30 ms·

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008)

322 points by cow9 8y ago

cow9 8y ago
"For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck." do you agree?
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  I think that is usually true that big companies have little autonomy. And I've usually noticed that the people who say they have autonomy are those who control other people - and disregard the fact that they reduce the autonomy of others.
- FrankyHollywood 8y ago
  Definitly not! Few years ago I worked as developer at a startup. 4 devs, 2 sales, 1 marketing and 1 CEO. It was a mess, sales made horrible promisses to customers, and letting us build demo after demo. The CEO was going round every day pushing people to work harder. And everytime the guy read some tech news we had to drop everything and switch technology to be 'more innovative'. Right now I'm working in a large company (> 1000 employees) I have a steady budget for my team. There are targets offcourse, but overall a lot of freedom to do with my team we think is best. Management doesn't get involved in any tech descisions. Wouldn't wanne go back to my startup years...
- fernandotakai 8y ago
  honestly? i do. i've worked for a big bank as well as a small (10~15 people) startups and i hugely prefer a startup; mostly (if not all) because of stuff pg cites on this article. i feel more free to be creative, to implement interesting stuff, to experiment. not having that management layer on top of you is kind of liberating. ofc this is not for everyone (just like remote work is not for everyone -- i love it, but i don't recommend that every single developer out there stays at home from monday on), but i do think (from my own experience) that you will become a better professional working for startups.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  I work at a large organization. My worldwide impact here is literally six orders of magnitude larger than what it was when I was working in a small team in grad school. Large institutions are powerful. This blog post is crazy.
everdev 8y ago
> groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy I made more money at my web agency when I had 10 employees than when I had 20. I kept growing the business through inertia and the thought that bigger was better. I decided to sell with 20 employees rather than drop back down to 10, but by 20 it was unweildy for me to manage on my own. The overhead described in the article from growing beyond a group of 10 I felt everyday. If I had to do it over I'd stay at 10 or less for as long as possible and prioritize connection and profits over revenue and headcount.
- jdhawk 8y ago
  Or add another layer of Management?
  - everdev 8y ago
    That's what I did when I grew to 20 and part of what increased our revenue but decreased our profitability. The article talks about the challenges of managing managers and my experience lines up with what the author describes.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Companies also have economies of scale. The 10-to-30 transition is so hard because it has to pass through 20, the moment when overhead as a fraction of total turnover is at a maximum. After that things get better again. But getting through that is a really hard thing to do.
gamma-male 8y ago
Perfect blogpost as I'm joining a large corp soon...
- initself 8y ago
  "In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."
- uncle_d 8y ago
  Ha. Perfect blogpost as I’m leaving a large corp soon...
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
In the really big companies I worked at we were in small teams of about 10, and communication outside that team was infrequent. It's the medium sized companies that were the drainers.
jqcoffey 8y ago
So I'm a manager in a large engineering org (~600 devs) and I've managed from 2 (and was therefore an IC) to ~40 people. I can definitely relate to this blog post and if the author's intent is to say that working in small groups is easier and more natural than working in large ones, then I agree wholeheartedly, but I think there are a few other things to keep in mind. > One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. He goes on to say that this is a consequence of the tree structure, which may be technically correct, but I think this is actually a consequence of the natural conservatism that develops at a large company making lots of money and paying lots of salaries. This doesn't change the validity of his message, but I think it's worth pointing out the motivations of a large company. > The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. So this is also, on it's face, completely valid. The only exception I take with it is that "new things" is ill-defined. If he means to say, "building entirely new systems from scratch is nearly impossible at a large company," then yes. That is 100% true. If in that he includes, "building critical new functionality into an existing system that will make hundreds, thousands or maybe millions of users insanely happy," then, as you can probably read from my phrasing, I think he's wrong. I personally prefer doing the second than the first. I think it's a harder challenge to work within legacy systems and make them adapt than to be a full-time greenfield engineer. (sidebar: If any of my colleagues are reading this they may be rolling their eyes given a project we have in motion at the moment because it's perceived as greenfield--come see me I'll do my best to convince you it's not :D) > But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup. Implicit in my previous comment is that, because it's harder making things move in Big Corp one tends to learn more, both as an engineer and as a human. Finding the right technical path through a heavily used, critical system is an interesting challenge, and evolving legacy systems, or spawning new work in a large org requires lots of communication, as well. All that said, I do fully agree that working in such a large corp generates a different sort of stress than working in a small company (I've worked in many). In a small company you're worried, fundamentally, about the company's viability and therefore your paycheck. In a large company I think the major stress is knowing whether you still have a voice that carries any weight. Anyway, it was a great post and I thank the sharer of it :).
frederikvs 8y ago
There are some interesting books regarding organisational structure, that also reflect some of what's in the blog post. Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux is one that especially struck my interest.
dang 8y ago
From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767 From 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732 And twice from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898
jatins 8y ago
Assuming what that article says is correct, that it isn't natural - what's the solution to this? Surely, everyone can't be a startup founder. Just curious how the world should work for that article to not exist.
- jp_sc 8y ago
  Maybe cooperatives? The book "Developer Hegemony" talk about that.
austincheney 8y ago
So completely torn on this. In the corporate world I completely agree. I feel like a vegetable. I am numb and stare out a window. I enjoy taking long walks and picking fruit on my corporate neighbor's property. In addition to working for a Fortune 50 company I am also an officer in the army. In the army this idea about bosses is and large organizations is mostly (not completely though) upside down. In the military this can really work for you if you are engaged and your primary leader isn't a criminal. This is perhaps the biggest difference between these worlds, and I cannot put it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you have shared a similar experience yourself. Seeing and living this difference shapes your world perspective more than any other objective quality (there are catastrophic subjective qualities that will shape anybody's world).
- tome 8y ago
  > I cannot put it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you have shared a similar experience yourself Could you try? This is really interesting!
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Bear with me on this... In the corporate space many of the younger people I have worked with feel, to me, extraordinarily fragile. We all have fear and we all make mistakes. Sometimes I would rather shoot myself in the face than point out a minor shortcoming. Sometimes the result is a long series of excuses and justifications (deliberately not listening and having a one way conversation with themselves to you) and on rare occasions the response is immediate hostility. I don't know everything, but I have been in this line of work for 20 years and I do feel justified in thinking I might be able to offer advice or technical guidance to somebody who has been doing it for 6 months or less. Older developers I have worked with in the corporate world tend to be a bit rigid and stuck in their ways, which is completely expected. Although this is not a surprise it does prove a bit frustrating when it comes to exploring newer technologies or open-mindedness to new approaches. In the military you often don't get a vote upon the technology, the environment, the people you work with, or really anything. You realize you are an adult. You suck it up and try to make the best of it. As crappy as that may at first sound it is a forcing function with some really positive results. You have to be flexible. You have to embrace new things. You have to work with all kinds of people. Confrontation is common in the military. There really is a such thing as positive confrontations. Positive confrontations are necessary to develop people. This exists in the corporate world as well, but its generally hidden behind directors and senior managers where tiny contributors like me don't see it. Ownership of work is vital to motivation. The military has figured this out. Some of the corporate world has figured this out, but usually not. People have to be allowed to fail in order to feel the pressure to grow. Let's not forget corporate employees are adults and they need mentorship not helicopter parents. As an example tell a JavaScript developer they can't use their favorite framework. Tell them they actually have to write original code and solve problems. Oh, the crying...
_yosefk 8y ago
If you work on/for a startup and that startup succeeds, it will more often than not have to grow. If you're unlike Paul Graham who sold his startup and then invested in countless others and made lots of money but did not keep working on the thing he'd built - meaning, if you're what he likes to call maker as opposed to primarily a money-maker - you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food. And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding.
- lmm 8y ago
  > you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food. I've grown attached to projects in small companies and large ones, sure. What you've written can be read as an explanation for why people continue to work at companies even as they grow larger and get worse, rather than any contradiction of what Graham said. > And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding. Really? I don't think I've experienced anything rewarding/inspiring being made by more than ten people; even in large companies, the most rewarding/inspiring projects I've worked on have been those that were worked on by a small, relatively isolated team. Scaling up may be necessary and/or lucrative, but I doubt it could ever be as rewarding as making the thing, and AIUI the economics research backs that up - productivity is concentrated in small companies, successful companies grow until they get too bloated to be successful rather than stable (because if you're successful, growing is the default path) rather than improving through growth.
  - _yosefk 8y ago
    A group of 100 is 10 groups of 10. Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team. Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it? (Of course lots of them get paid to do this, but many are not.) It's not exactly easy calories for a caged lion, the way Graham describes a corporate job taken by recent college grads. Instead, people choose to work in these large groups because they want to make an impact. You can instead contribute to TinyCC or MenuetOS - smaller team, less impact. Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses? If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? I think that market realities point in the direction of there being economies of scale and diseconomies of scale, without a single one-size-fits-all procedure for determining the optimal firm size for any particular endeavor.
dazc 8y ago
Once I had a great job, I managed myself most of the time and was trusted to just 'get on with it'. Then the company got busier and started hiring more people who were less able to manage themselves. As a consequence, I acquired a manager who wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to be doing. This led to situations where he would need to do things that justified his existence, like phoning me every hour to ask 'how it was going', 'where was I, and so on... Needless to say, I started enjoying my job much less... Then, when it became obvious my new manager wasn't coping so well, they gave him an assistant. You can probably guess how that panned out?
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  > This led to situations where he would need to do things that justified his existence, like phoning me every hour to ask 'how it was going', 'where was I, and so on... You missed a great opportunity to manage upwards. Surely you have some meaningless menial tasks in your job that you hate to perform? Excellent delegation material! You know what they say, many hands make for lighter work. They hired him an assistant? Looks like you just acquired a whole department!
- jon-wood 8y ago
  This just sounds like you ended up with a bad manager, rather than a failure inherent to all management. A good manager would have recognised that you're pretty much capable of knowing where to focus your effort, and generally get that call right - given that they can be more or less hands off, but provide you with a screen from things that really shouldn't be getting near you in the first place, and a route to push things up the chain when needed without having to shepard them along.
exergy 8y ago
This article again. sigh What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all, coupled with a tone that deals only in absolutes. There is no space for doubt, for hesitancy, for understatement. It is grandiosity dialed up to 11 in a way I've seen precious few "essayists" do. Even that word grates me. Oh, no sir! Paul is above mere 'blogging'. He is an "essayist" because his blogposts feature more than 2500 words. Look at what he claims: > And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. > It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck. My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything approaching sensitivity. Here's Jeff Atwoods take on it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-narcissism/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-nar... It's an opinion I sympathise with a lot more than PG's. I work for a big company (CERN). Group of thousands upon thousands. It's wonderful here. I wouldn't trade it for the next "Uber of...". My 'boss' is just someone who has worked on my topic for a lot longer than me, and is therefore a veritable treasure chest of knowledge. I LOVE working for him because I learn a shitload on a weekly basis, and the projects that he is responsible for align with my interests. I LOVE working in my 'group of hundreds', because that group of hundreds can accomplish a lot more than a full-stack developer straight out of Stanford thinking he can disrupt everything just by ignoring zoning laws. I also imagine there are a significant portion of people working for places like NASA/ESA etc who share my view. Where does this jive with Mr Graham's World Of Absolutes? Further, even if we limit ourselves to the corporate world, 'groups of hundreds' can afford to do more than one guy. A large group can, for example, dedicate resources to lowering the environmental impact of the product chain, in a way that a three person startup couldn't. They can have customer service that a small startup just cannot match. Is all of that worthless? And if it isn't, just what is Graham getting at in this article? Is it limited to young graduates? Then why the far reaching claims and the excessive overreach? And if not, is he genuinely so delusional as to think he can speak for everyone? I will give another example, at the risk of outing myself, just because this article is still fucking grinding my gears. My mum is working on the Polio program. In a couple of years, they will have rid the world of this killer disease. Millions of lives saved. It's not necessarily the glorious work environment that gives Paul Graham a hardon. Doesn't mean it 'sucks'. Just means that most of the people working there are capable of understanding that there are some necessary evils involved in taking on such an enormous challenge. You need to talk to Politicians the world over. You need to coordinate the door to door vaccine distribution. You need to balance the books for millions and millions of dollars in funding. You need to set up secure enclaves for staff that are going into dangerous zones and risking their lives for the project. I would like to see some fucking bossless Ycombinator graduate try their hand at that.
jondubois 8y ago
I've been trying to escape having a corporate day job for 8 years now precisely because it doesn't feel natural; I constantly get the urge to escape and I change companies often. I hope that this kind of article doesn't promote the mindset that if you're not financially successful by the time you turn 30, then you're either lazy or unskilled (I.e. thinking that leaders are fundamentally different than employees). There are a lot of business leaders today who harbor significant contempt towards their own employees; you can see it by how they talk about their employees and how they interact with them. It might seem like some employees aren't ambitious, don't take initiative and don't want to step outside of their comfort zone but that's rarely true; most employees do want to take control of their lives and they devise plans to make it happen; but dumb luck is just a much more powerful force. You can't beat dumb luck.
- rocannon 8y ago
  Please do not be discouraged. You can't always beat dumb luck, but you can certainly fight it. Also, there's a saying: "you make your own luck". It sounds glib, but there's some truth to it.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  Why not start by becoming a consultant? I think that's always a good question to ask yourself. Consulting has many of the challenges you'd face running your own business, except the product you're selling is yourself.
  - jondubois 8y ago
    I did do contracting in the past and I do consulting from time to time related to an open source project that I created but it's not enough to turn into a full time business yet.
hevi_jos 8y ago
I agree with this article, as I have experienced what is working for myself and working for others. On the other hand, people need other personalities to complement their personalities. Organizing this environment is not simple for most people, as it requires a complete different set of skills than most technical work. People will have to enter a company to get this environment, as it is already created for you. Usually not well created, but something is better than nothing. IMHO Paul Graham acquired these skills from his now wife, thanks to that they created YC and you have all this environment of mutual support, the "family", the "Church". It always surprising when you go to the US, how isolated most people is from each other. This makes PG advice extremely damaging for most people in the US. The technical people that will listen to it are already not very social. Without social support, you will perish. No matter how good you are, people are social creatures.
m0skit0 8y ago
Except that white flour or sugar are not bad for you physically. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-against-sugar/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-ag...
paulie_a 8y ago
There is a big difference between management and leadership. Regardless of the size of the team there will be managers. There will be a structure. whether it is a team of two or megacorp, what consistently lacks is genuine leadership.
GuB-42 8y ago
We aren't meant to have a boss. We also aren't meant to use computers, let alone build them. Big and complex organizations are required in order to build big and complex things. And it turns out that it works best by having bosses. Now, I work most of the time for large companies and what I notice is that you have much more freedom than you might think. But you have to work for it. You may not get to choose a framework, you may have to follow a process, but you still need to make decisions, even if they are on a small scale. You may be handed over procedures and recipes, don't follow them blindly, try to understand them and maybe improve on them. No matter where you are working, you are not a robot. You are the human, the problem solver, the decision maker, the repetitive tasks are for the computer. As a programmer, there is always a way to make a boring job more interesting in a way that benefits the company. And if your boss is competent, he will appreciate it. As for what a boss is, I always see my boss as a partner, not a "superior". My boss works for me, he looks at the big picture, meets with customers, and feeds me work. I work for my boss by doing the work he wants me to do.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  I generally agree with you. I would opine with we aren’t meant to have a single boss. If you own a business your customers are effectively your collective boss with a much more diverse set of satisfaction criteria. In my opinion this is a better way to love and plays into many of the points you raised.
- phillc73 8y ago
  > Big and complex organizations are required in order to build big and complex things. And it turns out that it works best by having bosses. Is that true? Having bosses has been proven as the best way to organise big and complex organisations? In a capitalist economy a hierarchical organisational structure is for sure the overwhelmingly most common structure, but there is an alternative; a flat non-hierarchical structure such as in a worker's co-operative.[1][2] I'd like to see a study comparing the two and drawing a conclusion as to which is best. [1] http://www.morningstarco.com/ http://www.morningstarco.com/ [2] http://www.enliveningedge.org/organizations/morning-stars-success-story-no-bosses-no-titles-no-structural-hierarchy/ http://www.enliveningedge.org/organizations/morning-stars-su...
NKCSS 8y ago
I love this quote: "Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem."
33a 8y ago
So.... Basically the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
yowlingcat 8y ago
I'm going to agree with other folks saying PG really took the L on this piece. That "Don't talk to corp dev" piece is a far more quality piece than this one, which is really a stretch. As it turns out, if you're at the right company, even if you prefer small firms, you'll probably find a lot to learn and a good reason to stay at a larger company. And if you're at a small firm, you can really be gambling on your entire career. PG, of course, never mentions this in his piece, or the consideration that so many startups fail. How many bush tailed young engineers have gone to work at a startup somewhere early in their career and had it go pear shaped? Was this kind of inspiration porn to blame? Of course, it's 10 years on from this piece, and we're seeing lots of correction to this. The youth aren't quite so naive these days. They don't buy this kind of drivel. They want a real job with real benefits, room to grow, mentorship, a healthy org, userbase growth, an interesting roadmap -- they want a career. They're not going to settle for a huckster selling them a get rich quick scheme. PG gets dangerously close to that in several articles. EDIT: I'm realizing this sounds a little bit more bitter and polemical than I'd like. Let me submit for reference that this view is very, very much colored by my own experiences -- right out of college, I had several early stage startups I worked at and/or co-founded go sideways in manners that I had zero preparation for or help extricating myself from. I found myself wishing at that stage that I had worked at either more established companies, whether they be post series A startups or BigCos. I went on to do just that, but had already burned through 3 years of a spotty resumé, low salary, emotional burnout and having to develop an unnecessarily thick hide to weather all that than I wished. I'm seeing colleagues of mine who took this route out of college, and they seem so much further ahead and well-balanced than I was at their age. It makes me think that in hindsight, it all seems so unnecessary -- had I worked at more stable companies in that period, wouldn't I be three years ahead? Would I have been a more polished and developed professional just as they are now? It's easy to discount the necessity of good mentorship early in your career, but it's so crucial. That mentorship is what gives you the tools to learn how to learn and how to peacefully co-exist with others -- if you don't get that the right way, there's a lot of painful and wasteful unlearning and relearning that must be done. I certainly found myself doing more of that than I would have liked. For all intents and purposes, there's no guarantee (just a high probability financially) that I would've been further ahead if I started my career off at a big co. But life doesn't work like that. I would have certainly been more risk-averse, and a lot less capable of, erm, smashing through my problems (when I need to) as I am today. I guess that even so, I would still trade some of that off for a more stable early career that let me get to a place of security and learning right out of college.
fallingfrog 8y ago
You weren’t, but here’s the reason you do: In an organization where everyone is equal, adding a new person to the org doesn’t benefit the people who are already in it. Let’s say you have a coop bagel shop- is there any particular reason to want to cut your own paychecks until you have saved up enough to open another one? Or let’s say you live in an egalitarian, peaceful country. Is there any reason to want to invade your neighbors and annex territory? No. But, if you put one person in charge, then suddenly you have a person in a position of authority with a vested interest in expanding the franchise, since he gets to skim off the labor of everyone underneath him. In a stroke, you’ve invented empire, war, and capitalism. Come back in a hundred years and the organizations that expanded the most are also the most heirarchical. I don’t think this is a good thing, by the way, just a historical factor to be aware of.
- donaldknuth123 8y ago
  There's a fairly obvious reason to expand your corporation or territory. To increase the resources available to your people. Through invasion and annexation you can increase the average amount of resources available to your people if you invade a place with a very high concentration of them. you don't need a hierarchy to justify this. Your argument doesn't make much sense.
- cubano 8y ago
  So how do you explain the exact opposite actually working in the wild? Over the past couple hundred years, almost all full communist/socialist governments have failed, while market-based capitalistic ones have pulled billions out of abject poverty.
- neil_s 8y ago
  Huh? If the additional person can bring more value to the cooperative than they consume (which you would generally hope to be true for most hires), then it will be to your benefit. Yes, more slices need to be cut, but the cake is bigger. For example, a marketing expert that can increase customers for the single bagel shop by 10%, but their salary only costs 1%.
  - 8y ago
jacquesm 8y ago
There is a huge contradiction in this essay. If everybody were to follow the mantra and 'fire their boss' then who will those scrappy starter-uppers hire? Some people will have a boss, some people won't and that's all dependent on personal risk evaluation. The 'gig' economy is where really nobody has a boss, the libertarian wet dream where everybody sells their body as a service to be discarded on a moments notice. Having a boss translates into access to social security, welfare, healthcare and other safety nets in many places in the world, and entrepreneurs usually pay in to such schemes but will not be in a position to apply for help if it should come to that.
- jannes 8y ago
  I think the essay doesn't make the case for everyone to 'fire their boss' rather than to limit organisation size to about 8 people and to eliminate hierarchies.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    How is that working out for Stripe, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Uber and Apple?
darkerside 8y ago
Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his thinking, but this article has not aged well. Or perhaps my understanding of organizations has simply matured. I think the biggest problem, for which this article was a lagging indicator, with working for large companies pre-2008 was that they hadn't really figured out how to work with technology yet. Disclaimer, I've never worked for a truly huge firm, but I get the sense folks are getting closer and closer to figuring it out. We've learned to build and support disruptive units inside of larger ones, managers are more often technically skilled and able to properly support their employees, and we've adopted more agile ways of writing software. Or maybe I'm just lucky to work where I do!
- golemotron 8y ago
  > Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his thinking Does Paul Graham have cooties? What happened?
imgabe 8y ago
People have always read way too much into this essay instead of looking at it for what it is: marketing material for Y Combinator. It doesn't speak to you? Ok. That's fine. You aren't the target audience. Obviously there have always been millions upon millions of people who live perfectly happy, productive, successful lives working for large organizations. However, some subset of people have always felt dissatisfied in this arrangement. For some of those, this essay might be the spark they need to look around and find something that suits them better (and maybe Y Combinator can fund them.) I'm feeling old that the average HN reader anymore doesn't seem to know who Paul Graham is.
- paulcole 8y ago
  Yeah pretty obviously pandering to the desired audience: > There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically. Could almost hear all the heads nodding in agreement. If only he'd mentioned intermittent fasting or the fact that the hiring process for developers is broken...
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    I wonder if pg ever wrote something along the lines of that old pinnacle of masturbatory pandering: "The first differentiator of an elite developer is to read industry blogs, which you're already doing, so congratulations!" I feel like I've read it before from him but I'm having trouble remembering now 10 years later.
  - edanm 8y ago
    FYI, this was written in 2008, before IF became a thing.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      Back then we just called it anorexia. Really shows what marketing can do.
      - 8y ago
rafiki6 8y ago
My fundamental issue with this viewpoint is that it takes away the inherent entrepreneurship that exists in an employee/employer business relationship. Whether I'm on a team of 10 in an organization of a 100 or a team of 100 in an organization of 10,000, the reality is I still have much work to do to be valuable. I'd argue that if you are truly ambitious and hardworking, making your way up a corporate ladder can be just as challenging, risky and rewarding as being a startup founder. It requires time, dedication, sacrifice, risk-taking and developing skills that most people who chose programming as a career seem to forget about. People who program shouldn't box themselves into being code monkeys. I still need to pitch ideas at my corporate job to ensure they are valuable. I still need to use other people's code as any person building a shiny web app will do with open source projects and frameworks. I still need to manage finances, ask for raises, manage budgets. I still need to deal with HR, accounting, sales, product management, project management, marketing etc. At the end of the day a truly valuable "employee" is one who's really figured out the system and learned to sell themselves within it. As a startup founder you are still beholden to many people much in the same way as an employee who's working up the ranks. As a founder you will still deal with unproductive slow people. You will deal with aggressive investors, finicky customers etc. I think a corporate job is what you make of it. It's safer in some cases sure, although since we work in an at-will employment world, your never fully safe. But if you really want to grow, you need to take risks and try things and learn all the same skills an entrepreneur would need to.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
This post parallels Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial society and its future"
iblaine 8y ago
TL;DR; Successful guy visits Africa, sees animals in the wild instead of Zoo's, creates clickbait article to imply capitalism is a zoo and people do not belong in zoo's. The premise of this argument is that people do not belong in large groups. Ironically that is what we all try to do. Over time, people organize so they can accomplish greater things as a whole rather than individuals. The end of the article goes on to say, "Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller." I can't decide if this article attempting to be advice or a sales pitch for Y Combinator.
frogpelt 8y ago
Two thoughts: pg says we are designed but then in the notes he says "by evolution." Since evolution is changing to fit and survive your environment, perhaps humans working in groups is better for their survival. Also, specialization of labor has created this concept. Humans used to provide their own food, shelter and transportation that's all they needed to do. But when one person specializes in transportation, one in farming or hunting, and one in building shelters things start to change. And we end up with companies that only build pipe fittings.
draw_down 8y ago
Everyone who isn't independently wealthy has a boss.
agumonkey 8y ago
Brings me memories about stories at PARC, there were often manager-free path between groups. This led to unleashed creativity: want something ? ask the dude that know about something, done.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
The ability to organize into large groups is one of the greatest social innovations in history, and is a fundamental aspect of civil society. I worked at a company that had an 'individual' service, and a 'business' service.In Spain, Italy and Greece and S. America - our customers were 'individuals'. In Germany, France and UK, they were 'business' accounts. Those economies with more 'business' accounts have somewhat more advanced industrial basis than those with 'individual' accounts. There are many things that can only be developed at scale, and certain kinds of specialization that only become available at scale. Only a company with X people can start to invest in Y kinds of things, which is a huge part of their competitive advantage. Yes, big cos are seemingly more inefficient at the individual level, but their scale actually might imply greater efficiency. Put another way - someone at only 50% individual efficiency at a big corp, may be 'creating more value' than otherwise.
queryly 8y ago
I am not sure if it is because I am getting old, but have found Paul's old writing more resonating than ever.
- matfil 8y ago
  Likewise. His more programming-centric writing, in particular, is a breath of fresh air relative to the current "teams, tests, and tickets" dogma. Personal favourite: http://paulgraham.com/head.html http://paulgraham.com/head.html
mempko 8y ago
> to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do. If you look at truly revolutionary making environments like Xerox Parc, they are like this, no bosses and small groups. However, what you didn't see in Xerox Parc is a market economy. Why? Because competition destroys invention. Humans are not meant to compete with each other. Markets are another artificial environment, but of course, Paul doesn't see that because he is the fish in the fishbowl.
noir_lord 8y ago
The legacy code but resonates, I'm often stuck doing things in an ugly way or constrained because I have to work around the continual tire fire I inherited. On the flip side I'm one of those weirdos who likes working on legacy code as long as I have the freedom to improve it.
setgree 8y ago
> I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. I this this is a good analogy but I don't draw the same conclusion Paul does. I trained for a marathon last summer, and it sucked. Long distance running and racing has been associated with diminished lifespans [0], organ damage [1], weakened immune system [2], and lowered sex drive [3]. This research isn't conclusive by any means, but it's a lot easier to explain if you believe in an upside-down U-shaped relationship between exercise and well-being than a monotonic relationship. (I personally found that my sweet spot was under 100 km/week, any more than that and I got sick and tired and felt beat-down.) Same with being a CEO. It's great to be your own boss. It's generally hard on your body, soul, and relationships to work 100 hours a week. If your ambition is to have a 5k/month side project and live on that, that's probably good for your health. If it's to make and sell a billion dollar company, that's probably not. That's not to say that _working_ at a startup isn't great. I just wouldn't want to start one. And unless you do, you're probably going to have a boss. [0] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196(15)00621-7/fulltext https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196(... [1] https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386(17)30536-X/fulltext https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386(17)30536-X/fulltext [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622 [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-workouts/years-of-intense-exercise-tied-to-dip-in-male-libido-idUSKBN16O1Y8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-workout...

322 points by cow9 8y ago

cow9 8y ago

"For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck." do you agree?

MrTonyD 8y ago
I think that is usually true that big companies have little autonomy. And I've usually noticed that the people who say they have autonomy are those who control other people - and disregard the fact that they reduce the autonomy of others.
FrankyHollywood 8y ago
Definitly not! Few years ago I worked as developer at a startup. 4 devs, 2 sales, 1 marketing and 1 CEO. It was a mess, sales made horrible promisses to customers, and letting us build demo after demo. The CEO was going round every day pushing people to work harder. And everytime the guy read some tech news we had to drop everything and switch technology to be 'more innovative'. Right now I'm working in a large company (> 1000 employees) I have a steady budget for my team. There are targets offcourse, but overall a lot of freedom to do with my team we think is best. Management doesn't get involved in any tech descisions. Wouldn't wanne go back to my startup years...
fernandotakai 8y ago
honestly? i do. i've worked for a big bank as well as a small (10~15 people) startups and i hugely prefer a startup; mostly (if not all) because of stuff pg cites on this article. i feel more free to be creative, to implement interesting stuff, to experiment. not having that management layer on top of you is kind of liberating. ofc this is not for everyone (just like remote work is not for everyone -- i love it, but i don't recommend that every single developer out there stays at home from monday on), but i do think (from my own experience) that you will become a better professional working for startups.
UncleMeat 8y ago
I work at a large organization. My worldwide impact here is literally six orders of magnitude larger than what it was when I was working in a small team in grad school. Large institutions are powerful. This blog post is crazy.

everdev 8y ago

> groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy I made more money at my web agency when I had 10 employees than when I had 20. I kept growing the business through inertia and the thought that bigger was better. I decided to sell with 20 employees rather than drop back down to 10, but by 20 it was unweildy for me to manage on my own. The overhead described in the article from growing beyond a group of 10 I felt everyday. If I had to do it over I'd stay at 10 or less for as long as possible and prioritize connection and profits over revenue and headcount.

jdhawk 8y ago
Or add another layer of Management?
- everdev 8y ago
  That's what I did when I grew to 20 and part of what increased our revenue but decreased our profitability. The article talks about the challenges of managing managers and my experience lines up with what the author describes.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Companies also have economies of scale. The 10-to-30 transition is so hard because it has to pass through 20, the moment when overhead as a fraction of total turnover is at a maximum. After that things get better again. But getting through that is a really hard thing to do.

gamma-male 8y ago

Perfect blogpost as I'm joining a large corp soon...

initself 8y ago
"In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."
uncle_d 8y ago
Ha. Perfect blogpost as I’m leaving a large corp soon...

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

In the really big companies I worked at we were in small teams of about 10, and communication outside that team was infrequent. It's the medium sized companies that were the drainers.

jqcoffey 8y ago

So I'm a manager in a large engineering org (~600 devs) and I've managed from 2 (and was therefore an IC) to ~40 people. I can definitely relate to this blog post and if the author's intent is to say that working in small groups is easier and more natural than working in large ones, then I agree wholeheartedly, but I think there are a few other things to keep in mind. > One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. He goes on to say that this is a consequence of the tree structure, which may be technically correct, but I think this is actually a consequence of the natural conservatism that develops at a large company making lots of money and paying lots of salaries. This doesn't change the validity of his message, but I think it's worth pointing out the motivations of a large company. > The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. So this is also, on it's face, completely valid. The only exception I take with it is that "new things" is ill-defined. If he means to say, "building entirely new systems from scratch is nearly impossible at a large company," then yes. That is 100% true. If in that he includes, "building critical new functionality into an existing system that will make hundreds, thousands or maybe millions of users insanely happy," then, as you can probably read from my phrasing, I think he's wrong. I personally prefer doing the second than the first. I think it's a harder challenge to work within legacy systems and make them adapt than to be a full-time greenfield engineer. (sidebar: If any of my colleagues are reading this they may be rolling their eyes given a project we have in motion at the moment because it's perceived as greenfield--come see me I'll do my best to convince you it's not :D) > But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup. Implicit in my previous comment is that, because it's harder making things move in Big Corp one tends to learn more, both as an engineer and as a human. Finding the right technical path through a heavily used, critical system is an interesting challenge, and evolving legacy systems, or spawning new work in a large org requires lots of communication, as well. All that said, I do fully agree that working in such a large corp generates a different sort of stress than working in a small company (I've worked in many). In a small company you're worried, fundamentally, about the company's viability and therefore your paycheck. In a large company I think the major stress is knowing whether you still have a voice that carries any weight. Anyway, it was a great post and I thank the sharer of it :).

frederikvs 8y ago

There are some interesting books regarding organisational structure, that also reflect some of what's in the blog post. Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux is one that especially struck my interest.

dang 8y ago

From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767 From 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732 And twice from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898

jatins 8y ago

Assuming what that article says is correct, that it isn't natural - what's the solution to this? Surely, everyone can't be a startup founder. Just curious how the world should work for that article to not exist.

jp_sc 8y ago
Maybe cooperatives? The book "Developer Hegemony" talk about that.

austincheney 8y ago

So completely torn on this. In the corporate world I completely agree. I feel like a vegetable. I am numb and stare out a window. I enjoy taking long walks and picking fruit on my corporate neighbor's property. In addition to working for a Fortune 50 company I am also an officer in the army. In the army this idea about bosses is and large organizations is mostly (not completely though) upside down. In the military this can really work for you if you are engaged and your primary leader isn't a criminal. This is perhaps the biggest difference between these worlds, and I cannot put it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you have shared a similar experience yourself. Seeing and living this difference shapes your world perspective more than any other objective quality (there are catastrophic subjective qualities that will shape anybody's world).

tome 8y ago
> I cannot put it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you have shared a similar experience yourself Could you try? This is really interesting!
- austincheney 8y ago
  Bear with me on this... In the corporate space many of the younger people I have worked with feel, to me, extraordinarily fragile. We all have fear and we all make mistakes. Sometimes I would rather shoot myself in the face than point out a minor shortcoming. Sometimes the result is a long series of excuses and justifications (deliberately not listening and having a one way conversation with themselves to you) and on rare occasions the response is immediate hostility. I don't know everything, but I have been in this line of work for 20 years and I do feel justified in thinking I might be able to offer advice or technical guidance to somebody who has been doing it for 6 months or less. Older developers I have worked with in the corporate world tend to be a bit rigid and stuck in their ways, which is completely expected. Although this is not a surprise it does prove a bit frustrating when it comes to exploring newer technologies or open-mindedness to new approaches. In the military you often don't get a vote upon the technology, the environment, the people you work with, or really anything. You realize you are an adult. You suck it up and try to make the best of it. As crappy as that may at first sound it is a forcing function with some really positive results. You have to be flexible. You have to embrace new things. You have to work with all kinds of people. Confrontation is common in the military. There really is a such thing as positive confrontations. Positive confrontations are necessary to develop people. This exists in the corporate world as well, but its generally hidden behind directors and senior managers where tiny contributors like me don't see it. Ownership of work is vital to motivation. The military has figured this out. Some of the corporate world has figured this out, but usually not. People have to be allowed to fail in order to feel the pressure to grow. Let's not forget corporate employees are adults and they need mentorship not helicopter parents. As an example tell a JavaScript developer they can't use their favorite framework. Tell them they actually have to write original code and solve problems. Oh, the crying...

_yosefk 8y ago

If you work on/for a startup and that startup succeeds, it will more often than not have to grow. If you're unlike Paul Graham who sold his startup and then invested in countless others and made lots of money but did not keep working on the thing he'd built - meaning, if you're what he likes to call maker as opposed to primarily a money-maker - you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food. And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding.

lmm 8y ago
> you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food. I've grown attached to projects in small companies and large ones, sure. What you've written can be read as an explanation for why people continue to work at companies even as they grow larger and get worse, rather than any contradiction of what Graham said. > And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding. Really? I don't think I've experienced anything rewarding/inspiring being made by more than ten people; even in large companies, the most rewarding/inspiring projects I've worked on have been those that were worked on by a small, relatively isolated team. Scaling up may be necessary and/or lucrative, but I doubt it could ever be as rewarding as making the thing, and AIUI the economics research backs that up - productivity is concentrated in small companies, successful companies grow until they get too bloated to be successful rather than stable (because if you're successful, growing is the default path) rather than improving through growth.
- _yosefk 8y ago
  A group of 100 is 10 groups of 10. Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team. Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it? (Of course lots of them get paid to do this, but many are not.) It's not exactly easy calories for a caged lion, the way Graham describes a corporate job taken by recent college grads. Instead, people choose to work in these large groups because they want to make an impact. You can instead contribute to TinyCC or MenuetOS - smaller team, less impact. Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses? If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? I think that market realities point in the direction of there being economies of scale and diseconomies of scale, without a single one-size-fits-all procedure for determining the optimal firm size for any particular endeavor.

dazc 8y ago

Once I had a great job, I managed myself most of the time and was trusted to just 'get on with it'. Then the company got busier and started hiring more people who were less able to manage themselves. As a consequence, I acquired a manager who wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to be doing. This led to situations where he would need to do things that justified his existence, like phoning me every hour to ask 'how it was going', 'where was I, and so on... Needless to say, I started enjoying my job much less... Then, when it became obvious my new manager wasn't coping so well, they gave him an assistant. You can probably guess how that panned out?

vinceguidry 8y ago
> This led to situations where he would need to do things that justified his existence, like phoning me every hour to ask 'how it was going', 'where was I, and so on... You missed a great opportunity to manage upwards. Surely you have some meaningless menial tasks in your job that you hate to perform? Excellent delegation material! You know what they say, many hands make for lighter work. They hired him an assistant? Looks like you just acquired a whole department!
jon-wood 8y ago
This just sounds like you ended up with a bad manager, rather than a failure inherent to all management. A good manager would have recognised that you're pretty much capable of knowing where to focus your effort, and generally get that call right - given that they can be more or less hands off, but provide you with a screen from things that really shouldn't be getting near you in the first place, and a route to push things up the chain when needed without having to shepard them along.

exergy 8y ago

This article again. sigh What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all, coupled with a tone that deals only in absolutes. There is no space for doubt, for hesitancy, for understatement. It is grandiosity dialed up to 11 in a way I've seen precious few "essayists" do. Even that word grates me. Oh, no sir! Paul is above mere 'blogging'. He is an "essayist" because his blogposts feature more than 2500 words. Look at what he claims: > And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. > It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck. My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything approaching sensitivity. Here's Jeff Atwoods take on it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-narcissism/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-nar... It's an opinion I sympathise with a lot more than PG's. I work for a big company (CERN). Group of thousands upon thousands. It's wonderful here. I wouldn't trade it for the next "Uber of...". My 'boss' is just someone who has worked on my topic for a lot longer than me, and is therefore a veritable treasure chest of knowledge. I LOVE working for him because I learn a shitload on a weekly basis, and the projects that he is responsible for align with my interests. I LOVE working in my 'group of hundreds', because that group of hundreds can accomplish a lot more than a full-stack developer straight out of Stanford thinking he can disrupt everything just by ignoring zoning laws. I also imagine there are a significant portion of people working for places like NASA/ESA etc who share my view. Where does this jive with Mr Graham's World Of Absolutes? Further, even if we limit ourselves to the corporate world, 'groups of hundreds' can afford to do more than one guy. A large group can, for example, dedicate resources to lowering the environmental impact of the product chain, in a way that a three person startup couldn't. They can have customer service that a small startup just cannot match. Is all of that worthless? And if it isn't, just what is Graham getting at in this article? Is it limited to young graduates? Then why the far reaching claims and the excessive overreach? And if not, is he genuinely so delusional as to think he can speak for everyone? I will give another example, at the risk of outing myself, just because this article is still fucking grinding my gears. My mum is working on the Polio program. In a couple of years, they will have rid the world of this killer disease. Millions of lives saved. It's not necessarily the glorious work environment that gives Paul Graham a hardon. Doesn't mean it 'sucks'. Just means that most of the people working there are capable of understanding that there are some necessary evils involved in taking on such an enormous challenge. You need to talk to Politicians the world over. You need to coordinate the door to door vaccine distribution. You need to balance the books for millions and millions of dollars in funding. You need to set up secure enclaves for staff that are going into dangerous zones and risking their lives for the project. I would like to see some fucking bossless Ycombinator graduate try their hand at that.

jondubois 8y ago

I've been trying to escape having a corporate day job for 8 years now precisely because it doesn't feel natural; I constantly get the urge to escape and I change companies often. I hope that this kind of article doesn't promote the mindset that if you're not financially successful by the time you turn 30, then you're either lazy or unskilled (I.e. thinking that leaders are fundamentally different than employees). There are a lot of business leaders today who harbor significant contempt towards their own employees; you can see it by how they talk about their employees and how they interact with them. It might seem like some employees aren't ambitious, don't take initiative and don't want to step outside of their comfort zone but that's rarely true; most employees do want to take control of their lives and they devise plans to make it happen; but dumb luck is just a much more powerful force. You can't beat dumb luck.

rocannon 8y ago
Please do not be discouraged. You can't always beat dumb luck, but you can certainly fight it. Also, there's a saying: "you make your own luck". It sounds glib, but there's some truth to it.
rafiki6 8y ago
Why not start by becoming a consultant? I think that's always a good question to ask yourself. Consulting has many of the challenges you'd face running your own business, except the product you're selling is yourself.
- jondubois 8y ago
  I did do contracting in the past and I do consulting from time to time related to an open source project that I created but it's not enough to turn into a full time business yet.

hevi_jos 8y ago

I agree with this article, as I have experienced what is working for myself and working for others. On the other hand, people need other personalities to complement their personalities. Organizing this environment is not simple for most people, as it requires a complete different set of skills than most technical work. People will have to enter a company to get this environment, as it is already created for you. Usually not well created, but something is better than nothing. IMHO Paul Graham acquired these skills from his now wife, thanks to that they created YC and you have all this environment of mutual support, the "family", the "Church". It always surprising when you go to the US, how isolated most people is from each other. This makes PG advice extremely damaging for most people in the US. The technical people that will listen to it are already not very social. Without social support, you will perish. No matter how good you are, people are social creatures.

m0skit0 8y ago

Except that white flour or sugar are not bad for you physically. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-against-sugar/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-ag...

paulie_a 8y ago

There is a big difference between management and leadership. Regardless of the size of the team there will be managers. There will be a structure. whether it is a team of two or megacorp, what consistently lacks is genuine leadership.

GuB-42 8y ago

We aren't meant to have a boss. We also aren't meant to use computers, let alone build them. Big and complex organizations are required in order to build big and complex things. And it turns out that it works best by having bosses. Now, I work most of the time for large companies and what I notice is that you have much more freedom than you might think. But you have to work for it. You may not get to choose a framework, you may have to follow a process, but you still need to make decisions, even if they are on a small scale. You may be handed over procedures and recipes, don't follow them blindly, try to understand them and maybe improve on them. No matter where you are working, you are not a robot. You are the human, the problem solver, the decision maker, the repetitive tasks are for the computer. As a programmer, there is always a way to make a boring job more interesting in a way that benefits the company. And if your boss is competent, he will appreciate it. As for what a boss is, I always see my boss as a partner, not a "superior". My boss works for me, he looks at the big picture, meets with customers, and feeds me work. I work for my boss by doing the work he wants me to do.

xfitm3 8y ago
I generally agree with you. I would opine with we aren’t meant to have a single boss. If you own a business your customers are effectively your collective boss with a much more diverse set of satisfaction criteria. In my opinion this is a better way to love and plays into many of the points you raised.
phillc73 8y ago
> Big and complex organizations are required in order to build big and complex things. And it turns out that it works best by having bosses. Is that true? Having bosses has been proven as the best way to organise big and complex organisations? In a capitalist economy a hierarchical organisational structure is for sure the overwhelmingly most common structure, but there is an alternative; a flat non-hierarchical structure such as in a worker's co-operative.[1][2] I'd like to see a study comparing the two and drawing a conclusion as to which is best. [1] http://www.morningstarco.com/ http://www.morningstarco.com/ [2] http://www.enliveningedge.org/organizations/morning-stars-success-story-no-bosses-no-titles-no-structural-hierarchy/ http://www.enliveningedge.org/organizations/morning-stars-su...

NKCSS 8y ago

I love this quote: "Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem."

33a 8y ago

So.... Basically the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

yowlingcat 8y ago

I'm going to agree with other folks saying PG really took the L on this piece. That "Don't talk to corp dev" piece is a far more quality piece than this one, which is really a stretch. As it turns out, if you're at the right company, even if you prefer small firms, you'll probably find a lot to learn and a good reason to stay at a larger company. And if you're at a small firm, you can really be gambling on your entire career. PG, of course, never mentions this in his piece, or the consideration that so many startups fail. How many bush tailed young engineers have gone to work at a startup somewhere early in their career and had it go pear shaped? Was this kind of inspiration porn to blame? Of course, it's 10 years on from this piece, and we're seeing lots of correction to this. The youth aren't quite so naive these days. They don't buy this kind of drivel. They want a real job with real benefits, room to grow, mentorship, a healthy org, userbase growth, an interesting roadmap -- they want a career. They're not going to settle for a huckster selling them a get rich quick scheme. PG gets dangerously close to that in several articles. EDIT: I'm realizing this sounds a little bit more bitter and polemical than I'd like. Let me submit for reference that this view is very, very much colored by my own experiences -- right out of college, I had several early stage startups I worked at and/or co-founded go sideways in manners that I had zero preparation for or help extricating myself from. I found myself wishing at that stage that I had worked at either more established companies, whether they be post series A startups or BigCos. I went on to do just that, but had already burned through 3 years of a spotty resumé, low salary, emotional burnout and having to develop an unnecessarily thick hide to weather all that than I wished. I'm seeing colleagues of mine who took this route out of college, and they seem so much further ahead and well-balanced than I was at their age. It makes me think that in hindsight, it all seems so unnecessary -- had I worked at more stable companies in that period, wouldn't I be three years ahead? Would I have been a more polished and developed professional just as they are now? It's easy to discount the necessity of good mentorship early in your career, but it's so crucial. That mentorship is what gives you the tools to learn how to learn and how to peacefully co-exist with others -- if you don't get that the right way, there's a lot of painful and wasteful unlearning and relearning that must be done. I certainly found myself doing more of that than I would have liked. For all intents and purposes, there's no guarantee (just a high probability financially) that I would've been further ahead if I started my career off at a big co. But life doesn't work like that. I would have certainly been more risk-averse, and a lot less capable of, erm, smashing through my problems (when I need to) as I am today. I guess that even so, I would still trade some of that off for a more stable early career that let me get to a place of security and learning right out of college.

fallingfrog 8y ago

You weren’t, but here’s the reason you do: In an organization where everyone is equal, adding a new person to the org doesn’t benefit the people who are already in it. Let’s say you have a coop bagel shop- is there any particular reason to want to cut your own paychecks until you have saved up enough to open another one? Or let’s say you live in an egalitarian, peaceful country. Is there any reason to want to invade your neighbors and annex territory? No. But, if you put one person in charge, then suddenly you have a person in a position of authority with a vested interest in expanding the franchise, since he gets to skim off the labor of everyone underneath him. In a stroke, you’ve invented empire, war, and capitalism. Come back in a hundred years and the organizations that expanded the most are also the most heirarchical. I don’t think this is a good thing, by the way, just a historical factor to be aware of.

donaldknuth123 8y ago
There's a fairly obvious reason to expand your corporation or territory. To increase the resources available to your people. Through invasion and annexation you can increase the average amount of resources available to your people if you invade a place with a very high concentration of them. you don't need a hierarchy to justify this. Your argument doesn't make much sense.
cubano 8y ago
So how do you explain the exact opposite actually working in the wild? Over the past couple hundred years, almost all full communist/socialist governments have failed, while market-based capitalistic ones have pulled billions out of abject poverty.
neil_s 8y ago
Huh? If the additional person can bring more value to the cooperative than they consume (which you would generally hope to be true for most hires), then it will be to your benefit. Yes, more slices need to be cut, but the cake is bigger. For example, a marketing expert that can increase customers for the single bagel shop by 10%, but their salary only costs 1%.
- 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago

There is a huge contradiction in this essay. If everybody were to follow the mantra and 'fire their boss' then who will those scrappy starter-uppers hire? Some people will have a boss, some people won't and that's all dependent on personal risk evaluation. The 'gig' economy is where really nobody has a boss, the libertarian wet dream where everybody sells their body as a service to be discarded on a moments notice. Having a boss translates into access to social security, welfare, healthcare and other safety nets in many places in the world, and entrepreneurs usually pay in to such schemes but will not be in a position to apply for help if it should come to that.

jannes 8y ago
I think the essay doesn't make the case for everyone to 'fire their boss' rather than to limit organisation size to about 8 people and to eliminate hierarchies.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  How is that working out for Stripe, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Uber and Apple?

darkerside 8y ago

Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his thinking, but this article has not aged well. Or perhaps my understanding of organizations has simply matured. I think the biggest problem, for which this article was a lagging indicator, with working for large companies pre-2008 was that they hadn't really figured out how to work with technology yet. Disclaimer, I've never worked for a truly huge firm, but I get the sense folks are getting closer and closer to figuring it out. We've learned to build and support disruptive units inside of larger ones, managers are more often technically skilled and able to properly support their employees, and we've adopted more agile ways of writing software. Or maybe I'm just lucky to work where I do!

golemotron 8y ago
> Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his thinking Does Paul Graham have cooties? What happened?

imgabe 8y ago

People have always read way too much into this essay instead of looking at it for what it is: marketing material for Y Combinator. It doesn't speak to you? Ok. That's fine. You aren't the target audience. Obviously there have always been millions upon millions of people who live perfectly happy, productive, successful lives working for large organizations. However, some subset of people have always felt dissatisfied in this arrangement. For some of those, this essay might be the spark they need to look around and find something that suits them better (and maybe Y Combinator can fund them.) I'm feeling old that the average HN reader anymore doesn't seem to know who Paul Graham is.

paulcole 8y ago
Yeah pretty obviously pandering to the desired audience: > There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically. Could almost hear all the heads nodding in agreement. If only he'd mentioned intermittent fasting or the fact that the hiring process for developers is broken...
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  I wonder if pg ever wrote something along the lines of that old pinnacle of masturbatory pandering: "The first differentiator of an elite developer is to read industry blogs, which you're already doing, so congratulations!" I feel like I've read it before from him but I'm having trouble remembering now 10 years later.
- edanm 8y ago
  FYI, this was written in 2008, before IF became a thing.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Back then we just called it anorexia. Really shows what marketing can do.
    - 8y ago

rafiki6 8y ago

My fundamental issue with this viewpoint is that it takes away the inherent entrepreneurship that exists in an employee/employer business relationship. Whether I'm on a team of 10 in an organization of a 100 or a team of 100 in an organization of 10,000, the reality is I still have much work to do to be valuable. I'd argue that if you are truly ambitious and hardworking, making your way up a corporate ladder can be just as challenging, risky and rewarding as being a startup founder. It requires time, dedication, sacrifice, risk-taking and developing skills that most people who chose programming as a career seem to forget about. People who program shouldn't box themselves into being code monkeys. I still need to pitch ideas at my corporate job to ensure they are valuable. I still need to use other people's code as any person building a shiny web app will do with open source projects and frameworks. I still need to manage finances, ask for raises, manage budgets. I still need to deal with HR, accounting, sales, product management, project management, marketing etc. At the end of the day a truly valuable "employee" is one who's really figured out the system and learned to sell themselves within it. As a startup founder you are still beholden to many people much in the same way as an employee who's working up the ranks. As a founder you will still deal with unproductive slow people. You will deal with aggressive investors, finicky customers etc. I think a corporate job is what you make of it. It's safer in some cases sure, although since we work in an at-will employment world, your never fully safe. But if you really want to grow, you need to take risks and try things and learn all the same skills an entrepreneur would need to.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

This post parallels Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial society and its future"

iblaine 8y ago

TL;DR; Successful guy visits Africa, sees animals in the wild instead of Zoo's, creates clickbait article to imply capitalism is a zoo and people do not belong in zoo's. The premise of this argument is that people do not belong in large groups. Ironically that is what we all try to do. Over time, people organize so they can accomplish greater things as a whole rather than individuals. The end of the article goes on to say, "Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller." I can't decide if this article attempting to be advice or a sales pitch for Y Combinator.

frogpelt 8y ago

Two thoughts: pg says we are designed but then in the notes he says "by evolution." Since evolution is changing to fit and survive your environment, perhaps humans working in groups is better for their survival. Also, specialization of labor has created this concept. Humans used to provide their own food, shelter and transportation that's all they needed to do. But when one person specializes in transportation, one in farming or hunting, and one in building shelters things start to change. And we end up with companies that only build pipe fittings.

draw_down 8y ago

Everyone who isn't independently wealthy has a boss.

agumonkey 8y ago

Brings me memories about stories at PARC, there were often manager-free path between groups. This led to unleashed creativity: want something ? ask the dude that know about something, done.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

The ability to organize into large groups is one of the greatest social innovations in history, and is a fundamental aspect of civil society. I worked at a company that had an 'individual' service, and a 'business' service.In Spain, Italy and Greece and S. America - our customers were 'individuals'. In Germany, France and UK, they were 'business' accounts. Those economies with more 'business' accounts have somewhat more advanced industrial basis than those with 'individual' accounts. There are many things that can only be developed at scale, and certain kinds of specialization that only become available at scale. Only a company with X people can start to invest in Y kinds of things, which is a huge part of their competitive advantage. Yes, big cos are seemingly more inefficient at the individual level, but their scale actually might imply greater efficiency. Put another way - someone at only 50% individual efficiency at a big corp, may be 'creating more value' than otherwise.

queryly 8y ago

I am not sure if it is because I am getting old, but have found Paul's old writing more resonating than ever.

matfil 8y ago
Likewise. His more programming-centric writing, in particular, is a breath of fresh air relative to the current "teams, tests, and tickets" dogma. Personal favourite: http://paulgraham.com/head.html http://paulgraham.com/head.html

mempko 8y ago

> to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do. If you look at truly revolutionary making environments like Xerox Parc, they are like this, no bosses and small groups. However, what you didn't see in Xerox Parc is a market economy. Why? Because competition destroys invention. Humans are not meant to compete with each other. Markets are another artificial environment, but of course, Paul doesn't see that because he is the fish in the fishbowl.

noir_lord 8y ago

The legacy code but resonates, I'm often stuck doing things in an ugly way or constrained because I have to work around the continual tire fire I inherited. On the flip side I'm one of those weirdos who likes working on legacy code as long as I have the freedom to improve it.

setgree 8y ago

> I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. I this this is a good analogy but I don't draw the same conclusion Paul does. I trained for a marathon last summer, and it sucked. Long distance running and racing has been associated with diminished lifespans [0], organ damage [1], weakened immune system [2], and lowered sex drive [3]. This research isn't conclusive by any means, but it's a lot easier to explain if you believe in an upside-down U-shaped relationship between exercise and well-being than a monotonic relationship. (I personally found that my sweet spot was under 100 km/week, any more than that and I got sick and tired and felt beat-down.) Same with being a CEO. It's great to be your own boss. It's generally hard on your body, soul, and relationships to work 100 hours a week. If your ambition is to have a 5k/month side project and live on that, that's probably good for your health. If it's to make and sell a billion dollar company, that's probably not. That's not to say that _working_ at a startup isn't great. I just wouldn't want to start one. And unless you do, you're probably going to have a boss. [0] https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196(15)00621-7/fulltext https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196(... [1] https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386(17)30536-X/fulltext https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386(17)30536-X/fulltext [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622 [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-workouts/years-of-intense-exercise-tied-to-dip-in-male-libido-idUSKBN16O1Y8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-workout...