Read this book as a follow up to the phoenix project. It’s similarly heavy handed and far from the best piece of literature. Kind of like IT management fan fiction. However I still enjoyed the experience of reading a fictional novel about software development and I found myself rooting for the protagonists, so maybe I am being too hard on it.
I thought the messages around embracing devops philosophy and how they were able to turn a failing business around by doing so was great. In particular I liked that they were not held back by what already existed. They were unafraid to throw out systems if they recognized it was an organizational bottleneck.
One of the most unrealistic parts of the story to me is that they still had all these hyper talented individuals who were just waiting to be properly utilized. That’s not unheard of but I think in general when there are highly dysfunctional organizations, there is an exodus of talent because people of that caliber have options