Rails Is A Ghetto

I’m saddened by the number of grown men I meet who worship guys like the persona found in this rant. Too frequently men (especially younger men) will by default listen to whoever “talks tough” rather than the people who make the most reasoned arguments. They will listen to blow hards and pundits all day and blindly follow their “leadership” on fad after fad, never really questioning whether these people are worth listening to in the first place.

At first this rant was both a release of pent up anger, and also a parody of the pseudo-jock online speech. Eventually the rant took on a life of its own and I saw that my main readers were guys looking to read more pseudo-jock speech.

I understand that the days of kind yet strong men are probably gone, and that we worship the jocks and rock stars, but not the scientists and hackers. I’m not even sure those days ever existed in America, but I swear that people worshiped Einstein.

Today, he’d be stuck working at Google making adwords.

To these people, the men who look up to me because they think I’m mean, I ask you a small simple favor:
Find a hero who helps those who can’t help themselves.

People like me aren’t the ones you should look up to. You honestly shouldn’t look up to anyone, but if you’re going to, find someone gentle, not someone tough.

Most importantly though, you will probably not find these people on the internet.

This rant is no more. I’m sure you can find copies online, but I own the copyright so you can’t publish it without permission. And, I won’t give permission.

— Zed

From Industry to Corporate

ThoughtWorks is simply taking advantage of a pattern where new technology goes from fringe to corporate and then dies. A great example of this is Java Portals. They started out on the fringe at universities and non-profits, where they were mildly successful. Then they migrated into the corporate world where they were complete disasters, and finally the risk averse government picked them up for even less success.

How do I know this? I worked on portals for their entire life and followed them through this process. Go look. I did some of the first work on uPortal, then I worked on portals in companies, and then worked on them for the government.

Ruby on Rails is following the same trajectory I’m afraid, and ThoughtWorks is milking it while they can. First it started on the fringe in start-ups and a few lonely places where it’s having mixed success (mostly due to the poor performance of the Ruby platform). Now it’s getting adopted internally at companies where of course it’ll get fucked up again and die off. After that it’ll move to the government sector where it will languish along with it’s new found buddy COBOL.

Oh, did I mention ThoughtWorks compared Rails to COBOL as well? Awesome.


Fighting Consulting Firms

I have a few pieces of advice for people about to hire any company like ThoughtWorks. There’s just a few simple strategies you can follow to make sure you get the most out of them and get your money’s worth:

   1. Make sure you have the right to see every resume and interview each consultant they place. Treat them like new hires and don’t let anyone who’s not worth the rate you’re paying on the team.
   2. Demand a variable rate based on the position of the person and their experience.
   3. Demand that no employees can leave the project to work on another project. These placements have to be for the life of the project or until the employee quits.
   4. Require that you have the right to have someone replaced if they are not immediately capable. Part of what you’re paying is that a ThoughtWorker should be able to drop in commando style and just start working. The reality is they are usually totally lost anyway.
   5. Seriously consider recruiting one full time employee as a team lead, another as a project manager, and then staff the rest of your team with independent consultants. You’ll find that you get more control and better quality at a lower price.

Finally, a company like ThoughtWorks uses bizarre socialization processes and weird shit like Neuro-Linguistic Programming^[11] to enslave their employees into working more hours than needed. That shit about “can’t leave with a broken build”, pair programming, hazing rituals, firing people who don’t conform, and other unprofessional behavior mostly exists to make employees pliable pawns.

Why? Because ThoughtWorks pays these people a salary that is fixed and considered a sunk cost. If they pay someone 60k/year and that person works 40 hours/week then they are paying them about $29/hour. If they convince this idiot to work 60 hours/week then they are basically paying the moron $19/hour. If they can push them to 80 hour/week then these idiots are actually making $14/hour. You can make $29/hour managing a fast food joint.

The further and harder ThoughtWorks (or any consulting firm) pushes its employees the more money they make because then they charge the client for each fucking hour. Get it? If they push an employee to 60/week they not only reduce the cost of that employee but also increase the billable hours. Hell, even if they don’t charge for those hours they still make more money just by reducing costs.

Now I’ll admit I didn’t see ThoughtWorks do this quite as much as I’ve seen IBM Global Services, Accenture, and BearingPoint do it, but they still do it. My observation about ThoughtWorks is they’re really really really fucking weird about it. I saw them pull passive aggressive shit like picking on a single employee high-school-nerd-vs-jock style until he conforms or quits.

What’s this got to do with your project? Well, if you have a mix of ThoughtWorks employees and your own then be careful that the ThoughtWorkers don’t warp your employees as well. I’ve seen it once already where a room full of ThoughtWorkers would thrash and trash on one poor employee simply because he disagreed with their approach to a problem. Or, having special boards on the wall with “How Many Times Frank Is Late”. Or, holding “dev lunches” (which I called “dev lynches“) where they thrash client employees with alternative opinions in order to maintain their stupid operations.

I’ve seen it, and they do it. Be careful of it as you’ll lose people who are smart and not susceptible to that crap, or you’ll have a bunch of brain washed idiots at the end of the project. It’s also a horrible way to treat a client so don’t put up with it.


More To Come

This is a long rant I’m writing in serial form. Stay tuned for more about Ruby conferences and why they suck, and why the Pickaxe book is what killed Ruby.



_{REFERENCES                        
1.:http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/index.html
2.:http://www.zedshaw.com/feed.atom
3.:http://www.powerset.com/
4.:http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
5.:http://mkrf.rubyforge.org/
6.:http://obiefernandez.com/
7.:http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2006/Dec/1017363.html
8.:http://www.koziarski.com/
9.:http://merbivore.com/
10.:http://www.factorcode.org/
11.:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming}