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Your "(Incendentally, a moment's...)" comment makes me sad. Obviously Roth spent well over a moment reading and contemplating your essay. The fact that you di
by Husafan 19y ago
Your "(Incendentally, a moment's...)" comment makes me sad. Obviously Roth spent well over a moment reading and contemplating your essay. The fact that you disregard his thoughts so flippantly, along with those of other intelligent people, makes me wonder whose opinions you would respect.
He clearly states he thought your central point was: "It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck," because "humans weren't meant to work in such large groups."
How is this so different than your stated thesis that: "the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree. That we work better in groups of 10 than 100 I feel is obvious enough not to need justification?"
His refutation relies on examples of humans partaking in behavior that they were not originally "evolved" to do. It is a direct response to your reliance on evolution. If you thought the whole point of your essay was "obvious enough not to need justification," then why did you write a whole essay on the subject?
To address your central point, I would cite the space program. Humans were obviously not evolved to be space-faring creatures, and yet hundreds (thousands?) of human intellects in concert (in a tree-structured organization) managed to land a man on the moon. The idea of synergy, where many humans in an organizational structure can accomplish more than any single human's evolved capabilities, has long been recognized (http://www.complexsystems.org/magic.html http://www.complexsystems.org/magic.html). Many people that work in such organizations draw personal satisfaction from the fact that they are furthering what they consider a greater good, rather than their own personal desires. Where a start-up glorifies individuals, organizations tend to glorify the whole. The fact that this is not satisfying to some does not mean it is not satisfying to others, and certainly does not imply that “You were not meant to have a boss.”
- nickb 19y agoI felt like I gave that aspect of his post the reply it deserved. I'm not accusing him of not having spent a moment on it, but of missing things a moment's thought should have shown him. It's actually charitable to attribute that to an oversight. And you're right, he does state something close to the central point of my essay. But if you keep reading, that's not the part he tries to refute. Your last paragraph is actually the most thoughtful response I've read about this whole controversy. But I think you're wrong to say that startups glorify the individual. The startup founders I know are on average more idealistic than people working for big companies. They tend to be the ones who want to make the world a better place; though there are of course exceptions, the people working at big companies are the ones who tend to think of their job as something they do mainly for the money.
- ncart 19y agoholy sh*t!!! nickb = pg ????
- sspencer 19y agoWorlds are colliding...
- dw 19y agoScore: -inf, Slashdot-like whining. Well it is his site, deal with it. In the meantime please stop polluting my damn RSS feeds. Please consider the comments feature a side effect of this site's PRIMARY FUNCTION and not worthy of news itself. Thanks!! (GRRRRR)
- rw 19y agoLet's try something else. I claim that founders tell themselves (regardless of truth value) that they want to be: "Making the world a better place (and getting really damn rich)." The justification for this attitude is that one can supposedly participate in a positive-sum game for both parties -- one party is you, the other is the world. This is the altruistic lure of market structures. Whether or not you agree with that non-zero-sum stance (do markets actually tend to produce such situations, all externalities considered?), I think the "making a lot of money indicates I'm filling a truly needed demand" mentality produces entrepreneurs who unnecessarily tie their personal increase in wealth to the feeling of an increase in some greater good. But we do get pretty cool products out of this, whatever the psychology involved.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- Jd 19y agoYou haven't addressed Pg's unstated presuppositions. His 'telos' is that the programmers should be happy -- although only circumstantial evidence is presented it is likely he is correct that large organizations undermine such. Of course, persons can sacrifice for the greater good or a greater civilizational vision. This produces societies, not tribes. Your space program example serves to illustrate what is possible in the context of such a vision.