Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature? - <AUTHOR> I am a developer and the startup I joined as employee #2 a year and a half ago has been growing steadily. There are now double digits employees and I've been given more responsibility and authority.
Aside from development, some of my responsibilities up to this point have already included project management, staff management and proposal writing. Now I am joining the senior management team and taking on more strategic responsibilities, including determining the direction of many of the company's future plans and projects.
There are several paths I am looking at for preparing myself for my new responsibilities. I thought I'd start a discussion as out of the demographic on HN, I am sure I am not the only one in such a situation.
Self-teaching directions I've been looking at so far are: -	Business Analyst processes. -	Agile planning -	Agile requirements modeling -	Effective proposals -	Business development
Although there is certainly no absence of literature in this area, I've found it hard to find good recommendations. Does anyone have any suggestions for specific books in those areas, or any other areas that would benefit a developer taking on a more strategic role? <comment><USER2> Honestly I would get a mentor. Find someone either in your org or out of your org that has the skills and career you would like to work towards and start talking to them. If you hit it off you may have found someone who can help you through the bumpy parts of your career and help you plan your next steps. Some people charge for this as career coaching and that can also have some value but it's challenging to sort out the best ones. Every place I've gone I've looked for a mentor to bounce ideas off of and generally double check my thinking and how I'm approaching problems and my career. You can go to industry events and start reaching out or just look for people you admire and reach out and start a dialog.

I personally think the concept of apprenticeship is lacking in the technology industry and we loose out on what other older professions have with clearer career paths because of their established practices of guiding people though their careers. That said I've seen it abused too so there always needs to be balance in these things.

I personally coach about five people (for free) in my current company and they come from all areas of the org not just my group. I was very lucky in the early days to have several great mentors in my life who helped me and I feel it's my job to pay that back now in the latter years of my career.

Books are wonderful but nothing beats interacting with successful people.

<comment><USER3> > get a mentor

Seems easier said than done. I wouldn't want to share details of what I do with random people. Probably not with coworkers either unless it's strictly related to the job at hand, but at that point the advice they can give you is also more limited. Also, you need to find someone with more experience than you, so you don't have much to bring to the deal.

> Books are wonderful but nothing beats interacting with successful people.

That I can certainly agree with.

<comment><USER4> I can't agree more with Kator's comment. Find a mentor - maybe pay for a business coach if you want but you would probably be able to find an experienced serial entrepreneur in your industry after one or two conferences.

I would however start _today_ not with a book but a clean sheet of paper. Take a long hard look at you, your decisions and imagine explaining it all to a judge in five years time. What bits will you be proud of, which embarrassed by and which will land you in jail.

If I was to give five points I wish I had done more of:

\- Always be hiring

\- Always be filling the pipeline

\- Always cut more out than you think is possible. Do less better.

\- never ever lie, and stand up and speak the truth as needed

\- know where the money is going

<comment><USER2> Spot on, for sure a mentor is great but introspection is a powerful tool.

The first thing I ask when I start coaching someone is what are your goals with your career? In my career I can literally boil it down to four points:

1) Passion

2) Leadership

3) Compensation

4) Hybrid (Tech + Business)

At any time in my career I can score these 1-5 (5 being best) and the closer I get to 20 the better I feel. That said this is just the "what's your motivation" phase, next comes the "what's standing in your way" phase where you look deeply at your strengths and weaknesses and see how they block your ability to receive what you're looking for in your career. Then comes the "ok so now what" phase where you start setting goals to help shore up your weaknesses and magnify your strengths. Then it's "rinse and repeat" basically measure, adjust and execute.

<comment><USER4> I like that - might choose a different four but the idea is solid

Also totally behind the rating on a five point scale.

<comment><USER2> > might choose a different four but the idea is solid

The goal is to personalize these parts so they're your own. By all means I encourage people to pick their own but boil them down to succinct things you can describe in an elevator pitch.

They're very powerful when you talk to a manager or a potential employer about what makes you happy as an employee. It can be hard for a manager when you ramble on about what you want but I can blast these out along with a short example of each and use them as the basis of a productive dialog with the person I'm talking to.

In short, yes, pick your own, but know them cold and know how you measure them and how you can communicate to others when your not at a 5 in every area! :-)

<comment><USER4> I _think_ mine are :

\- Autonomy \- Collegiate \- Purpose \- Family \- Money

Thanks for making me think it through !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the last five years moved from development, to leading the development team to more of a product management role. Fully agree with that DanielBMarkham it's "the people part of things is where you'll screw up", so I'd focus on communication and team-building as much as processes.

I've found a few books really useful:

* The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-ma...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto))

* Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452796-drive](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452796-drive))

* Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7696135-making-ideas-hap...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7696135-making-ideas-happen))

* Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happi...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happiness))

* Rework ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6732019-rework))

These days I get the most value from articles and videos. Here is a list of my recommended articles on Medium, which might be useful - [https://medium.com/@nickboyce/has- recommended](https://medium.com/@nickboyce/has-recommended). Some great stuff in the list recommended by ravivyas too.

Edit: Something else I have been experimenting with is buying executive summaries of major books, in order to familiarise myself with as many perspectives as possible.

<comment><USER6> Can you elaborate on the purchasing of executive summaries? Sounds interesting; I also like to forage and often find that, for certain books, I really just want the technical footnotes.

<comment><USER5> Sure. There are plenty of summaries available on Amazon, for instance, this summary of Good to Great ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B008VGWCHY/ref=oh_aui_d_d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B008VGWCHY/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_?ie=UTF8&psc=1)).

There are also some really great mini books like Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction ([http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007P5N8D4/ref=oh_aui_d_d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007P5N8D4/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o02_?ie=UTF8&psc=1))

Also, I haven't tried these yet, but there are a number of subscription services available for summaries like [http://www.summary.com/](http://www.summary.com/) and [http://www.getabstract.com/en/](http://www.getabstract.com/en/)

The other way of cheating is by watching talks by the authors, which give you the key concepts from the book in an hour. For example Simon Sinek presenting Why Leaders Eat Last ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: my day job is helping companies continue to operate at scale the same as they did when there were only 5 of them. Turns out this is not a trivial thing to do.

Agile/XP practices are a good starting place in-between cowboy programming and micro-management hell -- as long as you don't take them as a recipe book. They're simply best practices that you can and should learn. Then prune/modify as necessary. There are really too many books to list separately. I'd advise joining a local Agile User's Group and noticing who has their shit in one sock. Then find out what they're doing. You can also bring in external coaches.

You need a couple of good books on the people part of things. I can guarantee you that the people part of things is where you'll screw up. "Drive" is really good. [http://amzn.to/1qtZdEd](http://amzn.to/1qtZdEd) So is PeopleWare [http://amzn.to/1iBnasO](http://amzn.to/1iBnasO)

For strategic stuff, especially in a growing company, you're going to have to master large work queues without having them eat you alive. If you'll allow me to self-promote, my Backlogs series is geared exactly towards this problem. [http://tiny-giant-books.com/backlogs.htm](http://tiny-giant- books.com/backlogs.htm)

One observation: as you grow, it's not enough that you pay extremely careful attention to whom you hire. You also need to create an on-boarding system where new hires can learn and adopt the culture -- things like pair programming, how the build works, good coding etiquette, and so on. Setting the table for strategy to work is actually more important than whatever the strategy is.

Second observation: I imagine you're going to be swimming in business book recommendations. Business books are like dieting books: everybody has a few favorites. (I imagine this is because the material inside matches how they already feel). Better to identify specific areas, like Agile Requirements Modeling, and find books targeting those areas. Then look for practical advice. Otherwise you'll just have a ton of books that you'll spend hundreds of hours reading and not really have much to show for it at the end of the process.

<comment><USER8> Links to the books Drive: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004P1JDJO](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004P1JDJO)

and Peopleware: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/)

for those who are worried about clicking url shortners

<comment><USER3> DanielBMarkham has been on this site for a long time and is pretty well known, so I would trust him not to put shady links.

I also heartily agree with him that lots of business books are best digested as summaries - look them up on wikipedia, for instance. The fundamental problem is that many have a simple idea, but you can't sell a 10 page book. So it gets fluffed up with lots of case studies and extra material until it's long enough to sell as a book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like you've taken the most important step, which is appreciating that "what got you here won't get you there".

One of my favorite books when stepping into a new role is M. Watkins, "The First 90 Days", which is very helpful in formalizing an effective approach to succeeding quickly when in a new management role.

It is worth trying to get some education in people management. While much of it is common-sense, it's worthwhile covering the basics -- the applicable laws, managing conflicts, that sort of thing. I have yet to find a good, practical book on organizational engineering (if anyone has a suggestion, please post it), but this is an area that I feel someone in your role should seek to understand well, because it has a big impact on the success of a business.

One of the most important, fundamental skills for a senior level manager is understanding finance. I recommend B. Knight, "Financial Intelligence" as a primer.

My favorite book on business strategy is M. Porter "Competitive Strategy", however, this book and all other business strategy books should be taken with a large grain of salt. They often suffer from survivorship bias, being applicable only to certain industries and times, and in at least one famous case, allegedly faking the data used to draw their conclusions. I treat business strategy books as leisure reading that simply provides another perspective.

<comment><USER10> I would have recommended the same books. In addition to that please read Books by Peter F Drucker on Management, strategy and how to treat Humans.

In startups, human interaction is most important more so than a huge corporation because both employee and employer needs to understand the importance of each other. Make sure you treat them right and make sure they are excited,valued and well treated.

Get a mentor, you need to keep them engaged, request with specific questions, ask for suggestions. No one wants to receive a specific mail asking me to be a mentor. they would rather send a note/ give a suggestion which will help you.

All the very best for you and company, and keep us posted on how your journey is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're looking for a book on strategy, you can't go wrong with Peter Drucker.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Drucker-Management- Essen...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Drucker-Management- Essentials/dp/0061345016)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker)

<comment><USER12> Can't forget _Moshidora_ ( _What If the Manageress of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker 's "Management"_): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshidora](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshidora)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In a senior role, effective communication becomes more important. One of the best books I've read about how to communicate effectively is [http://www.amazon.com/The-Pyramid-Principle-Writing- Thinking...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Pyramid-Principle-Writing- Thinking/dp/0273710516)

It introduces a specific method to write concise, effective business documents. Then it shows how you can use the method to critique your own thinking.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I can't recommend this book enough. Throughout my career, I've come into contact with a number of consultants from Harvard/MIT, Bain, McKinsey, etc. They all had a way of communicating ideas so clearly and effectively that I could understand exactly what they were saying, almost immediately. There was virtually no loss of information between what they spoke and what I heard. The ideas and thoughts all just flowed into my brain painlessly. I aspired to communicate as well as these people, but I just couldn't figure out the formula.

Finally, one late night, sitting across from my managing director (the leader of a prestigious boutique pharma-consulting firm), I asked him rather bluntly, "How did you learn to speak so well?" He gave me a rather blank stare, and thought for a little while. "Ah!" he exclaimed, jumping up from his desk and darting over to his bookcase. After a little rummaging, lo and behold, he pulled out an old copy of the Pyramid Principle. I leafed through the book and found a number of notes and highlights as he explained to me that what I held was the single most influential book he'd ever read. He told me to read it, not as a way to structure presentations or emails (although it helps there), but as a new lifestyle. Fold the ideas and principles into your very being, so as to become second nature, and you'll never have trouble communicating again.

It's a must-read book.

<comment><USER15> +1. What a great endorsement for the book. Your two paragraphs capture so much and in such a delightful way that it's hard not to want to buy the book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats!

When it comes to Management, I have to second vellum's advice and go with Drucker:

[http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Executive-Definitive- Harperb...](http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Executive-Definitive- Harperbusiness-Essentials/dp/0060833459/)

Classic (Mad Men era) of Marketing is ruled by Ogilvy:

[http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Advertising-Man-David- Ogil...](http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Advertising-Man-David- Ogilvy/dp/190491537X/)

However, I cannot stress enough the role of analytics in modern business strategy/marketing and Kaushik's book is the best:

[http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-2-0-Accountability- Centr...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-2-0-Accountability- Centricity/dp/0470529393/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The number one thing I'd suggest it learning to communicate effectively. Since you have been promoted already I assume you have some skills in this area - that's good! But it can be worth deliberately focusing on improving both your written and oral communication skills.

</comment><comment><USER18> The best book bar none that I've read about strategy is "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt: [http://goodbadstrategy.com/](http://goodbadstrategy.com/)

I highly recommend it. It's clear, intelligent, properly defines what strategy is (which most other books fail to do) and isn't, and how to go about designing and implementing it. It's very low on bullshit and very high on examples and insights from both history and business.

<comment><USER19> "His strategy was to risk his lead ships in order to break the coherence of his enemy's fleet."

He defines strategy incorrectly. He means "tactic". I think the problem is that "strategy" sounds more important, but it irks me every time someone confuses the two. (The US military thinks the difference is merely one of the size of the operation, which is also wrong.)

Nelson's strategy at Trafalgar was to have a decisive battle versus a skirmish. He _wanted_ to destroy the French navy (and was willing to risk everything to do it).

<comment><USER20> You cannot define something incorrectly. He can very well define "strategy" as something, you would label "tactic". That does not make it incorrect. It is great that a definition is done for an overloaded and ambiguous word like "strategy".

I have not found a good clear definition for "strategy" and "tactic". Could you give yours?

<comment><USER19> Let me give a concrete example:

In the WWII Pacific Campaign, the overall allied strategy was called "Island Hopping" and the intent was to establish a chain of bases to allow the supply of airfields within range of Japan, and bypass most of the islands the Japanese had conquered. Anything action beyond achieving that goal was superfluous.

In one campaign an Australian field commander on a disputed island fought a vigorous offensive against the Japanese garrison. His job was defending the airfield, but as a consequence of his excellent leadership and tactics, he managed to capture almost the entire garrison with little loss.

MacArthur was, reportedly, furious:

1) The Japanese garrison was starving and almost out of ammo and posed no real threat.

2) Now supplies would need to be diverted to deal with the Japanese prisoners.

3) Ammunition and other supplies had been wasted and lives put at risk to achieve non-objectives.

Great tactics, but counter to the strategy, and thus unproductive.

A more recent example:

The US invasion of Iraq was a superbly executed piece of tactical planning and execution in pursuit of an idiotic (stated) strategy (conquer Iraq, the people will happily become democratic, and the Middle East will be inspired by their wonderful example). It's possible the real strategy was to generate business for large defense contractors, in which case job well done. Bravo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't think there's anyone writing better, more actionable advice on this particular transition than Michael Lopp at [http://randsinrepose.com](http://randsinrepose.com)

I'd read everything on that site.

<comment><USER22> Seconded. If paper form is more your thing, I've found his compilation book "Managing Humans" ([http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software- Engi...](http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software- Engineering/dp/159059844X/)) to be a great place to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here is what I did when I moved from development to product & Marketing

1\. Follow people in the same field 2\. Ready up on blogs and posts : I use Zite, Flipboard and medium 3\. A book that helped me to a large extent is Good to great by Jim Collins ([http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap- Others/dp/00...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap- Others/dp/0066620996))

Also The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman [http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA- World-Class-Business-Educ...](http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-World-Class- Business-Education-ebook/dp/B004JXXKR4)

4\. Video from people in the same field. 5\. This article [https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-that- wi...](https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-that-will-make- you-a-great-product-manager-aad5babee2f7)

Some great tools:

1\. Trello - Project/product and pretty much manage any thing 2\. Qlikview - Data Analysis : Excel on Steroids

It's a very short list, but I am learning on the job :)

<comment><USER3> Josh's book is great - he sums up a lot of thinking from other books. He also has an account here, IIRC. Jim Collins, on the other hand, seems to write kind of empty books without much actionable advice. In my opinion, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are lot's of good advice already but I'd like to add few more. You need to make a mind shift from dev/manager role to strategic senior manager. My recommendation is to read: Good to Great ( [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76865.Good_to_Great) ) On War ( [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117031.On_War_Indexed_Ed...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117031.On_War_Indexed_Edition) ( I'm not sure which English translation is the best )

and try to see how practical tips both give for decision making. Art of War is also good, but I'd prefer Clausewitz since it's much more straightforward.

And read this masterpiece [http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/reports- downloads/the-testa...](http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/reports- downloads/the-testament-of-a-furniture-dealer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> I recommend the [http://www.manager-tools.com](http://www.manager-tools.com) site for lots of really great content on practical leadership & management. As for process ... yes, you can read all you want, but at the end of the day your success will be defined by your ability to sell a good idea (SDLC/ALM processes) to your team, not the pure quality of the processes themselves. If people don't want to or can get around process, they will.

I've never worked in a startup, but I run my teams as if they were small, fairly-independent-but-often-symbiotic entities. I started as a dev back in '99 and am one step below CIO in a 45,000 employee large corporation. If you'd ever like to chat about your problems or bounce ideas off someone, I'd be happy to.

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://www.amazon.com/The-Gervais-Principle-Complete- Ribbonf...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Gervais-Principle-Complete-Ribbonfarm- ebook/dp/B00F9IV64W)

</comment><comment><USER27> Developing strategy, relies on understanding the patterns evident in the mechanics of doing business, (startups and mature corps alike).

To that end, I strongly recommend Michael Porter, who literally wrote the book on modern "Competitive Strategy". There is no other single source of strategic theory that is better than this. Anybody that has taken a b-school class on strategy worth their tuition will recall concepts like Porter's 5-forces.

Other answers seem to offer more recently offered books and some might dare to argue his frameworks are dated but really it's in a robust, tried-and-true- kind of way. Other books that try to cover defining strategy, value chain, industry analysis are often derivative of his work.

If you don't end up reading it at least get a list of his key concepts and google the shit out of them. They all seem like a "duh, i knew that" on paper, but you should have these theories in your back pocket whenever you need to formulate a battleplan.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies)

[http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques- Indust...](http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries- Competitors- ebook/dp/B001CB34J0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403620127&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+porter)

</comment><comment><USER28> Understand Lean paradigm as a way of delivering business value: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Lean-Resolving-Efficiency- Parad...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Lean-Resolving-Efficiency- Paradox/dp/919803930X)

In terms of agile - I believe that scrum and related are too operational- related and not really strategic. You can skip that and delegate crunching it to others.

Master delegation - 1 minute manager, etc. - read at least one short book about it. Don't fall into micromanagement trap.

<comment><USER29> Couldn't help but notice that book has a terrible review from the author John Seddon - although he has always been a vocal critic of management thinking such as lean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> From a technical perspective, I have found 'The Mature Optimization Handbook' invaluable: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the- matu...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-mature- optimization-handbook/10151784131623920) (HN discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6763683))

'Team Geek' is a great primer on technical leadership: [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do)

Another recommended book is 'Shipping Greatness': [http://shippinggreatness.com](http://shippinggreatness.com)

Assuming you're already familiar with 'The Lean Startup', there has been a series of excellent 'sequels' on many more specific disciplines that you will likely find useful: [http://theleanstartup.com/the-lean- series](http://theleanstartup.com/the-lean-series)

A recent addition (that I am still digesting) on Agile processes beyond Scrum is 'Unblock!': [http://www.continuousagile.com/unblock/](http://www.continuousagile.com/unblock/) (Posted to HN a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921200))

</comment><comment><USER31> One aspect of strategy, crucially important, is actively, and continually deciding what not to do.

It is _necessary_ to not do great projects and not pursue great ideas, because of scarcity of resources: the organization cannot undertake all of the good and great ideas it encounters.

There is nearly no organization that is not over-committed in its operations. This is constant, challenging, and avoidable problem.

Actively deciding not to do a project, or not follow a particular line of effort...instead of failing, by default to give enough resources or effort to an idea or project aids the organization to focus and excel in particular well-chosen areas. And avoid being mediocre in multiple areas and spread thin as an organization, by actively choosing to do less. What great project will you abandon, to focus on the other great projects you're already doing?

Mission statements fail to inform about what the organization will NOT do. A strategy does.

* _Stuck: Why It's So Hard to Do New Things in Old Organizations_ (recorded lecture, December 6, 2007)

By Rebecca M. Henderson, (now at Harvard Business School) formerly Eastman Kodak LFM Professor of Management, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Video lecture (skip the first 15 minutes) (total time one hour) [http://video.mit.edu/watch/stuck-why-its-so-hard-to-do- new-t...](http://video.mit.edu/watch/stuck-why-its-so-hard-to-do-new-things- in-old-organizations-9319/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Take a look at the concept of servant leadership. I've worked at one business that used it, and it was phenomenal. The crux of it is that bosses are only as successful as the people doing the actual work, so the boss should focus on what is needed for them to be successful.

[http://www.amazon.com/Servant-Leadership-Legitimate- Greatnes...](http://www.amazon.com/Servant-Leadership-Legitimate-Greatness- Anniversary-ebook/dp/B00511JL6C)

</comment><comment><USER33> If you're under 50 people, you're still too small for many processes. Read every book you can lay your hands on about people-management (not project management, not product management, not strategy) and remember to over- communicate. The best lever you have at this point is to become a great manager of people--you'll motivate them to do good work and help turn some of them into great managers as the company grows.

</comment><comment> Su-Shee Start with the "classics" like "mystical man month" (Brooks) for example, then get many of the books by Tom de Marco and possibly read Richard Gabriel's "Patterns of Software". The book about the "Chandler" project (forgot it's title) is also a particular good read. Those two in particular are interesting reads about why things fail.

Go on to reading the Toyota management style in itself, there's a couple of books about it, that's what many IT techiques are getting their ideas from.

It's mostly about finding your values so to speak and pinpoint what you really think makes up a good software development company - maybe your focus will be on organization, maybe on other things, so get an overview first.

These two articles are hopefully also an interesting nudge to think about many things:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_u...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks)

[http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non- lin...](http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non- linear%2c+first-order+components+in+software+development)

O'Reilly has a very interesting book with analysis which practices actually work and why/how - sadly I also forget the title. There's for example a chapter about when and why pair programming works and when and why not.

Also, just watch carefully and learn to notice "good organization" \- happens in surprising corners and niches and try to see WHY it's good.

<comment><USER34> "The book about the "Chandler" project (forgot it's title) is also a particular good read. Those two in particular are interesting reads about why things fail."

Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg. Highest recommendation. 10x coders hired by visionary engineer to scratch their own itch. What could go wrong?

[http://www.dreamingincode.com](http://www.dreamingincode.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 1st "Thinking in Systems" [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H- Meadows/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H- Meadows/dp/1603580557)

2nd Article "Leverage Points" [http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points- place...](http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to- intervene-in-a-system/)

after these two you will have enough know-how on how to identify and manage systems (i.e.: your growing company)

then the only thing between you and success is reality, for how to influence the company reality you live in please read

3rd "Seeing Systems" [http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Systems-Unlocking- Mysteries-Org...](http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Systems-Unlocking-Mysteries- Organizational/dp/1576754553)

good luck and have fun (with the books, with your new responsibilities)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is my own list, I've not read these yet but collated this list after a similar promotion

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6398792-growing- software](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6398792-growing-software)

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6233608-software- product-...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6233608-software-product- management-and-pricing)

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13705334-enterprise- softw...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13705334-enterprise-software- delivery)

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6278270-the-principles- of...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6278270-the-principles-of-product- development-flow)

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9706236-management-3-0](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9706236-management-3-0)

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17278287-the-founder-s- di...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17278287-the-founder-s-dilemma)

[http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Minds-Technology-Officers- Peopl...](http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Minds-Technology-Officers- Peoplesoft/dp/1587620561/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=07NSG36D99JGTXTSKEQ2)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1118443667/ref=as_li_ss_t...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1118443667/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1118443667&linkCode=as2&tag=feldwebsite-20)

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Essential-Drucker-Management- Ess...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Essential-Drucker-Management- Essentials/dp/0061345016)

</comment><comment><USER37> Foundations of Business Strategy started last week on Coursera:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/strategy101](https://www.coursera.org/course/strategy101)

Probably not too late to catch up.

<comment><AUTHOR> What a fantastic suggestion. I've used Coursera on technical topics in the past, but it hadn't even occurred to me to look there in this instance. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow, lots of good recommendations in this thread already... I skimmed them, but apologies in advance for any dupes:

I'd suggest some general "business strategy" works that will help you understand the context of how/why the very highest level business decisions are made, as well as some works that deal with tying together strategy and tactical execution (which includes technical initiatives).

1\. _Understanding Michael Porter_ \- John Magretta. [http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Michael-Porter- Essential...](http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Michael-Porter-Essential- Competition/dp/1422160599)

Porter's framework is VERY influential in the business world, and having at least a passing familiarity with his work is important at the higher levels. Going straight to the primary sources (Porter's books) can be a bit daunting as they are big, dry, and academic and not exactly what you'd call "page turners". This book is a fairly solid overview of the key elements of Porter's approach, and a good read before diving into the meat of Porter's works.

2\. _Competitive Strategy_ \- Michael Porter. [http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques- Indust...](http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries- Competitors/dp/0684841487/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y)

3\. _Competitive Advantage_ \- Michael Porter. [http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating- Sustain...](http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining- Performance/dp/0684841460/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0FTB9ZNV98C1VSBMH30V)

4\. _On Competition_ \- Michael Porter. [http://www.amazon.com/On-Competition- Updated-Expanded-Editio...](http://www.amazon.com/On-Competition-Updated- Expanded- Edition/dp/142212696X/ref=pd_sim_b_5?ie=UTF8&refRID=0FTB9ZNV98C1VSBMH30V)

5\. _Good Strategy, Bad Strategy_ \- Richard Rumelt. [http://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference- Matters/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference- Matters/dp/0307886239/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=0FTB9ZNV98C1VSBMH30V)

6\. _Blue Ocean Strategy_ \- W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne. [http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested- Compet...](http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested- Competition/dp/1591396190/ref=pd_sim_b_15?ie=UTF8&refRID=0FTB9ZNV98C1VSBMH30V) This book has its critics, but I think it's a worthwhile read. Some people argue against the whole idea of a "blu e ocean" market, but even if the authors aren't 100% right about everything, I think the lines of thinking this book fosters are valuable in a general sense.

7\. _The Discipline of Market Leaders_. [http://www.amazon.com/Discipline- Market-Leaders-Customers-Do...](http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Market- Leaders-Customers- Dominate/dp/0201407191/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636311&sr=1-1&keywords=the+discipline+of+market) I think very highly of this book and the author's approach to strategy. It's not radically different from the Porterian approach in some ways, but I'd say it's narrower in focus and simpler. The big takeway is the idea (which _should_ be obvious, but often isn't) that "you can't be everything to everyone". The authors push a model of choosing a market discipline to appeal to a certain type of customer, and making that discipline the core of your business.

8\. _The Machine That Changed The World_. [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-That- Changed-World-Revolutioni...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed- World- Revolutionizing/dp/0743299795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636244&sr=1-1&keywords=the+machine+that+changed+the+world) Have you ever wondered what this "lean" stuff is all about? Or why Toyota is so revered by business leaders? Here's a good place to find the answer to those questions.

9\. _Working Knowledge_ \- Davenport and Prusak. [http://www.amazon.com/Working-Knowledge-Thomas-H- Davenport/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Working-Knowledge-Thomas-H- Davenport/dp/1578513014/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636102&sr=1-1&keywords=working+knowledge) Perhaps _the_ seminal book on Knowledge Management, or at least one of them. If you want to understand the importance of knowledge in an organization, this is a very valuable read.

10\. _Outside Innovation_ \- Patricia Seybold. [http://www.amazon.com/Outside- Innovation-Customers-Co-Design...](http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Innovation- Customers-Co-Design- Companys/dp/B000ULVK7Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636501&sr=1-1&keywords=outside+innovation)

11\. _The Future of Competition_. [http://www.amazon.com/Future-Competition- Co-Creating-Unique-...](http://www.amazon.com/Future-Competition-Co-Creating- Unique- Customers/dp/1578519535/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636525&sr=1-1&keywords=future+of+competition)

12\. _The Balanced Scorecard_. [http://www.amazon.com/Balanced-Scorecard- Translating-Strateg...](http://www.amazon.com/Balanced-Scorecard-Translating- Strategy- Action/dp/0875846513/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636595&sr=1-1&keywords=balanced+scorecard)

13\. _Strategy Maps_. [http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Maps-Converting- Intangible-Ta...](http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Maps-Converting-Intangible- Tangible/dp/1591391342/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0D3MEADXPXKSP6ASQ1QV)

14\. _The Strategy Focused Organization_. [http://www.amazon.com/Strategy- Focused-Organization-Scorecar...](http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Focused- Organization-Scorecard-Companies- Environment/dp/1578512506/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636595&sr=1-6&keywords=balanced+scorecard)

15\. _If Only We Knew What We Know_. [http://www.amazon.com/Only-Knew-What- Know-Knowledge/dp/14516...](http://www.amazon.com/Only-Knew-What-Know- Knowledge/dp/1451697570/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636835&sr=1-1&keywords=if+only+we+knew+what+we+know) Another seminal title in the Knowledge Management world.

16\. _Common Knowledge_ \- Nancy Dixon. [http://www.amazon.com/Common- Knowledge-Companies-Thrive-Shar...](http://www.amazon.com/Common-Knowledge- Companies-Thrive- Sharing/dp/0875849040/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636919&sr=1-1&keywords=common+knowledge) Another seminal title in the Knowledge Management world.

17\. _Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race_. [http://www.amazon.com/Winning- Knowledge-Transfer-Michael-Eng...](http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Knowledge- Transfer-Michael- English/dp/B005ZOM87O/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403636985&sr=1-1&keywords=winning+the+knowledge+transfer+race)

</comment><comment><USER39> Getting a mentor will help, usually someone outside the company that you trust enough to question them honestly (too many people try to get mentored by people they think of as infallible and then fail to ask questions when their understanding is incomplete).

If you are looking for reading material, consider putting the books "Execution" and "Facing Reality" (by Larry Bossidy with Ram Charan) on your list. I found these to be a good concise description of some of the more 'meta' aspects of senior leadership.

</comment><comment><USER40> Consider the book 'Becoming a Technical Leader' [1], by Jerry Weinberg. He and his students (e.g. Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby) have a whole host of excellent books and courses in the space you describe. They're also very approachable, if you want to discuss these matters.

[1] [http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Technical_Leader.html](http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Technical_Leader.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> The Heart of Change - best book I read in the MBA

Six Thinking Hats - best way to think like an analyst (and to lead meetings that are effective)

Both of these are killer and quick and easy books.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you are looking for an intellectual discussion around management (helpful for some people) I'd recommend checking out Henry Mintzberg.

He's been writing on Management for 4 decades and he's opened my eyes to what management is about. [http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Henry- Mintzberg/dp/1605098744](http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Henry- Mintzberg/dp/1605098744)

</comment><comment><USER43> The book Understanding Michael Porter was a good introduction to strategy for me. I used it in my EMBA program when I was struggling to grasp business strategy. That gave me a solid grounding in how to think about it and some of the basic concepts. From there I was able to branch out to other books on strategy. But that one was a good starting point for me and some classmates.

</comment><comment><USER44> Mobile MBA by Jo Owen - less empty words, more practical advice. My absolutely favourite management book.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mobile-MBA-Skills-Further- Faster/dp/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mobile-MBA-Skills-Further- Faster/dp/0273750216)

</comment><comment><USER45> How to Measure Anything -- By Douglas Hubbard

The successful role models in my life have a keen ability to at least relatively measure large, nebulous things. For thinking in probabilities and ways to gauge intangibles like "effectiveness" I think this book is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd recommend, if you have not already read them, reading the relevant seeming articles off the front page of joelonsoftware.com and possibly Dharmesh Shah at onstartups.com and Paul Graham's essays. There's a lot of good stuff there.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Strategic Management" Fred David, [http://amzn.com/0132664232](http://amzn.com/0132664232)

Some people find it too academic but it covers pretty much all of the essentials of strategy and business policy practices.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you are in the bay area then we should go grab coffee some time. I was in your position a year ago and I'm more than happy to share my experiences and struggles. Send me an email and we can connect.

</comment><comment><USER49> I warmly recommend you to read Peopleware: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/)

</comment><comment><USER50> One of the best book I found in similar situation is High Output Management and Only Paranoid Will Survive by Andy Grove.

</comment><comment><USER51> [Meta] I really wish I could see upvote counts for this post. Answers here are reviews and each vote for a review matters. If only 10 people have voted for anarchitect's list of sources, that means there is _very_ little consensus here which could mean that there are _no_ truly good books on this somewhat ephemeral topic.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'd suggest reading Four Steps to Epiphany to learn about customer development.

</comment><comment><USER53> Just learn how to think. The best way to learn to think is to solve many problems. Solve many problems many times. Don't just solve the ones you already know how to solve.

I am not sure you can learn how to think from a book, but the recommendations here can be good to "know what you don't know."

Maybe the best question you should be asking is not what to read, but what problems you can solve you have not solved before. Here is one constraint: if you can solve it yourself, and not through others, then it is not a very interesting problem.

</comment><comment><USER54> Karate kid learned from a book in the beginning.

Wax on. Wax off.

Obviously a book won't do. You need a training montage.</comment>


Google is rebranding storage plans as "Google One" - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google-one/ <comment><USER2> I think this article is missing the bigger picture—this isn't about storage. This is Google trying to copy the success of Amazon Prime.

They're going to try to unify lots of different benefits under a single, high- value subscription. The storage plans and priority support are just the first benefit they've tied to the subscription.

> In addition to access to experts, the company also promises to provide > subscribers with other benefits. Google One's director Larissa Fontaine told > me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, > preferred rates for other Google services or credits on Google Play. "We > hope to build those out over time," she noted.

That would make more sense as to why they're "rebranding" these plans an not just updating Google Drive's pricing plans. "Google One" isn't a single product, it's a single subscription across many products, just like Amazon Prime.

Of course, I could be wrong.

It does seem like a weird way to launch the subscription if that's what they're trying to do, since the announcement goes deep into the weeds of storage. And the low-end plans seem much too cheap to be able to add meaningful benefits to in the future.

Even the idea of multiple tiers of the subscription might be too complicated. One of the nice things about Prime is that although it's expensive, there's only one option.

Seeing as this is Google we're talking about, I could imagine this new subscription will have incredible amounts of churn in branding, pricing and benefits along the way, and probably end up as a confusing mess in the minds of customers. Amazon's Prime took a very different route. It started out as a very clear subscription service for cheaper shipping, and then added more and more benefits as time went on. These days it's a little confusing, but it didn't start that way. If Google already can't get the messaging to be clear, it doesn't bode well for them adding lots of orthogonal benefits in the future and keeping it all sane.

I bet we'll see a Stratechery article about Google One in the context of Amazon Prime soon.

<comment><USER3> If this is really the case, then I would say the name sucks. It's hard to know what 'Google One' means from just the name. And there is 'Android One', which is designed for low-end devices, it would really confuse people when they talk about android one, google one. I can see more people will refer it as "google one drive", and microsoft also has its "One Drive", that's even more confusing to all the average users.

<comment><USER4> > If this is really the case, then I would say the name sucks. It's hard to > know what 'Google One' means from just the name.

It's also hard to know what "Google" means from its name. And "Windows". And "Bing". And "Facebook", "Twitter", "WhatsApp", "Amazon", "Yelp", "Pocket", "Chrome", "Firefox", "Safari", "Uber", "Steam", and many more.

<comment><USER3> I guess what I meant by "hard to know" is less confusing. All the names in your example cannot be easily confused with other product or brand. But "Google One" is the other way around.

<comment><USER4> I think it's only because they're well known. "Amazon" could be a supermarket selling organic food; "WhatsApp" some site to recommand apps; "Facebook" another site to make books out of pictures of your family; "Uber" and "Bing" pretty much anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _free one-tap access to Google Experts for help with any Google consumer > product and service._

This is _huge_. Together with having removed ads that scanned your e-mail from consumer Gmail, it looks like Google's consumer offerings could actually be changing course from "you're the product" to "you're the customer" \-- or at least be giving you the choice.

Of course, you could always get a single-seat G Suite for business account for $5 or $10/mo. with 24/7 phone support too, but it was a little too complicated and inflexible for most consumers.

<comment><USER6> There is always a reason for everything with Google. They didn't provide support for years. Considering what they showed lately with restaurant booking, what I think is actually happening is that Google want a huge data set for support calls/chats to use it as training data for their ML systems. Then they will present fully featured customer support product based on ML.

<comment><USER7> You're wrong. There's nothing nefarious or underhanded about this decision.

<comment><USER8> Why would scenario in GP be nefarious?

<comment><USER7> imho, creating new data sucking pipelines (no matter whether for advertising or model training) under the guise of a consumer service is at least slightly nefarious.

<comment><USER9> I've heard the "this call is recorded for training" message for decades. Now it's training a machine algorithm instead of a human one. Nothing really changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google already offered 24/7 support for paying business users with a G Suite > account, but this is the first time it actively offers live support for > consumers.

About fucking time.

I know so many people who will never purchase another Google product because it's was literally impossible to get another human being on the other end of the line.

<comment><USER11> This is the reason I think Amazon will end up winning the cloud computing race. Providing support is simply not in Googles DNA.

<comment><USER12> The cost of support has to come from somewhere -- is either Amazon or Google generally cheaper for cloud computing? (I know ~nothing in this area). I could definitely imagine a market for both a cheaper service that's lacking support and a more expensive one that offers increased support.

With that said, with Amazon's efficiency in logistics, I could definitely imagine them implementing support at a negligible cost.

<comment><USER13> Amazon.com's support is so terrible, even for those easy consumer questions I sometimes have. Their AWS support is amazing though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The naive name for this product bundling would be Google Bundle, GBundle, but that would rub regulators the wrong way.

The first rule of UX and branding is: don't make me think. Using a digit in a brand name is a question mark, just like Google Plus. Or was it Google+? It gets in the way of the meat of your message.

Why would Google would rub up against Microsoft OneDrive with Google (One?) Drive? Is it going to be Google1? 1Google? OneGoogle?

The Google Bundle/Spire thing could be called Google Together, or Google Everything, or Google Red, and it would be as effective without the confusion.

I don't know what this is and the brand confusion pushes me toward other more clearly defined storage services. I pay for Dropbox...because I know what it does and it won't go away.

<comment><USER15> I understand the potential confusion, but do you think this has hurt the Xbox One adoption? I think it's probably possible to execute a "One" branding correctly, provided it gives the users a sort of "universal" experience ala Prime.

<comment><USER16> The Xbox One faced this problem too but on a smaller scale. An example of a product that failed in large part due to its ambiguous and confusing name was the WiiU. Is it a wii? Is it something else? Is it just the control? What is a U?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a- go...](https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-google-drive- linux-client-is-coming/) currently says 6 years 20 days and 1 hour since Google claimed a Linux client is coming.

<comment><USER18> The moment they come out with a Linux client, the moment I will be a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> After having to change their name from Sky Drive to One Drive following a trademark dispute, I think maybe Microsoft might have something to say about Google calling their online storage solution "One" as well.

I mean come on, I know it's a very generic name, but it's nearly identical to one of their biggest competitors in this exact space.

<comment><USER11> It's even worse. They already have something called Android One. I'm sure this won't cause any confusion.

<comment><USER20> And MS has Xbox One. What's with all the 1s?

<comment><USER21> What about the people who manage their 1&1 server from their OnePlus One?

<comment><USER22> They just keep track of it in OneNote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> With storage it always seems that the devil's in the details.

Are there any upload/download caps in place? Are they documented?

Are they scanning it?

Downsampling it?

Checking it against some DMCA database?

What happens when Junior shares his Bluray rips with his buddies at school?

Are they blocking rclone? How about 6 months from now?

Net neutrality is toast, caps are the norm and they're closing the service in 6 months, but it will take you a year to get the files back, is there a snowball offer?

After the one drive and amazon about faces, can anyone take them seriously.

<comment><USER24> 1) Yes, 750GB upload limit a day. Not sure about download. 2) no 3) No 4-5) Maybe? Nobody I know who does this has been caught

<comment><USER25> There's a daily 10TB download limit according to people on the internet BTW.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/802ygu/-/dustd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/802ygu/-/dustd34/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm happy to see the 200 GB plan. I use Google Drive instead of Dropbox because I only have ~70 GB of data. Now if I hit the 100 GB limit, I can just pay for an extra 100 GB instead of having to go all the way up to 1 TB. I don't understand why Dropbox doesn't offer more pricing tiers. I'd happily switch since unlike Google Drive, they have an official Linux client.

<comment><USER27> Not only Dropbox is not adding more tiers for single users, they are actively pushing everyone to a dropbox business plan.

<comment><USER28> I am somewhat worried about Dropbox. They are giving every indication of trying to "pivot" away from file storage into some kind of unwanted "shared collaboration space" where I can "unleash the creativity of my team" or what not. Just check out their company blurb:

> Dropbox is a modern workspace designed to reduce busywork-so you can focus > on the things that matter. Sign in and put your creative energy to work.

NOOO!!!! Just store my files damn it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _Be among the first to know when Google One is available in your area._

What does my area have to do with an online storage offering? I'm not giving them my zipcode.

Anyway, taking all bets on whether this doppelganger will be killed off, or whether two more doppelgangers will be launched.

<comment><USER30> Yes, your area does matter. In some countries, there are requirements that your data be housed in a data center in your country. They may not have this option yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the reasons i prefer an independent storage service is because i don't want to have everything in one basket. I use Google for Gmail and Photos. I would rather keep my files with someone else. e.g like Dropbox or iCloud.

The downside is that Dropbox is expensive although it blows all the storage companies in terms of features and stability while icloud is too basic.

</comment><comment><USER32> """That access to live experts — not some barely functional AI chatbot — comes with every Google One plan"""

My guess is they want to collect enough data from these service interactions to eventually replace the service people with AI (or even plan on A/Bing some AIs right away to see how much people notice, sort of a crow sourced turing test).

</comment><comment><USER33> When on earth will Google give custom domains the full Google consumer experience? Like many people I did this before gsuite happened for my personal account and I'm happy to pay for this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ah yes. The good, old Google we all know and love. Introducing yet another confusing name for an existing product.

</comment><comment><USER34> Missing context: this is catching up to last year's iCloud pricing (200GB for $2.99, 2TB for $9.99).

Not sure how the new support feature compares to free/paid Apple support options. Not a lot of details on it yet.

<comment><USER35> Following up on this question of cost per TB.

Not trying to shill this crypto(because I dont know if it really works). But this crypto claims to be selling 1TB/2$/mo

[https://siastats.info/storage_pricing](https://siastats.info/storage_pricing)

So is Sia coin actually cheaper than these big players? Or are there hidden fees?

<comment><USER36> >because I dont know if it really works

Sounds like you have your answer?

<comment><USER35> No, I havent used the service.

I dont think its fair to make a conclusion without having evidence.

<comment><USER37> No, the reason is that you (and other people) don't know if it works. Trust in a brand can be a big factor in supportable price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> But... what is it?

<comment><USER39> Not entirely sure, but it looks like a new branding of Google Drive. Can't tell from the announcement if there's more to it than that though.

edit: Maybe more of a compilation of google apps for business with drive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not finding any details about it. Anybody knows if they'll finally be providing Linux support?

</comment><comment><USER41> Worth noting that it isn't available yet.

> Initially, Google One will only be available on a limited basis. If you have > a paid Drive storage plan, you'll be automatically upgraded to Google One > over the coming months. Look out for an email with details on your new > benefits.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just a comment on branding.

I worked for RealNetworks a long, long time ago and I remember when we came out with RealPlayer One in 2002. This was an effort to bring a bunch of products together in the face of competition from MS and others. The vision and company failed spectacularly.

The "One" branding strategy strikes me as a way to bring together disparate offerings that people can't articulate easily to users and probably shouldn't be bundled together. Maybe Google is about to do the same:

"Google One's director Larissa Fontaine told me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, preferred rates for other Google services or credits on Google Play".

</comment><comment><USER43> Looks like we have 2 Google Ones now.

[https://one.google.com/](https://one.google.com/) [https://onetoday.google.com/](https://onetoday.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> So wasabi (a Gdrive competitor) dropped their egress fees. So it's just $4.99/TB flat rate. It doesn't surprise me that google wants to change it's pricing structure.

<comment><USER45> That seem really cheap doesn't it?

<comment><USER44> You still have the egress fees if you're using another cloud provider. But as a general drive solution with an S3 clone, yeah it does seem possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > In addition to access to experts, the company also promises to provide > subscribers with other benefits. Google One's director Larissa Fontaine told > me that those could include discounts on hotels you find in Google Search, > preferred rates for other Google services, or credits on Google Play. "We > hope to build those out over time," she noted.

Giving you discounts if you use google search. Not sure they are using their search dominance innovatively or abusing it to promote this.

</comment><comment><USER37> Having a distinct brand for the storage shared (currently) between Drive, Gmail, and Photos rather than calling it Drive Storage is sensible.

The actual brand is distinctly non-communicative, and the vague ideas for ancillary benefits seem a bit odd with no relation to the core product.

</comment><comment><USER47> I like the pricing model, but why couldn't this just be an upgrade to Google Drive?

On second thought, why couldn't this be a $9.99 a month bundle of YouTube Red, 1TB Google Drive, Google Play Music, some Google Voice credits, and add free Google Search?

<comment><USER48> It is an upgrade to Google Drive, per the Techcrunch article

> It's also rebranding these storage plans (but not Google Drive itself) as > "Google One."

> Google will upgrade all existing storage plans to Google One accounts

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google- one/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/14/say-hello-to-google-one/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Dropbox down 4% today so far.

<comment><USER50> They introduced a second 1 TB plan for twice the price with questionable added value except for Smart Sync and their offerings with more storage space are only made for teams.

Maybe it is time for me to switch away from Dropbox?

Previously, one of the main advantages of Dropbox was their reliable sync client but this attribute is fading away: When I do many little file operations on Windows (npm, TeX Live), I expect to see MsMpEng.exe to eat away my CPU cycles. This is somewhat expected from an on demand antivirus scanner and as a Windows user it is somewhat common to whitelist some project folders or temporarily disable the AV before starting certain tasks. On macOS the same thing happens thanks to Dropbox! Even outside of my Dropbox folder their sync client seems to intercept all file operations and do some CPU-heavy calculations on them. I don't know when this started and what the technical explanation for this is but at some time the Dropbox client on the Mac started to cause a system-wide performance regression.

What is the state of Google One sync client? In the past I read some bad reports about it but after several rebrandings maybe it has matured technically?

<comment><USER51> When you have two 'file monitoring' apps accessing each other's scan space, they can interpret each other's access as edits and go into a CPU loop. Dropbox and any other sync client will do this.

I generally look at AV as effectively useless and badly made, your system will speed up a lot in general (independent of dropbox) if you stop using it.

> Some third-party apps access files in your Dropbox folder. Dropbox may > interpret this access as edits to the files, and sync these perceived > changes. If a third-party app continually requests access to your files, > Dropbox will continue to sync, which will in turn lead to high CPU usage.

> This loop usually occurs with third-party syncing apps, backup apps, and > anti-virus or security software, or when a third-party app is installed > within the Dropbox folder.

> [https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/high-cpu- > usage](https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/high-cpu-usage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Can we get Family Groups enabled for G Suite accounts? My family is on a G Suite account and it is frustrating being unable to take advantage of any Family features (sharing purchases, music, etc).

<comment><USER53> A paid biz account can piggy back off a free one for fam music btw

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> So, I've never been able to figure this out. If you pay for single-seat G-suite (using my personal @gmail.com address) does it also eliminate ads in gmail, etc (obviously not on search)?

<comment><USER55> > _If you pay for single-seat G-suite (using my personal @gmail.com address)_

You need your own domain to be able to use G Suite.

To answer your question: I don't recall ever seeing ads on the Gmail interfaces of any of my G Suite email accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I miss Ubuntu One? :-(

<comment><USER56> I accidentally typed a question mark, but I meant it to be an exclamation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Following in the trend of Google Hangouts, Google will eventually split the services back into different products.

</comment><comment><USER58> Where is my god damn native linux client?

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow they undercut microsofts pricing

<comment><USER60> for 10$ MS gives 5 account with 1TB each so total 5TB and office for each account. Really hard to beat that deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why is "One" so popular? A lot new buildings in my city has this word as well.

</comment><comment><USER62> Now with Google Duplex, you may never know if the Experts are "real".

</comment><comment><USER63> Did they hire somebody from Microsoft to name this?

</comment><comment><USER53> This is getting renamed before end of year. Watch

</comment><comment><USER64> woah woah woah, you can talk to technical help with google products under this same branch?

Sounds like they undercutting AppleCare ha

</comment><comment><USER65> I have a 32 TB machine sitting under my desk. It will return it's cost in less than a year. Storage is very expensive in the cloud.

<comment><USER60> It is multiple times replicated across geography, and available anywhere. So it's more than a disk.

<comment><USER65> I agree, but pretty sure that 90% of the average users doesn't need geo- replicated safety. It's nice to have, of course, but does it worth it? You can buy a couple of HDDs for multiple backup copies and it's an order of magnitude cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Out of all cloud storage providers, Google is the only one that can provide me with great speeds (I have Gbit Internet).

</comment><comment><USER67> Hope this leads to iCloud pricing drop.

<comment><USER68> iCloud is already at 2TB for $9.99/mo and has been since last year.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201238)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Not seeing the updated 2TB->$9.99 plan yet in Europe :/ Wonder whether this is just for the US?

<comment><USER70> Not live yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Time travel is not as illogical as it might first appear. The paradox, say, of you traveling back in time to kill your father before he impregnated your mother is easily resolved -- it never happened and is never going to happen because otherwise you would not be here to do it.</comment>


Why learn Graph Theory? Here are some reasons ... - <AUTHOR> http://andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry/?id=1 <comment><USER2> I have to throw my personal favorites into the ring: decompilation and deobfuscation.

In either case, after a certain amount of analysis you'll end up with a set of nodes (typically basic blocks) which connect to each other, but they'll be what I call 'immature' nodes. You know they connect, but they all effectively end with gotos. To make any sense of them, you have to make them into mature nodes: if, if-else, while, do-while, for, etc. Via graph reduction this is possible.

For instance, a few years back I was reverse-engineering Apple's Fairplay DRM and ran into an odd obfuscation scheme. There were dozens of functions which had the same structure: a switch inside a while statement; a state machine. After some hand-analysis, I figured out that at the end of each state, it'd set the state variable to either a constant value (a jump) or one of two conditional values (a conditional branch). At this point, it became clear that they were simply taking basic blocks and turning them into a big obfuscated state machine.

To make this into something worthwhile, I wrote a script that would go through the function and 'execute' it, to determine the state connections automatically. Then from there, I wired them up into a big graph, with two types of nodes: Fallthrough (no conditional) and Branch (conditional). Now, that helps a lot in terms of showing you what's happening, but not nearly as much so as control flow structures do, so the battle was only half over.

Now, if you look at common control flow structures from a graph perspective, they all look pretty straightforward (using something like dot graph notation):

        A; if(X) {B} else {C} D  becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> D, C -> D.
        A; if(X) {B} C  becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> C
        A; while(X) {B} C  becomes A -> B, A -> C, B -> C

So if you walk over the graph looking for these patterns (only looking at single nodes, mind you), replacing them with their mature equivalents, and recursively do that until you don't change anything, you can end up with a fully deobfuscated, cleanly readable result.

<comment><USER3> Great story. Worth pointing out here that reversers have been running with this idea full speed since ~2000. For instance, Halvar Flake and his team at Zynamics use graph isomorphisms of basic blocks in BinDiff, which is the industry standard tool for reversing security patches back to vulnerabilities.

Obviously, anyone who's ever used IDA Pro is familiar with control flow graphs and bblocks; hit the space bar in IDA and you get it graphically.

<comment><USER2> Yea, there's a lot of interesting things that have been done with graphs. I'm currently working on a reversing platform, and one of the core things I'm doing is elegant graph manipulation. It's amazing how much you can do when you have nice graphs, e.g. native pattern matching over graphs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of these examples are either naturally graphs already, or on the contrary, can be presented as graphs through ingenious reductions (e.g. coloring as an approach to register optimization). So transforming the domain problem to a graph theory problem is either trivial or hard.

I found that a huge benefit of knowing some graph theory lies in being able to approach problems where this transformation is _easy_ \- neither trivial nor hard, but easy once you have some experience and intuition working with graphs. Every time you have a bunch of entities, and you can kinda think of their interdependencies as a binary relationship of some sort, there's a warning bulb going off in your brain - "is this a graph problem?". And if it is, then very possibly you immediately get lots of insight into your problem, basically for free.

This occurred to me a few weeks ago as I was thinking about this puzzle: design a circuit that inverts three inputs, but uses only two NOT gates (plus arbitrary amount of ORs and ANDs). It's an interesting puzzle to solve manually, but I also wanted to quickly write a program to find the solution. Circuits are trivially graphs, but there're too many of them (an infinity) to iterate over. Once you see the problem as a reachability problem in a certain fixed graph, however (easy, but not trivial), the code writes itself. Someone with no exposure to graph theory might easily just balk at this easy problem, not knowing how to proceed.

<comment><USER5> I can get the circuit with 4 XORs and 1 NOT, or 3 XORs and 1 XNOR. I can't see a way to simplify to just ANDs, ORs and 2 NOTs. It's an interesting problem, were you able to find a AND, OR and 2 NOT solution? Or did you wind up using XORs?

<comment><USER4> No, the requirement is specifically to use just ANDs, ORs and two NOTs. There is a solution, I did find it. It's not particularly easy to find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a related note, Graph Theory is one of the top reasons to learn Linear Algebra. All graphs (included directed, weighted, and multi-graphs) can be represented intuitively by adjacency matrices, and matrix operations often end up being meaningful in terms of the graph they represent. Seeing the connections between a graph and its matrix helps to understand both of them, and being able to switch back and forth between mental models is often useful. For example, Markov Chains are the go-to tool in many fields of modeling, are most easily thought of as weighted graphs, and are most easily manipulated as matrices.

</comment><comment><USER7> Graph theory was easily the most practical thing I learned from programming contests. Most of the applications are "obvious", but only if you play with enough graphs.

</comment><comment><USER8> He misunderstood the circuits problem. It's not a graph planarity problem - anything significant is not going to be planar. Only very simple circuits are wireable with less than two layers (and then by, for instance, sneaking a couple of lines under a resistor, etc. - not planar).

But you do get to use graphs to solve the component placement problem, in heuristics that try to minimize total wire length. That hopefully means that wiring delays are smaller, and routing more feasible. One of the classic heuristics involved successive bipartions on the min-cut of the graph.

Nitpicking aside, it's a good post, well argued. My intro book recommendation: [http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks/comments/aho2h/graph_theor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks/comments/aho2h/graph_theory_with_applications_ja_bondy_and_usr/)

<comment><USER9> I like the cheap Dover intro: [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Graph- Theory-Advanced-Mat...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Graph-Theory- Advanced-Mathematics/dp/0486678709/)

<comment><USER10> If this is the same Dover book we used in our graph theory class, I found it difficult to learn from without a professor explaining the unclear sections. Not just doing the exercises, but some of the things they presented as trivial had some important steps missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _This is an NP-complete problem, so you need to know that no optimal solution can be found in a reasonable time for large problems._

Apparently, the interference graphs that arise from SSA code are a well- behaved sort of graph, colorable in polynomial time.

<http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/documents/6532>

</comment><comment><USER12> Good summary list. For most developers, there is a nice abstraction barrier for graph theory because tools like neo4j, efficient RDF stores, search libraries, etc. make it fairly easy to build apps without getting one's hands dirty in the details. (But knowing the details makes it more likely to get creative and novel apps.)

Off topic, but: since so many things are well described as graphs, the GraphViz tool is great for communication: few lines of code to write your data to a 'dot' file, and a few seconds later you have a visual representation of your data.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's a good curriculum / reading list for learning graph theory? What kind of things do you need to understand before you can check it off the "things to learn more about" list?

<comment><AUTHOR> This book is on-line, free, and the few bits I dipped into are sufficiently accurate.

[http://www.ecp6.jussieu.fr/pageperso/bondy/books/gtwa/gtwa.h...](http://www.ecp6.jussieu.fr/pageperso/bondy/books/gtwa/gtwa.html)

Not sure what it would be like to learn from - certainly you would have to "Read Like Math" and not "Read Like Prose". You would be strongly advised to do the exercises properly and not just skim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with his assessment. Any data representation can be construed as a graph - this is the basis of garbage collection. Besides the areas where graphs (or networks) are explicit in a problem, the most powerful use comes in analyzing a given model/algorithm. If you don't take that step to the meta- level, you might not see the use for graph theory.

</comment><comment><USER15> I find that the word "dependency" is a huge indicator that I'm going to need some kind of graph theory.

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome post, love the pragmatic and no-bullshit approach! There are some more real world graphy projects on the Neo4j wiki, <http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Neo4j_In_The_Wild>

</comment><comment><USER17> Hm, blog has two entries, both are on HN at this moment... is it considered ok to ask for friends to post links to your blog? Just askin...

<comment><USER18> Perfectly fine to do; even better if you post it yourself. If the posts are interesting, they'll get upvoted. If not, they won't.

<comment><USER19> Yes, self posts are perfectly fine, as long as you don't overspam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can I just add in anything and everything having to do with networks?

I've run into a number of forest problems due to distributed systems.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good post, but it's not like anyone with a bit of imagination can't come up with (most of) this list himself.

<comment><USER22> This is true of most things.

A few things require true genius, but most things can be done by anyone with enough effort. But few people put in the effort so when someone does and produces good results, they deserve the credit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One very cool thing I learned today is that knowledge amongst a number of people, with the help of modal logic and Kripke possible world semantics, essentially reduces to a graph reachability problem.</comment>


What was the cargo ship, Arctic Sea, transporting, and why was it hijacked? - <AUTHOR> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KH26Ag01.html

<comment><USER2> This isn't the first mysterious incident with cargo ships and the Russians I've heard of.

I grew up in Port Angeles, Washington. Port Angeles is located on the Olympic Peninsula, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Vancouver Island. The Strait of Juan de Fuca just happens to be the primary route to the Pacific Ocean from Naval Submarine Base Bangor, in nearby Bremerton. Bangor is one of two naval bases in the United States that houses America's fleet of Trident nuclear missile submarines.

A Russian cargo ship anchored itself in the middle of the strait about twelve years ago and just sat there without explaining themselves. The obvious explanation is that the Russians were probably counting submarines leaving and returning to Bangor. I suspect the Strait is shallow enough that it's not feasible for the submarines to leave the Strait submerged, and on fishing trips my dad and I saw one of them. Even surfaced, they are damn silent. I suppose they could have left Bangor through Canadian waters, though I don't know the political feasibility of sailing subs full of nuclear weapons through Canadian waters.

After the Russian cargo ship hung out in the strait for awhile, the American authorities figured they'd investigate it. So they got together with the Canadians and flew a helicopter over the ship. The ship evidently shone a laser at the helicopter (this is a couple of years before the days when lasers were an everyday cat toy) and blinded the American naval intelligence officer that was observing the ship. Investigating further, the Coast Guard decided to board the ship and search it for the laser. When they got around to boarding the ship, the laser was nowhere to be found. Eventually, the ship left the Strait.

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Juan_de_Fuca_laser_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Juan_de_Fuca_laser_incident)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While interesting speculation, I don't understand why we've frontpaged this story on a community site generally focused on technology, startups and hacker culture. I'd love to see this on a community site called UnsolvedMysteryNews, but until one exists, flagging for relevance.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about you, but speculation about the reality of international affairs certainly "gratifies [my] intellectual curiosity". See: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER6> Aliens, it's definitely aliens. Wait, it's called the Arctic Sea, penguins it's definitely penguins, _emperor penguins_! Wait, it was sailing too far south for penguins in a non-refrigerated vessel, Alien-Emperor Penguin Hybrids! Being, er delivered to North Korea, to, er, make counterfeit US One Dollar Bills!

There, solved it. So now that's over and done with, can we find something else to satisfy your intellect, not mysteries that are only a mystery because the investigation isn't complete yet.

<comment><USER7> > Wait, it's called the Arctic Sea, penguins it's definitely penguins, emperor > penguins!

You forgot the 'intellectual' part. Penguins are in the Southern Hemisphere, unless you count zoos.

<comment><USER6> You caught me, I have plans to release Emperor Penguins onto the Arctic glaciers, now you might want to forget this whole conversation . . . unless you want to fight a Mexican Snorkelling Kangaroo!

Dammit I haven't made those yet either. Supervillanry is hard :(

P.S. You pointed out the most logical flaw in an illogical conspiracy theorist dig, I feel quite honoured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "In its latest version, official Russian television said ecologists had hijacked the Arctic Sea because they had ran out of fuel for their boats. " ... _riiiggghhhhtt...._

</comment><comment><USER9> Remember to visit the "new" page and vote with your _votes_ as well as your flags.

<comment><USER10> What's the point if you can't downvote crap? Out of 30 articles 2 were good enough to upvote, about a dozen needed downvotes the rest were meh.

Comments should be up only, articles should be up/down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can a ship disappear from radar?

I would think sinking would be the only way - unless ships transmit an explicit signal for radar to pick up.

</comment><comment><USER12> i found it it interesting.. missles to iran isnt my cup of tea to be honest, although speculative, was interesting, reeks of a tom clancy story

</comment><comment><USER13> It contained a Black Oil, an extraterrestrial virus that controls the host. I believe there were 2 FBI agents checking that ship out before it got hijacked.

</comment><comment><USER5> If Russia has been shipping these to Iran for awhile, what was the Bush administration doing shaking nukes at Iran? Did they not know about it, or simply not care about retaliation against Israel?</comment>