lot of it was learning from others, watching them on the job, seeing what it took to be great at areas. How do we do that and also excel at doing remote which is a core part of how open source was built as well? So to be determined on that, but I think we'll have a few years tuning that one.
BP Yeah, I like your sentiment which is that if you get the core right and the mission right, then you'll buy yourself the time to figure those things out and try a few different ways and iterate. So, Matt, for all the developers who are listening who know and love Red Hat and its dedication to open source, they also know IBM, how is that working– the partnership of the two?
MH Yeah. I think with IBM we're three years and change into this. And I think the core of the independence of Red Hat and being able to be a great partner with IBM but also continue to partner and do our focus around an open source model has been key. The reason I think this works well for everyone is IBM arguably has a lot more reach across the planet than we do. We’re obviously like, “We're going to bring open source into every enterprise on the planet.” With it, IBM is there in those enterprises. But IBM is also comfortable with open source and committed to hybrid cloud. And so that alignment, and they will preference Red Hat, they understand our model, they are doing one of the best demonstrations of what can be done with Red Hat platforms, but then giving Red Hat the independence to partner with competitors in cases. It's been a phenomenal alignment. I think a lot of that credit is to Arvind, who is the current CEO but also helped drive the acquisition. I started my career at IBM and it's pretty cool to boomerang back in this long round but at this seat in Red Hat and be really comfortable with how they appreciate and understand Red Hat's model. So I think it has worked really, really well and I think it's actually a great thing for our core passion of making enterprises successful with open source.
BP Yeah. I like your point about how reach and also openness to working with competition really kind of shows the commitment there.
CW As a new CTO myself, what advice do you have for someone who hasn't been in this level of a role before?
MH I think for me, I focus a lot on how you can influence authentically, like how you want to show up and lead, how you want people to see your leadership style. And I think if you get that right for me, that mix of empathy, you know what other people are doing, you really have your leadership style honed in. I’ve talked to some other CEOs coming into this role and their advice was that you have to do you at the end of the day. And so really being dialed into your style, and understanding you're going to have to make a bunch of decisions and sort of set that course, especially in a CTO role. But I think for me it's knowing how you want to influence people and having it be really authentic. I think that brings the best combination versus trying to mimic what somebody else has done in the role. But that's helped serve me well, because you have to make easy decisions and tough ones, but if you're comfortable with the core of what you're doing that has helped me really feel conviction and passion about what I'm doing.
[music plays]
BP All right, everybody. We want to say once again, thanks for listening and we want to shout out a member of the community who came on and helped spread some knowledge. The inquisitive badge: awarded five hours ago to Wonton, who came on 30 separate days and asked a great question maintaining a positive question record. So thanks for all your curiosity, I'm sure a lot of folks have learned from those questions and answers. I am Ben Popper. I'm the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper. Email us with questions or suggestions, podcast@stackoverflow.com. And if you like this episode or you like the show, go ahead and leave us a rating and a review. It really helps.
CW My name is Cassidy Williams. I am CTO at Contenda, and you can find me @Cassidoo on most things.
MH And I'm Matt Hicks, CEO of Red Hat. You can find me on Twitter at @MattHicksJ. And I just want to say thanks to the tons of creative minds building Stack Overflow because I think for me that's gone hand in hand with learning and open source for a long time. So I very much appreciate what you've done, and best of luck in the years to come too.
BP Oh, happy we could help. I'm not going to shout out your user profile, I won't out you, but I'm glad if we could help you solve a few things or debug here and there. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening so much, and we will talk to you soon.
CW Bye!
[outro music plays]