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I worked at a health insurance company 6 years ago where they brought in a group from Pivotal for a week and we worked with them to see how they ran a Scrum tea

I worked at a health insurance company 6 years ago where they brought in a group from Pivotal for a week and we worked with them to see how they ran a Scrum team. I was amazed. The Scrum master wasn't just some busy body manager who only ran stand-ups, he was constantly floating around throughout the day helping people out. We had 4 developers and 4 consultants, so we mostly paired up and that was super productive. Pivotal tracker was better than Jira. They had a strong focus on getting something working and collaborating. It was eye-opening. Unfortunately, the company was picking 4 random employee developers from across the organization each week. Most of the organization was contractors, including everyone on my team aside from me. My team used Jira and had no option to use something else. Back on my team, the contractor Scrum master and contractor product owner continued to run the team incredibly ineffectively. I can't tell if those few consultants I worked with were representative of Pivotal as a whole, but I will say that that week was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal part of my career.

latchkey 3y ago
The way Pivotal Labs works is that people who don't buy into the whole culture tend to migrate out pretty quickly. The ones that do buy in, stay around for a long time, learn things inside and out, and end up getting farmed out to places like yours. So you generally get the best of the best on consulting agreements like that. I've heard some horror stories about Pivotal as well. Not everyone or every project was perfect. Their pricing is also insane. I'm sure your company paid through the roof for what you got. But overall, the general education that I got there for how to run projects and build products is hands down the best thing I've ever learned in software engineering. It is funny, they don't teach that sort of stuff in schools as much as they focus on just teaching you how to code. Oh and PT is hands down better than Jira, but that is a low bar since Jira is really shit. That said, it isn't necessarily about the tool, but how you use it. PT can be used for good as well as evil and knowing how to write stories, point them properly and manage them, is a learned skill.
gymbeaux 3y ago
It’s humorous to see your company’s seemingly-wise desire to do Agile properly shadowed by the classic attitude of “Contractors? The people we pay to do a job same as FTE? Fuck ‘em!”
- fragmede 3y ago
  Contractors != Consultants
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    They said that they and their team were contractors and thus continued to run inefficiently
p1necone 3y ago
> constantly floating around throughout the day helping people out I unironically love being distracted by other peoples problems. Usually the person giving me the work I'm really supposed to be doing gets annoyed at me for it, I'd love it to be my actual job.
papercurt 3y ago
The people at pivotal labs I got to know were amazing and I learned so much from then. However, there was also a ton of cargo cult going on among them and the code was far from brilliant. In the End they couldn't change much of my company's approach to software development. Managers mostly want to be fast like a Silicon Valley startup only if it does not mean they need to change anything in the organisation. Anyway, years of semi-successful software projects are more likely to bring a change...
- latchkey 3y ago
  Definitely cultish and yes, I agree... a lot of the engineers were brilliant, but their code was sometimes a bit crazy. I worked with one guy who meta programmed everything in Ruby to the point where even the tests were meta programmed and none of the stack traces made any sense when things failed. The complexity level was just too far over the top for the benefits of the meta programming. I've also tried to 'change' companies towards Pivotal process. It never really works. People are more than willing to listen, but when it comes down to the practice of things, it just doesn't happen for one reason or another. I think that is why Pivotal Labs works so well... everyone working there is already on the same page and sticks around for many years... and anyone who isn't on page, migrates out relatively quickly. I think this is also a bit why 'agile' tends to get a lot of hate/fear on HN. You really have to be military and cultish about it from day one, like PL is. Few people are willing to buy into that. Even I was skeptical of it when I first started there and it took me a while to relax into it.
twic 3y ago
> Unfortunately, the company was picking 4 random employee developers from across the organization each week. Oh god. I worked at Pivotal, and i saw something like this happen on one project. Four Pivotal Labs devs, four client devs; each client dev was with us for two weeks, so each week, we started with two new people, and two people with one week's experience on the project. Absolute madness. There was some weird politics, and i think the people running the project on the client side wanted it to fail, so this may have been an attempt at sabotage. The client devs were very sharp, and fully cooperative, so we did get some work and some training done despite all that. Common consulting L.

latchkey 3y ago

The way Pivotal Labs works is that people who don't buy into the whole culture tend to migrate out pretty quickly. The ones that do buy in, stay around for a long time, learn things inside and out, and end up getting farmed out to places like yours. So you generally get the best of the best on consulting agreements like that. I've heard some horror stories about Pivotal as well. Not everyone or every project was perfect. Their pricing is also insane. I'm sure your company paid through the roof for what you got. But overall, the general education that I got there for how to run projects and build products is hands down the best thing I've ever learned in software engineering. It is funny, they don't teach that sort of stuff in schools as much as they focus on just teaching you how to code. Oh and PT is hands down better than Jira, but that is a low bar since Jira is really shit. That said, it isn't necessarily about the tool, but how you use it. PT can be used for good as well as evil and knowing how to write stories, point them properly and manage them, is a learned skill.

gymbeaux 3y ago

It’s humorous to see your company’s seemingly-wise desire to do Agile properly shadowed by the classic attitude of “Contractors? The people we pay to do a job same as FTE? Fuck ‘em!”

fragmede 3y ago
Contractors != Consultants
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  They said that they and their team were contractors and thus continued to run inefficiently

p1necone 3y ago

> constantly floating around throughout the day helping people out I unironically love being distracted by other peoples problems. Usually the person giving me the work I'm really supposed to be doing gets annoyed at me for it, I'd love it to be my actual job.

papercurt 3y ago

The people at pivotal labs I got to know were amazing and I learned so much from then. However, there was also a ton of cargo cult going on among them and the code was far from brilliant. In the End they couldn't change much of my company's approach to software development. Managers mostly want to be fast like a Silicon Valley startup only if it does not mean they need to change anything in the organisation. Anyway, years of semi-successful software projects are more likely to bring a change...

latchkey 3y ago
Definitely cultish and yes, I agree... a lot of the engineers were brilliant, but their code was sometimes a bit crazy. I worked with one guy who meta programmed everything in Ruby to the point where even the tests were meta programmed and none of the stack traces made any sense when things failed. The complexity level was just too far over the top for the benefits of the meta programming. I've also tried to 'change' companies towards Pivotal process. It never really works. People are more than willing to listen, but when it comes down to the practice of things, it just doesn't happen for one reason or another. I think that is why Pivotal Labs works so well... everyone working there is already on the same page and sticks around for many years... and anyone who isn't on page, migrates out relatively quickly. I think this is also a bit why 'agile' tends to get a lot of hate/fear on HN. You really have to be military and cultish about it from day one, like PL is. Few people are willing to buy into that. Even I was skeptical of it when I first started there and it took me a while to relax into it.

twic 3y ago

> Unfortunately, the company was picking 4 random employee developers from across the organization each week. Oh god. I worked at Pivotal, and i saw something like this happen on one project. Four Pivotal Labs devs, four client devs; each client dev was with us for two weeks, so each week, we started with two new people, and two people with one week's experience on the project. Absolute madness. There was some weird politics, and i think the people running the project on the client side wanted it to fail, so this may have been an attempt at sabotage. The client devs were very sharp, and fully cooperative, so we did get some work and some training done despite all that. Common consulting L.