Inside Pivotal Labs, the Agile Force Behind Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Inside Pivotal Labs, the Agile Force Behind Twitter

gigaom.com

47 pointsjustlearning11 comments

Not a bad article/video at all, but I don't believe the title of this thread to be appropriate.

They weren't so much behind twitter, as they were brought on partway through the game to help with some (I assume) scaling concerns.

(edit: I like pivotal, but keeping the quality on HN is essential to my being)

Title seems appropriate. "...agile...behind Twitter".

keywords: agile (whether you like buzzword or not)

It's more about changing the culture of Twitter engineering department.

Good to see Pivotal Labs getting some of the credit they deserve.

Definitely. I know a couple of people who work there and they are some of the smartest/best programmers I know.

I've heard a VC saying that Pivotal is a great company to build polished software for you if you have raised a big chunk of money.

Anyone know how much they actually cost though? Are their rates through the roof because people throw their VC money at them?

Companies pay Pivotal between $150,000 and $600,000 on average, according to VP Technology and Principal Ian McFarland.

(from the article)

Sounds a bit hard to afford if you're not funded. I'd be curious to know what this includes too: how long, how many developers?

From 2-7 months, although typically 3-6

(Also from the article ;) )

I tend to like Pivotal and have friends contracting them.

Have any other open source efforts other than Diaspora come out from them? I don't understand how they let Diaspora do a big bang code release of such poor quality if they are the Rails experts they are reported to be.

I think the Diaspora just worked in the SF office. I don't believe it was a project out of Pivotal.

That's correct. We just let them use the space; we don't code with them.

Wow!

Being co-located I would hope folks would have taken an interest and the Diaspora folks having enough maturity to ask for early feedback from the more experienced folks in the room from Pivotal or others.

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