Reddit reviews The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8/

Yes, I'm serious.

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Alternatively:

https://www.amazon.com/Network-Warrior-Everything-Need-Wasnt-ebook/dp/B004W8ZL3W/

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Oh, wait I missed your last sentence.

Come on, is /r/sysadmin really the best place you could think of for personal organization?

/r/GetOrganized

/r/organization

/r/organized

In my mind, a DevOps PM is a technical role responsible for aligning project management (scrum masters), technology strategy, and developers. If the business says 'we want to push new code every 2 weeks' and 'we want the ability to A/B test different features,' it's up to the DevOps PM to make sure that the product is architected in such a way that this doable, make sure project management understands the challenges, track velocity for new releases, etc.

I'd recommend reading The Phoenix Project to learn more. A little outdated given the rise of cloud computing and microservices, but the ideas around agile and finding the most efficient way to release code still hold true today.

One possible reason but it doesn't sound like it quite fits, I read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=phoenix+project+devops&qid=1554156363&s=gateway&sr=8-1

About a guy trying to turn around a dysfunctional it department, and one of his concerns is that everything depends on this one tech guy who knows everything, and no one can get anything done without consulting this one guy, so he takes various measures to basically ease the guy out of the various processes and force the rest of the team to fly on their own and develop their own skills.

I agree with /u/NoyzMaker that you'll have to leave to get away from this. On your way out, toss this book on your boss' desk:

The Phoenix Project

It's a story about almost exactly the same situation you're in.

Read the Phoenix Project this week. Seriously. It's a great parable for fixing your stuff. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B078Y98RG8

> The self driving car is a creative industry, that depends on creative problem solving within a specific domain.

Not sure your background? But you really do not want to run your software engineering organization like this.

You really want it to be more like a system. You really never want to be dependent on any one person.

You want to put together the processes such that you are not dependent on any single person. There is an awesome book on this.

Well there is a series but if into software engineering I would first read the Phoenix Project and then read the Google SRE book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078Y98RG8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Or read the first one then Phoenix project and then the Google SRE book. They all go together. The first one is called the Goal. That is how I did it. It will change your way of looking at things.

Waymo is applying what R&D done at Google brain and with DeepMind.

Google is where the AI breakthroughs come from and then applied by Waymo. So where AlphaGo and AlphaStar and GANS and capsule networks and word2vec and TF and a zillion other things.

Google shares this research at NerulIPS. As you can see they lead in papers accepted. This is a year old as we do not have the new numbers yet. But as you can see Google is way out in front.

Google's AI Research Dominance Shown via NIPS Papers -

https://medium.com/machine-learning-in-practice/nips-accepted-papers-stats-26f124843aa0

But ZERO from Waymo. As it should be. Waymo is applying the R&D done.

BTW, this is the old and disgraceful name. It has been changed because of leadership from Nvidia and Google. It is now NeurlIPS.

> It doesn't matter that they're furthest ahead at the moment, there is currently no thing under Waymo's roof that is irreplaceable.

It does matter. Because Waymo has to use to get to scale and that is your moat. The self driving aspect will be replicated. You secure your spot by having scale. Scale can't be easily replicated.

It is why I keep harping on the business model of MobilEye is a very weak model. Reason is they are behind the scenes. They do NOT have the customer relationship. It makes it so you can be easily replaced. It gets you weak margins. Low multiples.

Perfect example is MobilEye won Tesla business. Messed up and killed someone. Then was fired and Tesla doing their own. They got nothing out of it. But a blemish on their reputation.

ALL the "breakthroughs" comes from Google including DeepMind. That is how it is supposed to work and is working. Waymo is responsible for applying those "breakthroughs" as you indicated applied science.

But it is done using the model from the Goal, Phoenix Project and applied with the principles from the Google SRE book or some other DevOps book.

Google has done this for a long time better than anyone else. They literally have written the book. It is how they have been able to achieve not a single quarterly decline since day 1 and through the greatest recession in my life time. They are now growing at 20%+ for the last 10 quarters without any end in site and a big part is using these principles.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue-of-google/

How everyone today runs their clouds was invented by Google and shared through papers. It was done by creating a new approach. It is why when you wake up in the morning and type Google it always works. If it did not you would think something huge must have happened in the world. That there is much bigger issues than Google not working.

That would never work if Google was dependent on a person. Let me know if this helped. I hope you consider reading the books. Or listen to the books.