Thoughtworks reviews

-People Leader betrayed employees. Only the hopelessly naïve would mistake an HR person to be an employee advocate. People Leader is a top-ranking company executive who gets paid to oppress employees, not a friend of the working man or woman. Workers, by definition, are oppressed to some degree. -The company was hiring at the same time it was marching people out -Management kept people who were well-connected, including obvious incompetents, while marching out good employees

Much of this pertains to ThoughtWorks India - 1. The young (5-10 yrs experience) old-timers (spent most of their careers in TWI only) are mismanaging the Indian operations/delivery - they're too proud of the achievements of the few good people who exist in rest of ThoughtWorks. In their pride and naivety they trash the newcomers and forget the privilege and opportunities they themselves had in a young organization that allowed them to learn and grow 2. The really humble, good people are now so few and far between that its difficult both to find them and learn from them. Also, unfortunately these few good people seldom take on greater responsibility or speak out, content merely in doing good work/being good techies in their little project 3. Consequently the leadership team in India is replete with cronyism - it's like a pantheon that needs to be pleased if one has to get good opportunities. They've been around forever, unbudging and unrelenting. Very few new additions from outside in the past ten years 4. The rumor-mongering amongst this old guard can obviate the other channels of feedback that the company needs to be the strong evolutionary organization that it hopes to be. And we falsely believe that this to be strong networking - it would be so, only if it served the common good of encouraging the long-term ideas of the company and discouraging the miscreants. However, in this strong network you'd find the old-timers repeatedly failing and getting away. And the new-comers taunted like a criminal before being given a chance to defend for an every day gaffe 5. You believe that you've setup a peer approval system hence making the process more open and mistake proof - sorry, wisdom of crowds is an idealism that needs a lot of underlying assumptions to be right - knowledge, maturity, self-determination, variation etc… and in India the old-crop has merely perfected the art of propaganda and the peer approval system has been subverted - Its not yet been so bad as to results in a catastrophe - now, let me not be a cassandra