Thoughtworks reviews

1. The first thing that will hit you at Thoughtworks(especially Chennai) is the arrogance personified to perfection by the lead and principal consultants. Thoughtworks encourages people to fail first and learn fast. But these people make it fail first and be miserable fast. As a lateral, they don't provide any structured support to transition into the company. They openly mock you if you make mistakes and hold it against you all through your miserable time working at Thoughtworks. 2. Pathetic middle management. As an athlete, I have seen more leadership in middle school football teams by preteens. The management has no spine to begin with. It's run by cowards who hide behind their mistakes and they don't mind stepping on your shoes to make theirs look cleaner. A whole lot of finger pointing, blame apportioning, favouritism. Thoughtworks was supposed to be run by the people who work there but looks like monarchy is creeping in slowly. Though everyone can voice their opinion at Thoughtworks, the middle management makes sure that nobody expresses their opinions. If someone pulls up the courage to defy the management's views, the management responds by apportioning blame, stunting their career and they won't rest until the affected person has resigned. The middle management is also not happy when someone excercises their rights at Thoughtworks. You get questioned by them for working from home or for sick leaves, even if your team is ok with it. 3. Now, let's combine arrogant consultants with spineless leadership. What do we get? Manipulation! Every project has atleast one (max 2-3 depending on the size of the project) of the arrogant consultants and EVERYTHING (right from staffing, timings,which table they wanna sit, who goes onsite etc) is chosen by them. Thoughtworks encourages people to express their opinions irrespective of the seniority in the office. However, if you fail to suck up to these consultants or worse, express your opinion, these guys go out of the way to make your life miserable! And what does the management do? They put up a sorry face listening to your story but go back to make sure His/Her Arrogance is pleased enough to stay in this company. According to the management, its these few people who make Thoughtworks run. Not the freshers, not the laterals, not the people who do a good job in a silent manner. 4. How do you get recognised in Thoughtworks? It's not enough to just do a good job. It's all about how well you publicise your work in the office. The problem here is that, the focus has gone from the good work to how much you can boast yourself about it. Now what do we have in the office? A bunch of people beating their chest desperately on top of their tables after doing their jobs which they were supposed to do in the first place. 5. Career progress - Thoughtworks makes it a point that a career is decided by the community (Dev, BA, QA etc) and the team you have worked with in the past. But what's been happening here in Chennai? Remember those arrogant consultants from point 2&3? Yes, your career is decided by them. They are either gonna be in your community or your project. There is no hiding from them. You wanna move up? Start sucking up, put them in a pedestal and worship them. You manage to rub them on the wrong side even if it means it's the right thing to do, your career stagnates at TW and there is nobody to rescue you. 6. For a company with such a strong open and modern culture, its sad to see favouritism displayed by caste. Your thoughts are more welcome if you belong to the same caste. Middle management makes sure that the middle management has a majority here so that no one can question them. 7. They openly believe that Thoughtworkers are supposed to have an air of arrogance. It's fine in displaying that in doing the job at hand. But it oozes out in unnecessary issues like ping pong table schedules, food menu for the week etc.

- 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.