[ekidd]

They generally do a mediocre job at best.

Interesting. Twitter seemed quite enthusiastic about their two "Pivots": When we began working with Pivotal last year, we knew they'd be a big help but we didn't expect how much they would contribute to a healthy and attractive work culture.

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/pivotal-means-of-crucial-imp...

On the other hand, Pivotal's price is steep, and you have to hire their programmers in pairs: It’s about $15,000 a week for a pair. And so what we came up with was, “Look. You don’t have much money...” But we came up with this idea that if we do a six week run, and he gave me a very slight bit discount, so like a six week was going to be $84,000 we could get a minimum viable product up and launched.

http://mixergy.com/oneforty-laura-fitton/

Given the price of hiring Pivotal Labs, it sounds like Twitter and Laura Fitton were pretty enthusiastic. I wonder how to reconcile that with what you've been hearing—has Pivotal Labs gone through a growth spurt in the last year or two?

[carlcoryell]

Hi, I'm actually a Pivotal engineer (in our Singapore office) and while I can't comment on either of the examples above I do want to clarify that clients don't have to hire Pivotal engineers in pairs. We do pair on all production code and our strong preference is for mixed teams of client engineers and Pivotal engineers. We strongly encourage even team sizes so that there is rarely an odd engineer out.

[oscardelben]

I know many people here charge $150/hour. 15k/week for two persons working 40 hour each is about $187/hour which doesn't look unrealistic to me. That's not to say they're cheap, they certainly aren't, but if you consider that a company has many expenses beside employees salaries then it's not that high.

Perhaps the biggest thing here is that you must hire a pair, so it actually comes to about $374/h, but if it's true that you get the job much more quickly with a pair then I don't see the issue.

[stanleydrew]

Often when you pay a lot for something you convince yourself that it was worth it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[maxawaytoolong]

Twitter is a unique case in that their engineers in 2009 were even worse than the ones at Pivotal. They still had outages every day, so how good could the "pivots" have been?

But my point still stands as Twitter did not renew their contract...

It's also not what I've "been hearing"... I've had to work directly with Pivotal people.

[ekidd]

Thank you for your first-hand experience!

I was curious about Pivotal's consulting work, because even very good software consulting companies go downhill quickly when they try to scale. Joel Spolsky described it perfectly: I don't need to name names, here, this cycle has happened a dozen times. All the IT service companies get greedy and try to grow faster than they can find talented people, and they grow layers upon layers of rules and procedures which help produce "consistent," if not very brilliant work.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html

If Pivotal has a nucleus of really talented people, it makes sense for them to become a scalable product company. (Although I'm not really convinced by Pivotal's proposed pricing plans, at least for consultants with several smaller projects going on at once.)