Random guy on TikTok - Must be true….
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Well…they don’t own their building and the lease is up this year. I wouldn’t be surprised.
https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2024/05/03/red-hat-raleigh-office-remote-workers-wfh.html
Which is it?
Either way, good. They kicked out buku my favorite restaurant downtown and I’m still mad. 
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I was downtown for dinner on Saturday at Daijobu and that was the busiest I’d seen that area in a while (for non-Hopscotch weekends). However, when I leaving the YMCA downtown on Tuesday night, Fayetteville St felt empty.
If Red Hat were to leave, that would be a huge loss - but they also have still been allowing for a lot of WFH IIRC. IMO, downtown really needs more multi-family and hotels to open up DT to fill the regular office void during the week. Some of that pipeline has opened recently (Maeva, Mira, Tempo, Acorn, etc.) - and there’s still some runway with the Omni and other projects in the coming years. I personally would love to work downtown, will be interesting to see what comes of some of the vacant office in the coming years.
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I wouldn’t be entirely sad to see Red Hat go. I can stare at the building and their parking deck from my office and it’s just not that active. My prediction still stands that downtown will change over to having 100 companies in it to 500, or in other words, more companies with smaller footprints compared to today. I think this is actually pretty good and that diversity will set us up nicely in the future.
The problem is transitioning to it and of course we’ll have to deal with putzes like tiktok guy going on about downtown dying. WRAL will say we’re dead and other “final nail in the coffin” comments will come out.
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I can overlook their entrance from my balcony, and they seem somewhat busy going in when I’m out there drinking my coffee in the morning. I would be sad for them to leave. I think it’s more because I worry how healthy they’ve been since the IBM acquisition.
We have a lot of job sprawl in the triangle, and I worry about having more of it. Having downtown be a large employment center can be a very useful driver of transit ridership and is better for transit ridership than residential density, even though residential does help.
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from a 2012 Biz Journal article and Red Hat is subleasing from Progress Energy now known as Duke Energy. They have 10 more years on this sublease and they would be on the hook for that but after that who knows.
Red Hat plans to move its headquarters from North Carolina State University to a new 19-story, 365,000-square-foot, hi-rise downtown. Red Hat will be subleasing the space from Progress Energy.
The lease contract amounts to about $86.68 million, not including concessions, over the next 23 years., the Triangle Business Journal reports.
The new building, Red Hat Tower, is situated at the corner of Wilmington and Davie streets. Company CFO Charlie Peters told Triangle Business Journal that the move would start this summer and should be completed by next year.
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2012 + 23 years = 2035, not 2025. What gives?
In case anyone was curious where I heard the RedHat news. Randomly popped up on my feed
Catastrophizing gets attention, in case anyone isn’t aware of this. 
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doesn’t add up. I know they got that space at a great rate but they have 10 more years of it. Does anyone know Red Hat IBM’s work from office policy?
One of our friends that works at Red Hat has been 100% remote since Covid. I think he said he has only been back to the office once or twice a year since. And he lives in Raleigh, so he isn’t a long distance remote worker.
My office has required 3+ days per week in the office over the past year or two, but there is zero enforcement. I have coworkers that I have only seen three or four times over the past 5 years. If the companies won’t enforce it, people aren’t going to show up. We actually have fewer people in our office now (within my group anyway) than before the requirement. Yesterday we had 5 (of 40+) in the office. 
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If this is the case with Red Hat they may really shrink their space at the end of their sublease. If that many people are not coming downtown to the office then the downtown business district has already felt this impact.
I mean I live in Downtown Raleigh and commute to RTP. Find me another place with good, walkable amenities with a one seat transit ride into the park, where I can bike or take RTP Connect the last 3 miles to the office. I could move down Hillsborough Street, further down the 100, but I don’t want to be around random college students at this point in my life and I can access that living downtown. All of the other places I can think of are other downtowns of the triangle but for whatever reason, Raleigh has spoken to me.
However I do think that we should work for more office activation downtown and along GoRaleigh routes. Downtowns are at their best when they mix uses and I sometimes worry that Downtown Raleigh is going to turn into government buildings, apartments, kitschy stores/restaurants/coffee shops, and festivals. All of them are good, but without private sector office, I do think that our downtown is a lot weaker.
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This guy doesn’t know Downtown Raleigh at all and is drawing wild conclusions based on a couple of instances and doesn’t even seem right in regards to RedHat. I’d actually prefer a more active tenant in that building so IF RH does leave, it’s an opportunity. And his wrap up comment, “all that’s left downtown is banks” is so wrong. If he talked to anyone in this forum he’d realize quickly he should move on to doom and gloom another city.
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IMO, our office strategy needs to evolve to match how and why people come into the office. If they are able to sit a desk and do heads down work effectively at home, why would they come to an office to have that exact same experience?
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My friend who works at red hat moved to Florida
I agree, although I don’t know if the post covid hybrid consensus is permanent and I think that hybrid is more likely to stay than full-remote. Although I also think that a lot of return to office mandates undermine the trust between managers and workers to get work done. So, I think this is still in flux.
I know that I collaborate better in the office. I know that I need to be hands on from time to time. Sometimes I am better heads down at home but it’s much easier for me to have an unproductive day. The data I read says that the people most excited about working from home, tend to be the least productive at home.
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I completely agree. He’s got some wild opinions after looking through his content
We are not disagreeing here. What I’m saying is that our office designs need to change to reflect what we do in the office. You already said the key word here and that’s collaborate. Many legacy offices remain a sea of cubicles with secondary or tertiary thought given to how we support effective collaboration. That needs to be pulled forward.
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