Dunbar's Number seems to be the crux of Paul Graham's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" without citing Dunbar's number. Just an observation. >What's so unnatu

Dunbar's Number seems to be the crux of Paul Graham's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" without citing Dunbar's number. Just an observation. >What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups. >Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. [1] >Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.