How Dumb Must You Be To Work For Pivotal in 2018?

Previously (January 2017): Anatomy of Software Frauds

Previously (December 2017): Pivotal Empolyment 2013-2016

Others in this series include, but are not limited to:

• Pivotal IPO? Hell No!
• Pivotal’s WTF Public Offering?

You see how Pivotal is a rotting corpse decomposing around the world. What are the most concise arguments for why nobody should work for Pivotal going forward?

Don’t Work for Pivotal

Future employers judge you on your past employment. Having any extended tenure at Pivotal on your CV is a negative mark against you.

No Purpose

What’s the purpose of Pivotal beyond “fraudulently take money from customers in return for broken services?”

Is Pivotal all about Big Data? No, they stopped repeating that lie after a couple years.

Is Pivotal about a big money public exit? No, they stopped repeating that lie after a couple years. Your employee stock is worthless.

Is Pivotal about a big money private acquisition by Microsoft or HP or ___? No, those companies run away from acquisition talks once they see Pivotal’s toxic internal numbers. Nobody wants to buy a consulting company pretending to be a software company.

Pivotal only exists to keep it’s slovenly, zero-posture CEO lazy and happy (plus his personal friends) at the expense of the advancement and development of thousands of other employees.

Why does a software company need two dozen offices around the world? It doesn’t—but scam-driven heavy-touch Staff Aug consulting companies need to be within driving distance of their marks to keep customers brainwashed into thinking progress is actually happening.

Look at your salary. Now look at typical salary offers from real companies. I bet you aren’t making as much as a 20 year old applying to Google.

No Future

What is the one thing Pivotal wants to be good at?

• Enterprise Java Garbage?
• PaaS on IaaS for Shit as a Service that can manage 4 requests per second while using 512 GB RAM and charging customers per “app instance” they create even though everything is supposed to auto-scale?
• Cult of Agile Pair Programming Body Shop Scams?
• Endless Staff Aug? Endless Consulting Support on Your Own Broken Software?
• Oh wait, maybe doing consulting on iOS and Android and dead Windows Mobile mobile apps, right?
• Oh, everything from mobile app consulting to amateur ruby scaffolding+stylesheet consulting to thousand-server scale PaaS consulting? So the company has no focus and no purpose and no talent and no expertise and just wants money for doing something?
• Or is it doing Azure consulting because nobody else will touch that garbage fire except for paid shills?
• I know! I know! Supporting dead-end, EOL open source software like RabbitMQ that was a good idea back in 2010 but is now an unmaintainable pile of failure and regret, but you keep selling it like it’s the gold standard of reliable software?
• DOJOS! You get a dojo and you get a dojo and every obese middle aged white guy gets a dojo!
• Invasive condescending managerial video chats at home?

The answer is All Of The Above! When formed in 2013, Pivotal wanted to be an actual software company.

Unfortunately, their core software play was so awful they ended up re-creating the CEO’s 1980s dream scam: pair programming consulting on anything. As long as you pay us, we’ll pretend to be experts™.

Rotten Past

Pivotal was formed from the unwanted parts of other companies. CF started in 2009 and was a failure. It was such a failure it’s been re-written about 8 times by now in 3 different programming languages.

This is not how you write stable and purposeful software. This is how you write scams. All you have to do is tell your customers “Oh, those fatal flaws killing your entire company you paid us to fix? Yeah, those will be fixed after our rewrite in another three years.”

Remember when the first CEO just up and left with a fake reasoning of “reaching retirement age?” Sure is a confidence builder. Then his replacement demanded everybody devalue themselves by becoming a “pair programmer” working strict office hours every day. (“Oh, you don’t like the CEO dictating how you manage your day-to-day work? Then you aren’t a fit for this company anymore. Please leave.”)

Pair Programming is a scam to reduce developer value to the company. If you don’t have any personal individualized responsibility, everybody is replaceable and wages can be driven down.

Pair Programming is a scam to keep companies feeling like they are moving forward without actual progress (also a great way of maintaining your sham consulting fees forever—look! we gave you 24 programmers doing 12 tasks (because PAIRS!) but they are STILL WORKING! We need THREE MORE YEARS of hourly payments for 24 people to finish the work 5 people could do on their own!). If everybody is interchangeable on rotation, nobody gets deep specialized knowledge to create useful solutions. Everybody is just a “copy from Google results” code monkey, and that’s just how management likes it. Programmers can’t get uppity and demand more money if they don’t have any actual responsibility or individual knowledge.

Remember when that one executive just moved his entire family to Hawaii and laughed about remaining on the org chart without doing anything?

Remember when Pivotal had layoffs and fired entire open source projects they were supporting? Grails? Anybody?

Remember when the CEO globally emailed a picture of his ugly newborn and drugged up post-birth wife to the entire company because he thinks we all submit to his cult of personality?

Remember every time you run up against a road block because you’re not part of the 50 year olds in the EMC/VMware old boys club who are the only ones allowed to advance meaningfully?

Remember when you were told the stock was worth something? Remember wasting years of your life for nothing while your friends all made an extra $5 million at their big corp jobs?

Remember co-workers being marched in front of the CEO and they must recite the Agile Cultist Manifesto Principles or they’re fired?

Remember being constantly being treated like children needing to be manipulated instead of autonomous professionals?

Do you member?

Rotten Future

Pivotal has no future. The products are not sustainable. If you had to start a new company today, would you decide to use the fake “open source” bloated, octopus-dependency, poorly maintained Pivotal platform they try to charge $5 million to $50 million for, or just use stable industry-standard solutions already out there?

That’s what I thought.

Run away as fast as you can.