Why I left Pivotal

http://jeremiahshackelford.com/post/89785894621/pivotallabsrip

by jshack • 12 years ago

76 45 12 years ago

I'd be interested in hearing more about the practices you engaged in that 'blurred the lines between startup and corporate marketing'. I personally have always found that after something like this waiting a few weeks and giving yourself an honest postmortem evaluation can go miles in helping you improve and strive for greater things in the future.

0xeeeeeeee• 12 years ago

This type story would make me hesitant to hire him after throwing his last employer under the bus (the usual response to this type of article). But with only one side of the story...you can't draw too many conclusions.

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.

colinbartlett3• 12 years ago

Most employment or termination agreements I've seen have non-disparagement clauses that specifically prohibit this kind of post as well. (Although who knows if it would be enforced or could be enforced).

fecak• 12 years ago

In my experience over the past several years, I've seen lots of contracts and employment agreements for tech firms but very few non-disparagement clauses. I expect if he were terminated they would get one signed (or try to).

beachstartup• 12 years ago

usually those kinds of contracts are presented with guaranty of a severence package or at least a single big check, which is supposed to ameliorate/attenuate any hard feelings. nobody can coerce you to sign something like that, and besides, the enforceability of those contracts is dubious (outside of normal libel/slander laws) so they want you to take the money and happily leave.

there's also supposed to be an exit interview in which you are told why you are being let go and the details of the above. this is also designed to prevent anger. people, even when losing their jobs, respond well to truth and money.

and in my experience it usually works fine, but in this case, it doesn't sound like either happened. or maybe he refused the contract and hence, refused the money. that's certainly possible.

vosper• 12 years ago

I'm sorry you were fired without any hint that your performance was an issue - that's poor management. But the rest of the post confused me (the metaphors didn't help) - are you concluding from your termination that the old Pivotal is dead and has been replaced by an evil enterprise hell-bent on sucking money from "legacy" software companies? Seems like a bit of a stretch.

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.

colinbartlett3• 12 years ago

Bear in mind that Pivotal Tracker is a very tiny part of what Pivotal Labs does. It's simply their internal tool released to the public. I imagine most of what OP is referring to is related to their software development consulting services.

coldtea5• 12 years ago

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.

Products don't necessarily indicate how the companies that made them are run. You could be happily using the same product for years, where the company becomes some hell-hole internally.

michaelneale• 12 years ago

"After all, patches are themselves a sign of the legacy that will be surpassed"

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

chasing• 12 years ago

Explain "stirred the pot." Most companies hire new employees to perform certain tasks, not "stir the pot."

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.

colinbartlett3• 12 years ago

I don't understand why anyone would post something like this. It cannot help you, it can only hurt you. It may be cathartic, but venting to a friend is probably much more productive.

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

Seriously, be professional and don't burn any bridges. It's something you learn the hard way I guess.

3h8d• 12 years ago

I'm willing to bet that jshack just lost his job today and isn't thinking quite clearly.

I can't think of a reason why a company would let you go without an exit interview though, that's rather unprofessional.

coldtea5• 12 years ago

Perhaps some people like to be frank and open, even if it means they won't get to work with the same assholes (or generally people against them being open) in the future.

E.g not everybody feels they should behave like a slave or an asskisser when they feel they got the wrong end of the stick.

error54• 12 years ago

If you get fired, that's not really the same as leaving. I can see if his post was about how he became disillusioned with the company and decided to leave but the reality is that he got let go so this comes off as a "I got fired so here's my rant about how bad this company is." Regardless of what happened, I think companies would be hard pressed to hire someone that does things like this.

miralabs• 12 years ago

he was being creative on how we titled his article you know.. He knew he was fired.

syncsynchalt• 12 years ago

Pivotal works fine for this startup. shrug

defen• 12 years ago

Can someone summarize this using less grandiose/mystical language? It seems like he has a point but I just don't feel like wading through the analogies. That said I am sympathetic to his position as I know multiple people involved in different startups who say that the Pivotal consultants they see today can't hold a candle to the Pivots they worked with five years ago.

toast76• 12 years ago

I've hired a lot of people in the past. One of the most important questions I ask is "why did you leave your company X?"

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...

otto_sf• 12 years ago

What a perplexing combination of emotions. Sorry you got laid off, but it sounds like you're upset at losing your job and therefore have concluded that your job is not what you thought it was.

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

kickme444• 12 years ago

It is usually not in anyones interest to open a discussion about why someone is being let go. "Then just tell me why, so I know" you might say. Well, the problem with that is it is just human nature to argue it and it is no good for anyone.

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

650REDHAIR• 12 years ago

Well, as recent as today, Pivotal has been pretty great to startups (ours included).

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.

siliconc0w• 12 years ago

I think he is talking about Pivotal's PAAS product targeted towards enterprises based on cloud foundry and how it won't be able to compete (since cloud foundry came out before all the coreos/fleet/etcd/docker buzz and it doesn't really have those nice primitives to work with and instead has it's own hairy java solutions to those problems).

stickfigure• 12 years ago

There is only one smallish Java component (an OAuth implementation). Everything else in CloudFoundry is Ruby and (increasingly) Go.

hluska2• 12 years ago

I hope that jshack takes this blog post down. Even if everything in it is true, he comes out looking worse than Pivotal Labs. I understand the urge to vent, but blog posts like this make someone close to unemployable.

dublinben• 12 years ago

In case he does take it down, here's an archived copy: https://archive.today/7u3t4

coldtea5• 12 years ago

Why exactly would we need the "archived copy"?

Is a personal rant from someone, that might be harmful to him, that important to the internet, that we need to preserve it and keep harming the guy if he decides to take it down?

This is how internet bullying sometimes leads to suicides.

andy_ppp• 12 years ago

Hmmm. I get on with the software, it's better than almost every other piece of software I've used along these lines. I've yet to use it in a big team but I imagine it's fantastic.

jakejake2• 12 years ago

This sounds like sour grapes. I have no insight into Pivotal Labs except that we have used Pivotal Tracker for quite some time for our startup. Unless there's some major pricing change is coming, I don't see what about them is considered unfriendly to startups?

jacques_chester3• 12 years ago

Tracker is one thing that Labs offers, but our bread and butter is actually consulting and co-development. Tracker is the tool that was developed in-house and then opened up for outside developers.

I didn't really get Tracker until I started at Pivotal Labs. Now I wish everything else was more like it.

jakejake2• 12 years ago

Ah, interesting. Our team came from using more traditional tracking systems and Pivotal Tracker got us re-thinking our strategy. We're not big enough to do full-blown SCRUM but Tracker been a huge help with managing our release cycle. It's a great product!

barce• 12 years ago

I always recommend this book to people that feel they're about to be canned, or who were canned but can't figure out why. It seems you know the cause when you wrote:

"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.

coldtea5• 12 years ago

I came into Pivotal Labs a few months ago excited and passionate, and I am now leaving Pivotal bewildered and dumbfounded. (...) The Pivotal Labs I knew, I respected, I admired is no longer. This would not have happened there. It was not how they conducted business.

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.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

What's wrong with selling to enterprises vs. startups? The former tend to have "money".

Hominem• 12 years ago

Pretty common for companies to have a 90 day probation period for new hires where they can fire you for any reason or no reason at all. Would be great if employees could just walk away after 90 days with absolutely no stigma, kinda a no fault separation.

ohwaitnvm• 12 years ago

I just left Pivotal Labs myself, albeit a bit more voluntarily (after seven years), and Jeremiah isn't completely wrong, but he seems to think he's seen a huge change over his three months working there in a role that is hardly one of Pivotal's core competencies.

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.)

GBond• 12 years ago

Thanks for a thoughtful comment that provided way more information and classiness then the OP's

h1karu2• 12 years ago

A few years ago I interviewed at a startup that was operating out of Pivotal Labs in San Francisco and during the process I was interviewed by the management at Pivotal. They were really nice folks, as was the team I was interviewing with. I didn't end up working there, but I did learn something from asking questions and seeing how they operate. Their philosophy, or core operating principle has to do with the value they perceive in "pair programming". This is fine if it's what floats their boat but I was left with the distinct impression that within such a paradigm the "social compatibility issues" are raised to a level of importance that becomes a nuisance in an environment where technical proficiency is in high demand.

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.

jacques_chester3• 12 years ago

I think you're imagining things that don't happen based on a single day's exposure.

I've never seen personal drama at Pivotal Labs. Sure, I find that everyone has a different tempo, persona and so on. That means each pairing takes time to establish a workable rhythm. But I've never seen it come to animosity, either with myself and another pivot or anywhere in the offices I've worked in or visited.

h1karu2• 12 years ago

yeah I can't say much about Pivotal labs aside from the unusual interview that I was a part of and the conclusions that I drew from that experience. It's certainly possible that I was imagining things but I strongly suspect they were poking and prodding to gauge my level of "reactivity" to various political statements. I understand why they felt the need to make me jump through those hoops. They felt the need to try to filter out ahead of time those individuals who are likely to express strong or controversial opinions during the course of their total engagement with the company. This makes sense because to run a pair-programming shop you have to try to build a community of relatively like-minded people who "get along" sort of like you're running a college fraternity. Polarizing issues/debates can lead to friction within these tight-knit fraternal organizations so it does make sense to try to weed out individuals who don't already have an understanding about that, and how else could you do it if not by testing them ?

I'm not saying they did something untoward in their interviewing process I'm merely pointing out that this whole hidden layer of social filtering must out of necessity exist in pair-programming organizations in order to nip drama-potentials in the bud before they have a chance to come to fruition. This is something that remote work shops simply don't have to worry about which is a major strategic advantage currently misunderstood in the popular tech media space but extremely well understood by those who are actually running successful remote teams.

In other words because their core programming methodology (pair-programming) involves forcing individuals to share more casual interaction than what would normally occur in a traditional office environment organizations like Pivotal are forced to be proactive about filtering for "casual social behavior traits" in their never-ending struggle to to maintain a harmonious drama-free zone. This puts pair-programming shops at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to sourcing talent because

A. they're drawing from a smaller talent pool, and

B. they have to care more about how the candidate behaves socially in casual 'off the record' situations.

It's my opinion that the added advantages which supposedly spring from working at the same desk with another skilled individual are more than offset by these hidden constraints which the whole business is subjecting itself to.

I didn't mean to imply that there's "emotional drama" within Pivotal labs in particular, but I did mean to imply that remote shops don't have to worry about that issue nearly as much as pair-programming shops because of the "always on the record" nature of modern group collaboration infrastructure.

I would also like to point out that the true 10x developers out there are statistically more often the personality types who are likely to express controversial opinions or touch on polarizing issues. This has been a truism throughout recorded human history when it comes to extremely brilliant individuals.

http://37signals.com/remote < recommended reading even for pair-programming die-hards

(I'm not connected with the author of that book in any way)

jmromer• 12 years ago

[Review Quiz] Jeremiah Shackelford left Pivotal Labs because: (a) He was told to leave (b) He was terminated (c) Security would have forced him to had he attempted to remain (d) All of the above.

Why I left Pivotal

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