Why I left Pivotal

jshack, I'm sure you don't remember me, but we started running into each other at the same events starting 5 years ago while you were at Sun. I would attempt to socialize with you for the first few events until it became crystal clear that you saw no value in talking with me. You were never interested in helping startups outside of a direct benefit to you- the opposite view shared by most of the SF startup community.

You went on to work at mt for awhile where again I would see you at events, only interested in helping the latest series a/b company and ignoring everyone else.

I'm somehow not surprised by this "news".

In any case, this blog post should probably come down. Nothing good can come of it and in a weeks time you'll surely regret posting it.

Best of luck and I hope you come away learning something from all of this.

I checked his linkedin and it looks like he was at Pivotal from March to sometime recently. Lots of details are brushed over in this post so...maybe a more extensive post-mortem would be helpful.

Unless you have something specific to share as to how or why Pivotal wronged you, this blog post comes off as vindictive and, frankly, not very well thought out. I suspect that pretty much everyone reading it is a bit confused as to your point.

For my part I use Pivotal Tracker daily and have got a lot of value out of it. I'm not completely sold on the new design (although the multiple project view is great) but I've really seen nothing to indicate that Pivotal has gone bad or sold their soul somehow.

I don't really care about the reason, I care about how they handled it. Whether they leave voluntarily or are forced out, there's always a telling tale there.

People rarely ever feel they've been fired "justly". Some people get on with their lives and some people set fire to the building on the way out the door. The only thing for certain is that everyone leaves eventually...

Sorry, but you came into the company "a few months ago" as you say.

It's not like you were in IBM in the nineties, and now IBM is all different etc. Or like you were in Google in 2000 and now you're dissapointed with how they turned.

What was this mythical "Pivotal Labs" you "knew, respected and admired", and when did you have time to get to know it before it changed? In "a few months"?

Mind you, I'm not saying Pivotal is good, or your story is not accurate. Just that the narrative of "the company I knew and admired is no more", when you just had a very short time to get acquainted with the company. Perhaps the company was that bad all along.

From a former Labs perspective, Pivotal can really be thought of as several distinct groups working within the same office spaces. There is the one that the audience here is most likely to know; Pivotal Tracker. Then there is the consultancy, Pivotal Labs. Finally, there is the overall Pivotal organization (including elements of VMWare, EMC, Greenplum, and other EMC properties) focused on creating CloudFoundry.

Pivotal Tracker was, for a long time, written by consulting Pivots during time unallocated to any specific client. More recently, Pivotal Labs realized the value of the product, and divided off an entire office (as well as some support from other offices) to work solely on Tracker. For the closest thing to a startup experience within Pivotal (as opposed to consulting), working for Tracker is where to be.

The consulting practice has always been the core of the Labs business. Every office (save the Tracker HQ) has some amount of consulting Pivots, and any new office is established with 66%+ consulting personnel with the intent to gain traction within the startup market of the new city. Pivotal has _always_ consulted for both startups and enterprise level clients, and I take issue with Jeremiah's assertion that Pivotal has lost its way with regard to types of client engagement. He simply has no idea. As recently as Dec-Feb I was leading a team of a brand new startup through a Rails+Backbone rewrite of their existing PHP/Codeigniter app that they had decided they had outgrown; my engagements directly before and after that were both for established companies (enterprise, even) that needed specific software expertise and/or assistance with process within their corporate structure.

The final group is those devoted to CloudFoundry. The interesting thing here is that the developers and project managers (and to some extent the designers, though CloudFoundry needs very little visual design relative to its backend complexity - think Heroku) come as a mix of dedicated employees OF CloudFoundry, as well as support from consulting Pivots who are between projects or have a specific skill that can contribute to progress of CF. Consulting Pivots are told that they always have the option to rotate back out to non-CF projects, though there can be up to a couple of months of waiting while a suitable project or suitable replacement can be found. Let's be honest, EMC has given the directive from the top that CF must be delivered sooner rather than later, and that it is more important to EMC and Pivotal (not Labs, just Pivotal) that CF is delivered than that Labs engage yet another client.

So let's talk about Jeremiah:

Jeremiah was in marketing, which means he was almost certainly part of the CloudFoundry section of the company (the other branches barely know what marketing is), which has always been interested in delivering their service for use with startups, but in my opinion, is still at least 6-9 months from having enough stability and enough service integrations to be useful for anything more than a demo environment. I haven't tried deploying to CF in at least 4 months, so YMMV, and it's likely a lot more stable and well-rounded than I remember. Jeremiah talks about how he "stirred the pot on the distinction between corporate and startup marketing", which sounds to me like he was really much more interested in the consulting branch of the company and the startups involved therein, not the cloud services part. Consulting pivots probably make up 70% of each Pivotal Labs office, on the average, though there are many offices for EMC and Pivotal that contain no consultants from Labs at all. I remember being at a CloudFoundry all-hands meeting over a year ago wherein the number two director of CF specifically said that startups and the community at large around CF is secondary (or worse) to delivering an enterprise-ready solution for some rather large, well-known interested parties. Pivotal is exactly the three-letter acronym that Jeremiah "[does] not trust", but it has never not been. Pivotal Labs may share a space and employees with Pivotal, but it remains a noticeably distinct entity. With EMC's purchase of Labs and subsequent spinoff of Pivotal, things became increasingly more corporate, but that has been true since March of 2012, a good two years before the glory days that Jeremiah so fondly remembers.

Now for me, why did I leave Pivotal? I was getting tired of working on the same early-stage startup code every other project, punctuated by rescue missions for larger (Fortune500) companies who had no interest in the process and discipline practices that Pivotal can teach (pairing, tdd, stable/reasonable hours, tracker stories) and really just wanted us to shut up and fix their damn code. Pivotal Labs has been taking more clients with mobile development needs as well, and my disinterest in coding for iOS or Android made it feel as good a time as any to walk away and take my chances on building something that I actually want to use in the technology that I like to use. Will I ever be back at Pivotal Labs? Probably, though I'll be making sure I choose an office on the frontier, working with companies in a new market, as far away from a CloudFoundry-focused office as I can get.

EDIT: A note about management in Labs: The communication within Labs itself has always been great; very little bullshit, very little waiting to find out something that is important to you, if someone can help you find it out. The managers for the devs at Labs are all either current or former Labs developers (some are now full-time management, some are devs for CF, and the majority still consult 36 hours a week). They understand their developers very well, and to a person would not let such an incident happen under their watch. That said, CloudFoundry and the Pivotal top level organization have entirely unrelated (and unknown to me) management structures, the bulk of which was likely inherited from EMC (as were the PR/Marketing/HR/ and some other departments.)

"I stirred the pot on the distinction between corporate and startup marketing to be sure."

Here's the book: http://www.amazon.com/How-To-Survive-In-Organization/dp/1933...

It's one of those books everybody reads but nobody says they are reading.

I think there are plenty of cases that refute this - just a sampling of nonsense.

The post is terrible though and serves no purpose other than to try to make your previous company look bad.

Much like the author, I am left asking "why?" with no good explanation being given.

When reviewing a team member in an open source project or a remote team working on a startup you only have to worry about "is this person technically competent and professional+expressive in his 'on the record' interactions ?" This is all that matters because there is very little "off the record" communication since it almost all occurs in hipchat, basecamp, git, etc. Contrast this to a pair-programming paradigm where there's so many more human factors that come into play because the programmers are expected to "hang out" and engage in lots of friendly "off the record" banter and social stuff. All of these extra social expectations can introduce friction, drama, and political wrangling into the team, so the management at these pair-programming shops have to go to great lengths to try to reduce these potentials.

For example during the interview process at Pivotal, after I had hung out for most of the morning I was encouraged take a walk outside of the office with some of the Pivotal team, to grab coffee, which is fine, but apparently this is a strategic part of the interview process where they go ahead and try to bait the candidate into discussing political 'hot button' issues as part of a fishing expedition. I don't think they cared one way or another what my political opinions were but rather they wanted to measure how "sensitive" I was in relation to various subjects areas and get a feel for how easy or difficult it would be to provoke me into a rant. By subtly putting their own opinions out there unnecessarily in a more casual coffee shop environment they were trying to lure me into opening up to them in a way that wouldn't be appropriate over say hipchat or some other "on the record" medium, and I suspected that if I had expressed too much of an opinion of my own that would have been a huge red flag to them.

I understand why this particular factor would be so important to management at a pair-programming shop. It would be a disaster if a programmer started pairing with a team, made major contributions, became a significant factor in the success of the project, and then for whatever reason during the "forced cohabitation" ended up making some quasi-political or religious statement which led to animosity and disrupted the harmony of the team. This is the double edged sword that comes with trying to setup an environment that feels half like a business and half like a hip afterhours lounge. Which is it ? Are you trying to be friends or coworkers ? Friends open up to eachother when nudged to do so but is it secretly a trap where a jealous coworker is trying to lure you into making unprofessional statements to be used against you later in a conversation with the rest of the stakeholders or are you just being paranoid ? This is how the drama starts. It's risky to not "try to become friends" but it's also risky to "try to become friends" because it means opening up to your actual opinions about how you see the world which could gasp turn out to be controversial.

All of this precipitates what I like to refer to as "bullshit emotional drama" that just isn't a factor when you work in remote teams. Why ? Because when you work remotely all of your conversation is logged right there in hipchat so you can't be baited into saying controversial things without there being evidence of the baiting. So either the baiting is there on the record, or there was no baiting and you were being unprofessional by putting controversial opinions out there for no reason. Either way you're being judged solely based on an accurate record of the conversation so there's no ambiguity, no people misquoting you, no need for interview processes that consist of dishonest baiting. There's less "he said she said" drama.

I don't buy the idea that you need pair-programming in order to break down knowledge silos because it's clearly not the case in a ton of open source projects where everyone is remote. Imho it's not difficult to get all of the goodness about pair programming without being physically next to someone simply by having a continuous conversation going in hipchat, constantly sharing gists, and reviewing each other's commits. The rest is just sociological posturing for the sake of having a "hip" co-working space to show off to your friends. As for the idea that members of remote teams have no social life, that's nonsense because you can go hang out in a co-working space just to make friends while keeping any friendship-exploration-drama-potentials well away from your business and economic bottom line.

tldr; Remote teams have an edge :) It's only a matter of time before remote accelerators come online and start dominating if they're not already secretly doing so.