I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a heroic feat. In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in githu…
Are there any good resources out there about how pivotal works in details? A book, or anything else you could recommend?
Pivotal Software S-1
141–148 of 148 posts
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any good resources out there about how pivotal works in details? A book, or anything else you could recommend?
Check out these resources: - https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/architecture/ - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920042501.do - https://content.pivotal.io/ebooks/cloud-foundry-the-cloud-na...
ah my bad I meant more the work practices at pivotal (labs?). They seem to be using a very specific flavour of agile with pair programming etc. I'd be interested to dive more into it.
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The optics that they use to get consulting contracts with non-tech big-co's are the exact opposite that you'd want to cultivate to impress HN.
Please do explain this. I would love to understand what is the modus operandi.
To sell, you need to speak the language of your target audience.
Pivotal's audience is enterprise customers, so their website is naturally filled with enterprisey messaging - high on 'outcomes' for decision makers and low on nitty gritty details.
HN's audience is not really the same (broadly speaking). A landing page that shows you how simple it is to deploy a python function into production on Pivotal Foundry would probably be a better sell here.
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare I'm late to the game here; was it GSX Server a.k.a. VMware Server?[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Server
It was Cloud Foundry, Spring, RabbitMQ and at the time they were sponsoring Antirez (Redis).
Which is a bit misleading as far as Spring is concerned.
Spring has never been abandonware to the Java community. It is probably the most used framework for enterprise - I've seen maybe 10 jobs looking for Spring experience vs the JEE crap that it has mostly replaced.
I know it gets a bad view on HN - a lot of FactoryBuilderFactoryBeans and a rather large kitchen sink of APIs.
But the framework itself is well written, great docs, lots of resources.
I've been involved in a dozen different projects where the architects hated Spring and instead went to some newer hipper lang like Flask, Django, Rails, Finatra / Finagle. Spring has a learning curve, but once you get it, it is far more powerful and stable than any of these alternatives.
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DR "So Pivotal decided to employ both a stick and a carrot. The stick is a mandatory morning meeting at 9 a.m., where your absence will likely be noted. The carrot is the breakfast buffet, "sort of a prize to get in,"" I'm glad I read this. Now I'm sure to never apply for this company
I run the Pivotal office in Singapore. Breakfast is wonderful, but it's hardly mandatory. Standup at 9:06 is important, though. In order for pairing to work, you need to have everybody there at the same time. The iron bargain is that you work a rigid eight hour schedule, but then you go home (or wherever) and don't think about work. No overtime or crunch mode, ever. It's not for everybody, but many folks really reall…
Thanks for explaining
However having flexible time is a more important asset to me than doing the occasional overtime
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out these resources: - https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/architecture/ - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920042501.do - https://content.pivotal.io/ebooks/cloud-foundry-the-cloud-na...
ah my bad I meant more the work practices at pivotal (labs?). They seem to be using a very specific flavour of agile with pair programming etc. I'd be interested to dive more into it.
Pivot here. Here's the book we give to everyone that rotates into labs for the first time:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321278658/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_tTuU...
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#147I interviewed with Pivotal Labs this week. It went well and they wanted to move forward until I asked for my current compensation. They balked like I was asking for the moon. I coincidentally had an offer from another firm for a 15% raise, so I know I wasn't asking for too much. Pivotal declined when I wouldn't budge, and I took my 15% raise. I start in 3 weeks.
I had a similar experience a couple years ago. The interview was pretty hard, 6 hours of pair programming in Go, a language that I have only passing familiarity with. The interviewer seemed impressed that I completed the entire task with time to spare. Then it got to talking about salary and that's when things seemed to go sideways. I make top of market for my area, because I've been doing this a long time and I have a history of success so past employers have rewarded me for it.
I think the thing is that in consulting, the equation is "margin = billable rate - salary". The higher the salary, the less profitable you are. Feels to me like Pivotal mostly hires mid-level people to hit the sweet spot of experience/skill/salary.
It's a bummer because I went on to work with a company that engaged Pivotal Labs and I loved working with the Pivots.
Re: Pivotal Software S-1
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't foresee companies continuing to pay for the ability to switch cloud providers. Mostly because I doubt the pricing differences between providers will ever be significant enough to justify moving. I also suspect that providers will not keep feature-competitive with one another. It seems like every month, AWS is releasing new tools, and there's no way that other providers are maintaining this pace. My suspicion…
Funny, I see the opposite trend. Technologies like kubernetes enable immutable infrastructure that’s not locked into a single cloud. There’s no reason you couldn’t build a system that regularly and automatically buys the cheapest capacity, sets up a kubernetes cluster, and deploys the latest build to it.
Do they make it easy to migrate from tools like AWS EMR, SageMaker, or ElasticTranscoder? It's one thing to be able to migrate VM images or microservices, but in my experience, the big draw to AWS is the features they offer beyond that.