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593 points ZeroTalent | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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WoodenChair ◴[] No.43943001[source]
I've read over 100 business books. Why? Because I enjoy the genre and its many sub-genres. From both an entertainment and a practical perspective. And that's also why I co-host the podcast Business Books & Co. [0].

In my opinion, the author of this post is correct about his criticisms of the specific books in the post (we did several of them on the show). Many business books overly generalize, are not empirically rigorous, and are better seen as anecdotal and/or entertainment.

But you also need to understand that "business books" is a very broad category that includes many sub-genres like entrepreneurial storytelling (Shoe Dog), "big idea" books (Zero to One), career up-skilling (Radical Candor), economic history (Titan), and self-help (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Many of these cross over into non-business genres as well.

So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do. He's mostly speaking about the "big idea" books as if those are the whole genre. What is a business book? It's ill-defined but I think there are many great ones outside the "big idea" space. For example, we just interviewed John Romero on the show to discuss his 2023 autobiography Doom Guy[1]. In my opinion, it is absolutely a wonderful business book from the entrepreneurial storytelling sub-genre. But it doesn't fit the mold that this post talks about.

0: http://businessbooksandco.com

1: https://pnc.st/s/business-books/e9076f47/doom-guy-with-john-...

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lazyasciiart ◴[] No.43943912[source]
I enjoy “business fables” like The Goal or The Phoenix Project. Since you must know a fair chunk of the business books - any other good ones in this genre?
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ghaff ◴[] No.43945203[source]
DevOps is one of the weird ones because the details are so situational. No one likes to emphatically throw communications between Dev and Ops (and security) under the train. But the reality is that, for large organizations, making it so that different functions don't have to communicate is often the best approach.
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1. sgarland ◴[] No.43945541[source]
I have yet to see DevOps actually executed well. IME, it always winds up with half-assed infrastructure, because devs often have little interest in ops, and even more rarely have any kind of background in it.

The entire concept seems to me like devs noticed that ops folks were often automating large portions of their jobs with shell scripts, and haughtily thought, “we could do so much better with proper tooling and a better language,” completely disregarding the fact that the ops team had decades of combined experience and trauma from past incidents.

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2. ghaff ◴[] No.43945618[source]
Don't really disagree.

I sort of lost interest in a lot of the DevOps culture.

I think when Kubernetes came in for larger orgs (and even before such as OpenShift that I was involved with), the set infra up and get out of the way mindset made a lot of sense. I think there was an attempt to overlay DevOps on what would become Platform Engineering but I'm not sure it ever really made sense.