History of TW assignment.

How did TWU get its current name? See the long below quote. 

Make sure it doesn't scare off immigration/border protection officers! We got into trouble when it was called "Global Boot Camp" because immigration officers thought that ThoughtWorks was sending people off to India to train with some sort of para-military organization. http://twuname.ideascale.com/ (check out the comments for more info)
The original name of the program was "Global Boot Camp", something most people felt was good and described how new hires from college would be trained once they joined TW. "Global Boot Camp" was also catchy; we could use it when talking to our customers, and even they started asking if we could run boot camps for them.
Unfortunately, this name doesn't work so well when it comes to crossing borders. Everyone involved had to be instructed to use "technical training course" when going through immigration at airports and border crossings, so we wouldn't cause any alarm. Apparently, that still didn't matter, because a ThoughtWorker unrelated to the GBC was stopped at an airport and asked "what is this 'Global Boot Camp' thing all about?"
In the search of a new name that still sounded catchy but had less of a militant edge, we through around a few names for the next round of training. Some of those that were rejected included the following:
"ThoughtLearning" (according to our brand guidelines, we can't break up ThoughtWorks)
"Global Thought Learning"
"Technical Training Course"
"ThoughtWorks Center of Excellence"
"Neville Singham's School for the Gifted" (Gary Larson fans united around this one)
"[ThoughtWorks.edu]" (couldn't get the domain)
So, we ended up with "ThoughtWorks University." We're not trying to be smart-alecky nor are we full of ourselves. We just needed to find a name we could use consistently to throw to the recruits, regional invitation letters, t-shirts and the corporate website.
We want something that rolls of the tongue and is easy to understand. If you want a better name, please suggest one soon.
https://confluence.wazokazi.com/display/GBC/About+the+Name

OpenSpace on Arduino, soldering, and makerbots (possibly with practical demonstrations)

What is (bring mine)

• soldering
  - flux
  - lead-free or notlead free
  
• an Arduino
  Show it off. Microcontroller. It has its own dev language.
• a makerbot? (I only wish that I had one of these)
  - prints plastic, can make shapes that modern manufacturing can only do in many steps
  - prototyping
  - ideally self-replicating
• hackerspaces
  - there's one in pretty much every city, and usually several
  - PS1 in Chicago
  - Janga in Bangalore http://www.jaaga.in/bangalore-hackerspace

What would you do with one?

• Everyone say an idea

And then we will discuss... I expect it to be over relatively quickly (especially considering that not that many people are signed up for it...)

defeating jet lag

I slept during the normal hours of the night! Woke up to my alarm at 7:30 feeling triumphant but groggy. Now we're at the Orchid, eating breakfast... and it turns out that when I take both my wake-me-up pill and the weekly malaria pill at the same time- even if I take them both with food like they're supposed to be- the feeling it creates is to say the least interesting. I wonder how well I can learn while under the influence of pills which reportedly give mild psychoactive side effects.

The ill appears to have vanished for me and several other TWUers, which is excellent. I hope it stays away!

Service culture

The nice man in the uniform at the buffet ladles your soup for you, and the nice man in the uniform by the coffee pours that for you, and asks you how much milk you want, and if you add sugar he uses your spoon to mix it in for you. And there's full waiter used-plate-pick-up service during/after the buffet meal. I thought that the point of a buffet was that it was self-serve, lol.

Anyway, just another culture difference

My first post to the main forum!

Was totally inspired by Rrodrigo's courage in going first. I mean, I just sent an email to the entire company (or at least the ones who don't filter out the townhall mailing list) ...that's like 1800 people and includes people whose books I've bought and read. It's exciting.

I was replying to a thread about diversity in hiring, i.e. quotas vs. goals, with a side of how to get the pool of interviewees to be more diverse.

On a related note to diversity recruiting, I also am currently at TWU (dev, Chicago office) and I am interested in the small and diminishing presence of women in IT and what can be done to redirect the trends towards a ratio which more closely resembles parity.

My favorite document on the topic is a (longish) howto by Val Henson about how to avoid driving female Linux users out of groups, and how to find more and retain them. I believe that his points are very generalizable to the IT industry as a whole. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

When it comes to interviewee's backgrounds in computer science, I too am one of those who came to the field from an unexpected direction. I was in the Humanities department during my undergraduate career, and programming didn't gain me anything in my particular academic or social circles. I think that, as a solution, "lowering the bar" is worse than the problem because it gives fuel to the cultural theory that women in IT are not as skilled as their male counterparts.

I believe that mentoring of female students by women in the IT industry gives good result percentage per time invested on the part of the mentor. Mentoring needs to start with students before they enter college, where they have already begun to choose their specialties. In fact, I think that late middle school (7th and 8th grades) may be the ideal start time for introducing the specific field and attributes of our field to students.

Random notes

Future TWUers: the 24-hour cafe in G-block named Java is a sit-down place but you can get take-out. Take-out is an extra 7Rs. A box of white rice is 35R - jut under $1USD.

Bug bites are a perpetual and severe annoyance.

One of the door greeting guys at the Royal Orchid has an amazingly excellent hat, and shook everyone's hand as they came in the door. :)

Cultural differences regarding complementing clothing continue to confuse me. 

ponderings on professionalism

What are traits of professionalism? Here's a short list of my current learnings.

• staying late if the situation requires it
• having a passion for your job
• making sure things get done properly
• everything that falls under customer commitment- not just for the hours or the money but because you're proud of what you do
• showing up on time
• if they ask for something and you think it's not the best thing to do, tell them no, no matter what. You could do it and just pocket the money, but don't.

Training Day 1

Future TWUers: the "ice cream list" means that the people on the list buy us all ice cream at the end of the week. Things that will get you onto it: being late, writing emails with poor spelling, cell phone during work, sitting all with people from your office (during sessions, not when actually working). 

I hear that TW has a service where they can do our taxes if we want them to. I wonder how that works... 

Today we did something called a fishbowl, where there are two rings of chairs, and the ring on the inside is 4 or 5 people with one empty chair, and only people in the middle are allowed to talk. And anyone who wants to from the outside circle can come sit in the empty chair, but then someone from the inside has to get up and leave. And only people who have spoken already are allowed to leave the inner circle for the outer circle! It was really fun.

The fishbowl and our independent lunch discussions were about some value studies of value issues within TW: recruiting women, client:TWer environment issues, management issues, and the truck factor + salary differences between countries.

"There is no better way to get people hooked in [to our company] than to give them what they want." (talking about the fact that TW supports employee entrepreneurial efforts)

Geek nights- each office has basically a study party for people's independent projects. Frequency varies by office

PM groups- usergroups for project managers where non-TW people come in and hang out and talk about best practices.

opensource.thoughtworks.com Paul Hamitt is the go-to guy for questions about open source at TW. /

Quotes about leaders:

"TW pushes its leaders quite a bit"

"That's because I'm hard on my leaders."

Reminds me of the V for Vendetta quote about how a government should be afraid of its people.

Apparently when Roy comes into the TW offices (he visits all of them to make sure they're going well) he talks to the lowest person on the ladder and if they're happy than it's probably a happy office. 

On a completely unrelated note, I think that India should buy thousands of these and put them in Poo River.  

TWUer: "What makes you tick?"

Me: "Large amounts of obstinance."

As part of a diversity discussion, we had a discussion about Chuckecheese. :)

The "truck factor" is how many people on a project can be run over by a truck before the project grinds to a halt. 

Pro tip: the trainers say to order takeout chinese food from "Mainland China" (although possibly only after your stomach has adjusted to the food!

Is there any country with a large % of women in tech? (According to one of the Brazil TWUers, Brazil is even lower % than the USA(?))

One of the things that the company considers best practice (Google aslo does this!) is to have a woman or a member of a minoity group or a person in a very different age cohort in on at least one round of an interview, to check the interviewee for obvious negative reactions which would imply that they would be unemployable by a global company.

Prezi is a cool way to give presentations. 

"technology stack" means what platforms and tools you will be using to develop on a particular project.

The last several TWU teams created an internal application called Chronicle.

At the very beginning of the morning, we did:

• facts exercise where we have to fun around the room asking everyone whether particular obscure facts that our trainers pulled from facebook are true.
• put up anonymous postits about our hopes and concerns on a board on the wall
• listened to a presentation that covered:
  knowing the big picture concept vs. knowing the tools (tools can be looked up; big pictures can't)
  fail fast to reach perfection iteratively (less total effort)
  TWU is a proving ground: people have washed out before and you could do it now. We'll be graded on:
  - tech skills
  - consulting skills (how well we interface with a client and our team)
  - people skills (are you a good person to work with?)
  - drive (do you learn fast and enthusiastically?)
• Over 4 weeks, we will have 160 hours of practice on a project to teach us what to do when we get assigned to something billable.

I want to keep a chart of who gets sick and when... just for statistical purposes... but eh, it might be difficult.

Values are things that outweigh practicality. (my definition)

Origin of the name TWU: used to be TW Global Boot Camp. Also there used to be "lateral immersion" for two weeks...?

The TW Director of Social Responsibility has some cool projects. I want more details.

Professionalism (part deux)

http://davidmaister.com/search/ > "professionalism" > read everything

But if I do that right now I'll be exhausted at work today, so it has to wait.

I like this guy's writing style.

Sleepless in Bangalore

The ill seems to have receded for now, but I went to sleep so early that I woke up just past 4am. I wonder whether I will ever get my sleep schedule regularized. Going by the activity on the mail.thoughtworks chat list, and the lights that are on under my flatmates' doors, I don't think I'm the only one with this problem.

I do like having a quiet hour to myself to upload photos and catch up on blogs... maybe this isn't so bad.