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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much the only things I know about ThoughtWorks I got from Zed Shaw's Rails rant, which put them in a sharply negative light as a body shop of mostly-useless people. Was that an accurate characterization or is there more to them?

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I worked as a Rails developer at ThoughtWorks for three years, from 2008 to 2011, on three different projects, including the one they called "the largest Rails project in the world" at the time. [1] I didn't see any of the toxic behavior Zed recounts. Rather, I got to work with some of the best developers -- and smartest people -- I've ever met, and had a lot of fun while leveling up my career.

[1] https://conferences.oreilly.com/rails2009/public/schedule/de...

I wrote a blog post about it at the time. [1] Wouldn't change a word of it today.

[1] http://davidrupp.blogspot.ie/2010/01/why-should-you-want-to-...

I got fired for being a "Rails trouble maker" in late 2009.

Never saw your blog back then but if I did I would have applied.

I will be incredibly impressed with Apax if they are able keep this type of culture thriving.

Nice to hear it. Certainly other parts of Zed's rant didn't really stand up to close scrutiny, so I figured I'd ask someone who was really there.

What they really are is subjective. But, they have grown fairly large (4500 employees, 14 countries) and still maintained an image of being in a quality tier above a body shop.

They are typically brought in to do marquee type projects, so you can imagine animosity from developers at their clients...they didn't get to do said project, because their boss hired it out.

It could be that their quality isn't great, but even if it is, they would still see criticism from that crowd.

I worked for ThoughtWorks in Chicago for 6-ish six years (2000-2007). I started the Selenium project there in 2004. At the time, I was a Python and JavaScript developer living in a sea of Ruby, Java, and .Net fanatics.

Hi Jason!!! Still a Ruby fanatic over here although I do a lot more JavaScript these days

Hi, Obie! :-) If I hadn't discovered Python first, I probably would have been a Ruby fanatic, too. But yeah, I mostly do JavaScript now.

Ironically, I've a got a theory (I did confirm parts of this with Martin years ago, though), that it's all Martin's fault. Before Martin was into Ruby, for a brief period of time, he was a Python fan. But by the time we wrote Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, he was full-on into Ruby. Then DHH came along and wanted to implement one of the first patterns listed (Active Record). DHH wanted to to step away from PHP and write his new code in whatever Martin's favorite language was. And the rest is history. But within a small window of time, DHH's project might have been called Python on Rails. So, it's all Martin's fault that you (or DHH or half of ThoughtWorks) never became a Python fanatic. :-)

I never worked with them, but their CI product seems solid, and a few of its concepts seem to have predated the more popular competition by a few years: https://www.gocd.org/

With CruiseControl, ThoughtWorks practically invented the CI tool category. https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration....

bullshit. continuous integration came out of netscape, which was open sourced by mozilla in the late '90s.

i worked for a company in the mid '00s that had some thoughtworks people come in. they were spouting all sorts of nonsense about design patterns and this and that.

i asked "how come nobody in open source speaks like this?" "oh, well you know the scope and scale of the projects and the quality of the code in the open source world doesn't compare to that which is locked up inside of companies..."

mhmm...

Okay, I stand corrected. Sorry about that. After some googling... Are you referring to Tinderbox? https://oduinn.com/2014/06/04/farewell-to-tinderbox/

(It looks like Tinderbox predates CruiseControl by 3/4 years.)

Also, the CI Wikipedia page should probably be fixed to also include info about Mozilla's CI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

Got a link for this? The original seems to be gone.

"Rails is a ghetto" returns fruitful links, fyi. It's a classic.

https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/01/zed-shaw-puts-the-smack-do...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedsha...

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