[delegate]

Could you go into a bit more detail ? What did the Brazilians do / change ? As for ThoughtWorks, I've been at an interview with them and got a strong cultish vibe from the whole thing. Especially when they made it clear that their 'social responsibility pillar' is cool and all, but "we're still a commercial company that needs to make a profit so don't imagine you'll be doing charity here"... I'm curious how the people from that environment affected SC's culture.

I'm sure the company had a much nicer culture when they started, given that their product attracted so much original content.. So what went wrong ?

[brazilianboy]

I happen to be one of the "incestuous" Brazilian boys. Also, I came from ThoughtWorks. I doubt thowaway999 considers me one of the "bad ones", but I do need to give my two cents here.

1. I fully agree about the fractured organisation with lots of in-fighting.

2. I relate with the statement about "confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product". I think it was more a matter of very clever yet immature kids that loved to play around with eccentric language features. That was not the root of any problem, though. The problem was lack of leadership to curb the in-fighting and give the engineers some direction so that they don't get lost on their drive to experiment around with whatever they feel like it.

3. It's ironical to blame the ex-TWers Brazilians _and_ the monad-loving hipsters. From my perspective, these were distinct groups. The Brazilians were not the stronger advocates of monads and other Scala typing tricks. Quite the opposite. The few Brazilians that were more fond of Scala were not ex-TWers. In short, simplifying the blame to one nationality is very short-sighted.

4. I'm very curious about who we supposedly bully. Or who was bullied at all, for that matter. Perhaps, I was too far from the director ranks to witness that. I'd imagine a director could do something about lowly engineers bullying people.

5. About ThoughtWorks, there's another misconception here. There's a strong cult-like culture there, yes. It happens that the former ThoughtWorkers that joined SoundCloud were exactly the ones that we dissatisfied with the cult, and joined SC in search for a better work culture. The ones that I knew personally have some quite strong feelings _against_ the "social justice" hypocrisy that is rampant at TW.

6. How were we "incestuous"?

[thowaway999]

I apologize about calling out the entire Brazilian group by name. That was unfair. Not all of you were bad. I think if you asked folks at large anonymously they would say that their was a whiff of nepotistic networking privilege in whom was hired, why certain immature acts were tolerated from members of the group, and why certain favored outcomes occurred to the Brazilian network disproportionally.

[brazilianboy]

no need to apologise. By no means I read your post as an attack to Brazilians in general. It was at a particular group. That's fine. I just think it's an incorrect assessment.

I concur with the nepotistic networking in part. Everyone tends to refer people they know personally. Our network was strong enough to become some sort of inner joke. I doubt that this was what brought SC down. Immature acts were not restricted to us.

[CrystalLangUser]

Can you go more into detail about the Thoughtworks culture? I applied there while in Chicago and got a strong sense of that from the culture portion of the interview (after the programming challenge).

[kafkaesq]

Yeah, that's pretty much dead give-away that you're in some kind of stealth cult environment:

"We're all big believers in X here. But actually, we don't really believe in X"

[kafkaesq]

My favorite example for the above:

"Great news, bro - we offer unlimited vacation! But actually you aren't expected to take more than 10 days of vacation per year."