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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

> There must be a middle ground where developers can focus on the core business logic that yields the most value without incurring technical debt and making the development process a nightmare. I don’t have an answer for that, nor have I worked at a company that found the perfect balance.

Personally speaking, the best place that I've worked at that mostly solved that balance, was Pivotal Labs. Technically, it was Cloud Foundry, but same people. The way they use Pivotal Tracker and the process around it was mind blowing. Unfortunately, it is really one of those things that you can't just read about and understand. You really had to be part of their culture. It was a cross between cultish and military precision. You can google around and read up on many blog posts. The PT documentation [0] spells a bit of it out too. It was intense, but I really enjoyed my time there.

[0] https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/articles/gettingmore_int...

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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 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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!”

Contractors != Consultants

They said that they and their team were contractors and thus continued to run inefficiently

Can I just take a minute to thank you for CloudFoundry, it seems like it was what PaaS really should be and when one of the organizations I was contracted with moved to AWS one of the things we realized was that there really was nothing like CF anywhere else. Thanks for your work if you worked on CloudFoundry then you probably know some of the people on my team.

That's really nice to hear. When I was there, it was super early into the acquisition and CF was a shit show. For context, this was even before Docker was announced. The people who stayed on eventually rewrote most of it and turned it into a much better product. This was a great example of using the Pivotal process to do good.

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