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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that story is total bullshit. It's someone's fantasy. The equivalent of me telling the story of my epic comeback in the Superbowl.

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I can buy the part about putting up fences between business people at the tech team. Been there, done that, modernized project management. But the "thank you"s, bonuses and all that? Complete fantasy. :)

I 100% guarantee it's someone who has recently read "The Phoenix Project" and made it up based on that.

He even referenced the Phoenix Project ;)

Now you understand modern book marketing. :-)

Wait...are you suggesting that whole comment is actually just an ad?

While I have no evidence in this particular case, if I wanted to promote a book, I could imagine making up a related, positive story, which just happens to mention the book positively, and posting it on a popular social media site (I put the book in my cart). Then one could follow up with a softball opposing story on another site to get some controversy and thus visibility.

Probably someone will cross link for you (I thought about doing that when I saw the headline). If not, a sock puppet can point out the link, and the book, again.

TBH these two stories have the exaggerated perfection that characterizes fake stories. And the fact that they arrived so close together makes me very suspicious.

I mean I read it and thought about looking up the book and getting it

I did like the book, back when I was completely new to DevOps. It's also a fictional story in the same vein as the one on reddit basically same template, but more mystic. Explaining DevOps through a story.

Now I'd suggest to just read the state of Devops reports by Google, they are excellent.

This is not an ad and I doubt it is fake. Click on the user profile and read some of his other comments. This guy is real.

Completely agree. I knew they'd link to the Phoenix Project at the end

If so, I’m even more impressed.

When I first encountered the Phoenix Project, I was expecting it to be some kind of satire. It wasn't, it was played straight all the way through and ends with "a win".

It blows my mind that someone could write a novel about work and NOT have it be a satire or dark comedy. This book is used in project management courses, by the way.

Why? Maybe it’s that you’ve never worked for a boss that fought that hard for your free time?

Great bosses like this exist

The manager maybe, but you don't change the culture of the company like that. A low level manager has very little influence on that, they'd be replaced the moment other VPs started complaining.

Depends on the on the exact political arrangements. I’ve seen a “low” level manager get the ear of a senior leader and get protection/empowerment that ended them to do something on par with this. It sounds like the author got the appropriate buy in, and I suspect that not all ad hoc work got prioritized in a FILO manner.

It sounded implausible to me. Admittedly I don’t work for a large corporation but this sounded like a socially challenged persons dream of how they’d convince large groups of opposing people to their side. Hostile interactions with shelter from an all powerful HR and the vague threat of a lawsuit.

I've explicitly asked for strong barriers from external leads and developers from my manager before and gotten them. My current boss aggressively puts barriers in place to keep us from being bothered or distracted.

Why? I do this stuff all the time as a manager. It really goes exactly that way. Notice that the reddit commenter started with getting buy-in from the higher-up in their org. He didn't unilaterally start changing process.

This is honestly basic management technique. It is called the "Auntie/Uncle" problem.

I’m having a bit of trouble what “Auntie/Uncle problem” is in reference to. My Google search are just a bit too generic to narrow in. Any chance you know of an article on the subject I can read through?

You might consider providing a link, since Google returns absolutely nothing about management relating to “Auntie / Uncle” as a search term.

I could see it happening where I work (Large Multinational in the Energy Industry). HR are removed enough that they would back this up, yet have the authority. Teams often report by function, therefore there isn't a local manager worried about the missed deadline. Combined with the companies image as attempting to be a leader in social responsibility (at least as much as an Oil and Gas company can). I can see it happen however I don't think I could see it in any of the smaller companies I have worked for as the results of missing deadline were frequently too significant.

That being said my current employer is exactly like the one mentioned by OP here. You basically need to build credibility internally to deliver.

It's pretty hard to imagine HR intervening in business operations to protect a single department's work-life balance - couldn't really track it from there.

Reddit is 90% LARPing when it comes to situations like this - it's obvious once you see it, and once you see it you can't unsee it ever again. It's like getting vaccinated against a sickness.

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