

Inside Pivotal Labs, the Agile Force Behind Twitter  - justlearning
http://gigaom.com/2010/10/07/inside-pivotal-labs-the-agile-force-behind-twitter-and-groupon/

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rbxbx
Not a bad article/video at all, but I don't believe the title of this thread
to be appropriate.

They weren't so much behind twitter, as they were brought on partway through
the game to help with some (I assume) scaling concerns.

(edit: I like pivotal, but keeping the quality on HN is essential to my being)

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hello_moto
Title seems appropriate. "...agile...behind Twitter".

keywords: agile (whether you like buzzword or not)

It's more about changing the culture of Twitter engineering department.

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derwiki
Good to see Pivotal Labs getting some of the credit they deserve.

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jseifer
Definitely. I know a couple of people who work there and they are some of the
smartest/best programmers I know.

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srgseg
I've heard a VC saying that Pivotal is a great company to build polished
software for you if you have raised a big chunk of money.

Anyone know how much they actually cost though? Are their rates through the
roof because people throw their VC money at them?

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Timothee
_Companies pay Pivotal between $150,000 and $600,000 on average, according to
VP Technology and Principal Ian McFarland._

(from the article)

Sounds a bit hard to afford if you're not funded. I'd be curious to know what
this includes too: how long, how many developers?

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rbxbx
From 2-7 months, although typically 3-6

(Also from the article ;) )

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woan
I tend to like Pivotal and have friends contracting them.

Have any other open source efforts other than Diaspora come out from them? I
don't understand how they let Diaspora do a big bang code release of such poor
quality if they are the Rails experts they are reported to be.

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binspace
I think the Diaspora just worked in the SF office. I don't believe it was a
project out of Pivotal.

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joshsusser
That's correct. We just let them use the space; we don't code with them.

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woan
Wow!

Being co-located I would hope folks would have taken an interest and the
Diaspora folks having enough maturity to ask for early feedback from the more
experienced folks in the room from Pivotal or others.

