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Comment by postit | Hacker News Reader

Thanks.

This summarizes and completes perfectly the ThoughWorker bingo. They are always dreaming about the ultimate factory line for knowledge workers, but they don’t get much done other than blog posts.

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Last year I got to work on a codebase done from scratch by ThoughtWorks India, it was a convoluted piece of shit anywhere you looked... and, again, it was from scratch, they made a 1 year-old codebase feel like a giant ball of legacy spaghetti.

Even by the HNs/SV measure of success they just got 700 million in funding and a 4.6 billion valuation... Just from writing blog posts apparently.

Well, sell each consultant hour ~100 and pay ~30. After the initial project implementation swap the whole team to India, move the existing people to another projects. Keep everyone in a cult like mindset, profit.

Do you work somewhere that pays you exactly the same as the value you generate?

Are you saying ThoughtWorks bait and switch their customers? Do you mean without their knowledge? Or are they convincing them to accept dev teams from India?

Anecdotal but that's exactly what ThoughtWorks did for a company I work for, and then we entered protracted legal battles around Intellectual Property for the work/crap they had produced.

I don't know about what they actually do because I've never interacted with the company other than reading what they publish. I have to tell you that if you apply the things they share, where previously you had a home-grown "process" or lack thereof, your engineering organization will produce better results and your engineers will be happier. I can't vouch for every single thing they ever wrote, but I think this style of rebuttal must be coming from someone who's had to work in disfunctional places with overbearing product management.

The pendulum can swing too far both ways. Having worked for a startup that consisted of probably half ex-thought workers I can attest that yes some of the development processes and infrastructure we created were commendable. Some others were just absolutely frustrating. However I feel the only metric that’s really worth mentioning is that after a couple of years, there was practically no product to show of, not a single paying customer and the company slowly burned through its entire runway and faded to (more) obscurity. Yes I’m convinced that the ideological stances such staff took were directly correlated with the business failure. I think the only positive result was focusing on building an ivory tower meant everyone’s CV looked more impressive.

I think you overestimate the sophistication of the average Dev shop. There are many orgs where "having a basic CI process" would represent a massive leap forward in developer productivity and happiness.

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