I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing, but what I perceive from the essay is slightly different than your central point. For instance, if you titled the essay 'the i

I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing, but what I perceive from the essay is slightly different than your central point. For instance, if you titled the essay 'the inverse relationship between personal freedom and organization size', I don't think it would elicit such an outcry (or any attention whatsoever). Instead, you state that the loss of freedom makes going into large organizations a bad choice for certain groups of people (namely, programmers, because programming is about freedom). The programming community is made up of many people with different backgrounds, mindsets, and interests. While I myself may program for the freedom to create things, I know other people who program for the fun of it, and others who program because its what they know how to do. All of these types of programmers exist in the startup community, because a startup can mean much more than just programming freedom to them (it can mean money, prestige, adventure, a challenge, etc). If I am disagreeing at all, I would only do so concerning the scope of people that 'programming freedom' applies to. I think only a small subset of the startup community really thinks this point is meaningful - the rest do not give it much weight. I think the main point of the essay is to convince people to startup early in their careers, even out of college. (If 'you weren't meant to have a boss', what are you meant to do?) You back it up by saying that corporate culture, from your experience, does more harm than good from a startup's perspective (especially in the matter of programming), and you explore that line until you come up with a good model that explains why corporate culture is harmful in its essence. In contrast, many people don't think that programming freedom is a powerful incentive to starting up early, and are disagreeing because that is the only evidence that you provide to back up your claim that 'you weren't meant to have a boss'.