ThoughtWorks at NSBE

Last week I was at the National Society of Black Engineers Conference career fair looking for new recruits. Many of the larger companies there put on impressive displays. Boeing had a flight simulator. Honda brought in cars and engines that were cut in half. Harley Davidson gave out leather jackets. Compared to these displays the ThoughtWorks booth was positively spartan. But what we lacked in bombastic visuals we made up for with actual content. Andy Slocum had the brilliant idea of running a mini agile project at the conference. We came up with a concept application that made conference attendees the customer, put up a story wall, and used my laptop to develop and demonstrate the app. Over the 2 days of the career fair we wrote stories, pair programmed and demonstrated agile to dozens of students. The application was our central prop for explaining what we do at ThoughtWorks. Many of the students we talked to became very interested in Agile, XP, and Ruby on Rails. We even had a few volunteers write stories and pair with us on the code!

The application we produced was called Complement, and it was a pretty simple web 2.0 application. A typical path through the app was: enter the job you are seeking, enter your favorite companies here at the career fair that offer the job. Then the app displays a list of the companies offering that job sorted by popularity. Ok, it was pretty simple, but hey we only had 2 days. We used Ruby on Rails and Scriptaculous. Surprisingly only about 10 percent of the students I talked to had ever heard of Ruby, but most of them were pretty impressed when I showed them the code, especially the ActiveRecord portions.

It will be interesting to see how many hires we get from our work at the fair. I'm convinced that long after the students have broken their Accenture light-up pens and lost their IBM stress ball they will remember learning Agile and Rails from Thoughtworks.