Job Offer 2 - When it rains, it pours

Friday on my way to Sacramento, I got a second job offer, this one from Pivotal Labs. I had been trying to get a job with Pivotal since November after my initial meeting with Davis, and later with Davis and several Pivots (Pivotal employees). The quality of the work environment they depicted was amazing. They pair program, they rotate pairs daily, they pair with the client, they do Test Driven Development (TDD), they devlop in Java and Ruby on Rails (RoR). They do their work on giant iMacs so both people working can see the screen.

They als o do brown bag lunches that I make it a point to attend when I could and it's exciting to see a company that is willing to open its door that way. They also offer breakfast, like catered breakfast crepes for example, EVERY MORNING as an incentive to be there at 9:05AM for the daily stand up meeting.

The people I've paired with are very communicative, and very into what they do while also being knowledge workers, people who you can trust to make decisions.

To top it all off, I was offered 25% more salary, 50% more vacation time, plus vision and dental plans over GoodBarry's offer. There's no way I could say "no" to Pivotal. During the interview they alluded that this is not the environment for many people, that it can be overwhelming to work so closely with the customer, and share a desk with another developer, and that burn out happens to many. While I do tend to throw myself into work easil, I suspect that I will not burn out for any of those reasons. I like people too much, I like sharing knowledge. I like challenges. I expect to be a happy employee here for a long time.

P.S. I start today!