ThoughtWorks History

by Michael Aguilar

ThoughtWorks is a social and commercial community whose purpose is to revolutionise business software creation and delivery. Roy Singham, the founder and CEO, drew inspiration from Dee Hock's notion of 'thoughtware' from his book, The Birth of the Chaordic Age, which would drive the modern age, much as industrial production drove the last age.

In 1993 he incorporated ThoughtWorks, to attract and employ the best knowledge workers "ThoughtWorkers" who would share some basic core values: aptitude, attitude, integrity.

The pace of change in business necessitated a hiring model that focused on talent instead of experience. Human ingenuity and intellect ultimately differentiate a truly successful company from one that merely survives. To find the right people, ThoughtWorks eschewed recruiting shortcuts that depend heavily on measuring someone's mastery of this or that tool. Instead it developed a novel blend of assessments and interviewing that has found employees who are passionate about using technology to deliver business solutions. ThoughtWorker innovations such as CruiseControl and Selenium, as well as contributions to development practices such as Distributed Agile prove out a founding idea that intellectuals can also deliver outstanding business value.

Over the years ThoughtWorks has grown from that first handful of folks in a tiny office in Chicago to a company of 750 people spread across a dozen offices in 6 countries: Australia, Canada, China, India, England, and the United States. The desire to expand globally doesn't just come from a cost-benefit analysis evaluating various markets. ThoughtWorks sees that technology connects people around the world as never before, and that emerging countries such as China, India, and Brazil are becoming global players in the business world. ThoughtWorks feels it's the responsibility of every person and every company to be a responsible global citizen and to do so, it is committed to having a presence in these areas, as well as the more traditional'western' business centers.

The success ThoughtWorks has experienced over the years has only emboldened it to continue the 'social experiment', as the internal joke sometimes goes. Its growth is only constrained by its ability to find enough talented individuals to join.

Mike Aguilar

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