jutopia

I’ve been working 5 years at ThoughtWorks. ThoughtWorks vision is to revolutionize the software development industry. A young industry full of problems and inefficiencies. ThoughtWorks started out with with consulting and services but lately also releasing products to back up this vision. For the last couple of years I was part of starting up this product division of ThoughtWorks and I oversaw it’s technical direction. I was part of an amazing team that built Mingle, a product I’m incredibly proud of (watch out for the next release, it’s gonna rock your socks off). I also oversaw the design of several other products that are in various stages of development (you’ll hear about one of them very soon, you might have trouble keeping your socks on for that one too).

I cannot overstate how good it is to work for ThoughtWorks. A flat structure, very open communication, high morale and standards, low on internal politics that otherwise plague growing organizations, a warm and caring culture, incredibly intelligent, friendly and passionate colleagues. It’s by no means perfect but it’s the best company I’ve worked at so far. If you want to be part of the avant guard of the lean revolution in the software industry, if you want to evangelize agile/lean, promote new technologies, processes and techniques, ThoughtWorks is probably the best company there is to work at.

But what if you’re tired of software development as a concept? What if you’ve had it with yet another programming language? What if you want to build apps that maybe even your grandmother would use (I have two very internet-savvy grandmothers)? What if you want to focus on what to build not on how to build it?

Yesterday was my last day at ThoughtWorks. In February I will be joining a company called Google. You might have heard of them. Google’s vision is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible (and show you ads while you do it). This last part isn’t officially part of the vision but it has nevertheless made Google a ridiculous amount of money. This money they spend on cool but, well okay, kinda crazy projects: scan and index all the worlds books, drive a truck around San Fransisco (and other cities) to photograph all the streets and put them together in a 3D like environment , use statistical analysis (rather than rules) for machine translation, extend the web browser so apps can be taken offline, try to force the corrupt mobile phone industry into opening up.

At Google I’ll work with C++ rather than (for example) Ruby but I do get to be part of changing the world.

Trade offs.