Oops I read a Business Book

More than a year ago I had this sudden idea, what if I could find a narrative book about working in IT. This was before I had found a role in the sector, but it led me to discover The Phoenix Project. It’s a story about a midlevel manager, Bill, suddenly get a promotion pushed to him. He struggles to accept it at first but then ultimately does. He goes on to find out the company he works at is completely dysfunctional and every meeting with team just under Steve Masters, the CEO, ends in a yelling match. Thankfully the old tech hippie stereotype drops down from nowhere bearing donuts to lead Bill to see the correct way to run IT in a company. Mimicking the concepts from lean manufacturing they discover a process called Dev-ops. He doesn’t actually discover this, its more like he’s guided by this mysterious figure known as Erik, the tech hippie investor. He Teaches Bill the “3 ways”, everything runs efficiently, and Sarah is fired… thankfully.

I’m not going to write about this in the way it was probably intended. This was clearly an educational book to sell the philosophy of DevOps. It’s points make sense. We’ve definelty seen the movement away from the waterfall methodology and something, something agile. I’m not going to pretend I understand tech business methodologies. I’m going to think of this book from a narrative perspective. Why? Because i feel like it, that’s why.

Bill is your every midwestern American. They go with their gut, they drive 5 miles over the speed limit, and is always ready to do their job. He also really admired the CEO, I feel like admiring someone who makes executive decisions within a private corporations while appealing to faceless shareholders, is so strange. But I know we’re all guilty, we admired Steve Jobs for acting like a magician on stage. Sure you might have listened to the Behind the Bastards episode of Steve Jobs and realized he was a piece of shit, but regardless people still love them some CEOs.

Back to what I was saying, I never liked Bill through out most of the entire read. He reminds me of people that I worked with in the past. People that ignore everyone around them because their “gut” is some sort of 8-ball fortune teller. Wes and Patty (Networking and Operations) seem fine, the depth of my opinions on them is the depth of characteristics. Dick Laundry is hopefully not laundering money. John is probably my favorite because everyone hates him. Steve is a god I think. Erik is a psychosis episode from Bill, If I ever got the rights to turn this into a movie that is what I would do. Last but definitely least, Sarah. Everyone has a Sarah in the office. Sarah is satan.

Even though I did not care for Bill, he grew on me. I accepted his traits and enjoyed as he fell on his face trying to decipher the coded messages from his dream state, that being Erik. Actually reading his reaction to the disaster of Project Phoenix was the best part of this book. It was a slow start of walking around the office and meeting different functions, but once things started hitting the fan I was pulled in. One of my biggest complaints is the amount of meetings. I know business minded people need a hit of dopamine they get after a meeting with a bunch of nods at the end. I know this is a bit of disaster control, but I feel like when a company goes overboard with meetings they are admitting they are loosing control of the team and are not having enough one-on-ones. But what do I know I’m not a business minded person.

I loved that everyone hated John. He reiterated his reasoning for being annoying. Everyone groans at the site of him. Bill’s fever dream even decides that John is useless. John then goes on a downfall questioning life after these auditors came in and said, “meh dis whatev, jus take care of it brah. Easi moni.” To be honest I’m not sure what cheered John up. Did he look in the mirror and realized its time to quiet quit, or did he just enter the step of acceptance. Either way something about this new Dev-Ops system makes him go I’m ok now. If I were to really think about it, it must be because now development and security can push code to the same environment so there is no more waiting or allocating time for security. I guess.

Anyways, I’m glad I finished this book. I learned to understand what Dev-Ops. It makes sense to me why this philosophy exists. I’ve heard of lean manufacturing in the past, so it was interesting to see it applied to Development. Companies taking on this change had led to program applications be thought logistical services and not so much software products. This actually confirms to me why everyone is moving to a subscription mindset. It is because code is never done. It never stops moving. Instead continuously rains. As we maintain the rain we remind ourselves, thank god we’re no longer waiting for the impact of a large waterfall.