Pros
First the positives: - Still manage to attract smart people - The number of dimwits in the company is lower than in other similar outfits - You get some variety in the kind of work over a period of time
Cons
- The company has lost sight of what its core strengths were - building complex software systems - and is now doing any and every piece of so called coding that clients throw at it - This means it has been growing, and not enabled its hiring intake to be brought onboard in a way that makes sense - But since the quality of work has deteriorated over time, there is no need for the population to operate at highly skilled levels - They have launched some practices in the recent past, like analytics, but a miniscule number of people get to work on it and actual commercial projects in the space are yet to take off - ThoughtWorks is supposedly a company with minimal hierarchy - that myth has been laid to rest many years ago. So called leaders operate like feudal chieftains manning the company coffers, doling out sops for their groupies and themselves, while the vast majority wonders why the profitability is low. - Hare-brained initiatives are launched every so often, with fancy names, acronyms and leaders for these. They die a natural death without having delivered an iota of change or benefit, but lo and behold, come the new year and you will hear of a whole new set of initiatives and leaders to go with it. A smell is that recently launched a global innovation theme and as we all know, the second you have such a grandiose body, innovation stops. Maybe next year they will relaunch it as Continuous Innovation. - The overheads are so vast I think that a small country can be fed on their budgets : functions like recruiting, marketing, internal communications and people burn up money faster than the US Federal Government, flying themselves to fancy locations for so called workshops and planning sessions. - The latest fad is to have multiple people do a job. This is given a fancy name "X in a box". So you have cases where a region is managed by 4 instead of 1 Managing Director and an office is managed by 2-3 people where 1 might suffice. This is apparently done to provide greater coverage and learning opportunities, which, truth be told, is fine, however in some cases rank inexperienced folks are propped into such positions just to satisfy a notion that you have to forcibly get a certain gender, place of origin or some such 'diversity factor' represented in leadership. Whatever happened to plain old merit? - The company prides itself on 'fail fast', 'quick feedback for course correction' and other such Agile mantras. But they like to apply this only to the poor foot soldiers who work on projects. If you screw up, then you will get 'feedback'. If you don't improve, you will be put on a 'performance improvement plan'. And then fired. But do they apply this same yardstick to the management? Oh no, for them, any level of incompetence goes. So you have completely useless people holding positions of power and earning fat salaries to boot, while delivering almost zero value. Thankfully some of these people move on to greener pastures on their own, like one such clown recently did in the office in western India. He was completely useless in a bunch of billable roles, but was put into running some fancy-titled office which delivered less value than a post-it note. - The Chairman jet sets around the world spouting anti-capitalism, but is a pure bred capitalist himself. If he was so concerned about equality and justice, why doesn't he ensure that ThoughtWorks repays its venture capital partner who is owed millions? Different strokes for different folks. - He is the single most biased and irrational leader I have seen. He will trust anything he hears without bothering to even consider the other side of the story. The present crop of global leaders are not able to contain his bilious diatribes, leading to confusion wherever he goes. - He also had some ephiphany some years ago that the company needs to have a social impact angle. This has translated into nonsensical offices of social justice being created. All they do is fly people around the world and talk. Granted, there is actual good work going on in several places where software to help hospitals and the like are built. But the noise outweighs this good work. - Recently in India we had an away day where some random activists were called to spout their opinions. All well and good, but was any debate allowed? The second someone raised their voice, charges were drummed up against the person and summarily exited. Almost Stalinist. I saw it happen. So the mantra is "social justice for all" and "free speech for mankind" but please don't speak against it inside the company. - The company also prides itself on its values and ethics. Horse manure, I say. There is evidence of people way up the food chain sleeping with clients and potential clients to win and keep business. Perhaps they will define a new pillar for that and call it P5. - Thankfully I am soon on my way out of this quagmire of lies, deceit and self-proclaimed righteousness.
