Scale: Quest for the One True DevOps
Where a post-war college researcher witnesses the birth of IT job silos two decades before the jobs themselves would be invented, and triggers a revolution whose objectives are literally all over the map.
“It was here that [Enid] Mumford began creating a powerful idea, which would lead her through the rest of her career, and which would chart the course for seven decades of technological development. There were no computers along the Liverpool docks. But her study of the work habits of dock laborers, and the means with which management drove them towards efficiency, would bring her in direct contact with the first computers ever used in sociological research. The ideals she created, of ‘human machines’ and ‘socio-technical’ systems, would evolve into the founding tenets of our common philosophy of technology and society.”
