Definitely cultish and yes, I agree... a lot of the engineers were brilliant, but their code was sometimes a bit crazy. I worked with one guy who meta programmed everything in Ruby to the point where even the tests were meta programmed and none of the stack traces made any sense when things failed. The complexity level was just too far over the top for the benefits of the meta programming.
I've also tried to 'change' companies towards Pivotal process. It never really works. People are more than willing to listen, but when it comes down to the practice of things, it just doesn't happen for one reason or another. I think that is why Pivotal Labs works so well... everyone working there is already on the same page and sticks around for many years... and anyone who isn't on page, migrates out relatively quickly.
I think this is also a bit why 'agile' tends to get a lot of hate/fear on HN. You really have to be military and cultish about it from day one, like PL is. Few people are willing to buy into that. Even I was skeptical of it when I first started there and it took me a while to relax into it.
I've also tried to 'change' companies towards Pivotal process. It never really works. People are more than willing to listen, but when it comes down to the practice of things, it just doesn't happen for one reason or another. I think that is why Pivotal Labs works so well... everyone working there is already on the same page and sticks around for many years... and anyone who isn't on page, migrates out relatively quickly.
I think this is also a bit why 'agile' tends to get a lot of hate/fear on HN. You really have to be military and cultish about it from day one, like PL is. Few people are willing to buy into that. Even I was skeptical of it when I first started there and it took me a while to relax into it.