Back in April I left
the company I'd been working for after 9 (mostly) happy years. Not
entirely through my own choice, although redundancy ultimately didn't
treat me too badly. After spending Easter with my two girls, running
some races and doing some of the long overdue work around the house
and garden (though not nearly as much as Josie wanted me to do), I
finally got round to looking for a new job by going to the Silicon
Milk Roundabout in May.
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| While trimming the firethorn I shouldn't have cut this brown "twig" |
Like most people who
work in the technology industry I had heard of ThoughtWorks. I knew
they hosted a lot of community events, I knew they published the
technical radar and I knew that they have a kind of elevated, almost
mystical cult like status. I also was aware of a man called Martin
Fowler who is "chief scientist" at ThoughtWorks and is
considered a world authority on many technology subjects. Oddly, I
had never really thought about how ThoughtWorks make money. So when I
saw the ThoughtWorks stand at Silicon Milk Roundabout I initially
walked past it reasoning that there is no way ThoughtWorks could
consider employing me. After a circuit or two of the venue and with a
much depleted stock of CVs (I was down to one) and a couple of beers
to both deal with my hangover and give me some Dutch courage, I
finally approached the ThoughtWorks stand and spoke to a charming
lady called Amy. Thankfully, she was extremely helpful and human
(although she did explain she was a recruiter, not a technologist)
and after a chat about my experience, what ThoughtWorks do (we are
consultants obviously) and some dire warnings about the possibility
of having to travel for work she assured me that somebody from the
London office would contact me shortly.
Many people have
written at length about the ThoughtWorks recruitment process in blogs
and on Glassdoor so I don't propose to add greatly to that canon. In
short, I thought the process was challenging but very enjoyable and
above all was superbly managed by the team here in London. I guess I
would say that because it ultimately ended with me being offered a
job but I genuinely got the impression that I would have been
impressed with the process had that not been the result. Of course
there is no chance of any kind of confirmation bias going on here
contrasting ThoughtWorks recruitment with those rubbish recruitment
processes that didn't offer me a job. Another well known consultant
threatened to sabotage the whole process by offering me a job for a
much higher salary the day after ThoughtWorks had confirmed an offer
to me. I made what I considered to be the only sensible decision (and
I've subsequently found out, the far from unique decision) to take
the less well paid job.
When I started here
I suffered from a strange and debilitating loss of confidence in my
own ability compared to those around me. That also turned out to be
far from unique and I quickly found out that this phenomenon is known
as "imposter syndrome" and afflicts almost all
ThoughtWorkers in their early time here. After a few weeks I realised
that whilst I was far from the cleverest man in the room, there is
always something that I know more about than the other people to whom
I may be talking. Thus, whilst I may never aspire to the technical
ability of some of my colleagues, I can point to a solid decade of
experience in a company that grew from a startup into a large
organisation and went through a complete Agile transformation.
So 3 months on from
joining ThoughtWorks I'm over the imposter syndrome, I've made some
great new friends, I've had loads of interesting and truly
stimulating conversations, I've learnt stacks of stuff about
technology and business, I've become integrated in the ThoughtWorks
hivemind, I've been involved with some of our clients but I'm yet to
write any code in anger. Definitely the most enjoyable and mentally
invigorating three months of my working career to date. I'm hoping it
only gets better.
