My ThoughtWorks University experience

From developer to consultant…

If you are here, you are probably a Thoughtworker or somebody soon to join ThoughtWorks and you are looking for what is this TWU thing. If you are none of the above then is a good reason to start explaining what ThoughtWorks is, we are a software consultancy, but I know what you are thinking already, and no, we are not a traditional consultancy, we believe in a three pillars business model

“The pillars are the foundation of everything we do, they inform every decision we make.”

but we are here for TWU right, so what is it? ThoughtWorks University is the place where all the new joiners (Graduate software developers) go to learn the TW’s way, and what is this?

We as ThoughtWorkers believe in knowledge sharing, and how do we accomplish this? We work in pairs, for almost everything and anything, and doing so we always make sure that all we do is high quality and we advocate for excellence.

We believe in continuous improvement and for this, we have a feedback culture, we encourage to ask and give feedback as part of our daily routines. and all of this is pretty good, it helps with our daily work and creating a safe environment. But this is not all that we believe in, we believe in making a social impact with everything that we do, so we also take the time to get involve and fight for what we believe in.

Now imagine five and a half weeks in one of the most incredible places (Pune, India) getting to know people from all over the world. They come from all the different offices (Germany, Australia, China, Brasil, etc). We get to experience different cultures all in the same place, work together, learn how to communicate and all of this while learning the “TW way”.

After several days working you don’t notice, but you find yourself advocating for all the things I’ve mentioned before: you feel like a ThoughtWorker. Personally, I think we as Graduates have a huge advantage coming to TWU, we are the lucky ones and I only hope to give back by someday being a Trainer back in Pune and help the trainees become TWers as the trainers in my batch (TWU 61) did. They really did an amazing job.

So, what is a normal day in TWU? Well, you arrive really early to the office, usually to finish some things from the previous day. The first thing we have for the day is the daily stand up which if you are not familiar with Agile practices, it is just sharing what we accomplished or could not accomplish the day before, what are we planning to do today and if we have any blockers. The rest of the day will be split into different sessions and other activities, and at the end of the day when you arrive at the residence, you will probably go up to the roof to finish some work with other trainees.

But, what happens after TWU? Everyone goes back to their home offices, and you either will get some time on the beach (the place you wait until you are assigned to a project, it is not a real beach, except in Barcelona office we do have a view) or get assigned to a project shortly after you are back.

So as graduates, we are very lucky to be able to live this experience and get immerse very quickly into how to be a ThoughtWorker, but I do think any of this could be possible if we didn’t truly believe in the foundations of the company. ThoughtWorks is not a great company by itself, is we ThoughtWorkers that help make it great.