Are they still traveling a lot at TW? I don't want to live in a hotel for 4 days a week, so I declined when they approached me.

Travel like that is your choice and is based on what projects you want to do.

Generally speaking, the travel is because the client wants the team to be on site and pairing with the client's people.

We have a bunch of people who prefer not to travel as much, and that's fine too.

Also, work-from-anywhere tooling is getting better and better, and more of our clients are asking about it. In my opinion these tools are really good though not as good (yet) as being in person in groups.

Well, traveling really depends on project. But you can actually ask for non-travel project.

I would recommend talking to the recruiter and let them know your preferences before declining.

> you can actually ask for non-travel project

Interesting, thanks. At my current job they try to staff local as much as possible, there is no formal hierarchy and we also have 20% time, so my standards are high. Traveling too much would be a no go for me.

I'd actually be interested to know what thoughtworks does, and how (much) I could (should/would) pay for whatever services thoughtworks provides... I looked at https://www.thoughtworks.com/products etc - and I still don't know what thoughtworks provides, or how much what it costs? Am I just looking in the wrong place?

ThoughtWorks does custom software consulting, and specializes in high-throughput projects.

For example suppose you're Acme Widgets, and you want to build a web app, mobile app, analytics, a data lake, real-time stream processing, and all the continuous delivery tooling to go with this.

You can hire ThoughtWorks to provide the team to build all this and also teach your own people how to do it. The pay is essentially the same as you'd pay hiring your own employees for the project, i.e. time and materials.

The advantage of hiring ThoughtWorks is when you want a team of people who all know how to work together, and you want the team for a specific project goal.

An example that may be useful for the Hacker News readers: suppose you work for a San Francisco startup, and you want to ship a product fast, and do validated learning something like the Lean Startup book, or Steve Blank's Business Model Canvas. You can have your own employees building the core product, and you can hire a ThoughtWorks team to build your client apps, continuous delivery pipelines, analytics dashboards, and the like.

With having some products, ThoughtWorks does consulting and custom software development (services) as well.

ThoughtWorks has developed Mingle - a project management tool, Go - a continuous delivery tool, Snap - a continuous delivery tool on cloud, Gauge - test automation tool. But you can also hire ThoughtWorks for consulting on agile organization transformation, programming practices, etc. If you are looking for teams to help you develop custom software with these practices, ThoughtWorks can help you with that as well.