17 ms·

You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

202 points by alexellisuk 6y ago

ginko 6y ago
Says the guy that profits from people starting their own company.
- tux1968 6y ago
  PG is a big boy and can defend himself from deserved criticism, but this is just a silly characterization. He profits from his contribution in helping people start their own companies.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    So, as OP said: he profits from people starting their own companies. The pedantic semantic distinction is irrelevant.
    - tux1968 6y ago
      No it's really not irrelevant. The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy. PG earns his profit from investment and action, not exploitation or being anyone's "boss".
      - cambalache 6y ago
        > No it's really not irrelevant. It is, you can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest. > The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy. In no part of OP post is implied that PG is "undeserved" of his earnings from those companies. If you invest in oil companies or mining companies you absolutely deserve all the money that is legally yours, you are ALSO helping to destroy the environment. There is no contradiction at all.
        deleted 6y ago
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        isoskeles 6y ago
        > It is, you can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest. Actually, no, it's not. You can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest.
      - geofft 6y ago
        No one said anything about exploitation, but he absolutely earns a profit from people who choose to not be in a traditional boss-employee relationship. That's a statement of fact, and that colors the argument he's making. I don't know what you mean by putting "boss" in quotation marks, but at the big company (1000+ engineers) I work for, my direct manager does not "boss me around" (if that's the sense you meant it), and the four more levels of management above him certainly don't. I have the freedom to propose and pursue new ideas, I'm regularly learning new things, and I set my own goals - with active feedback and input from my manager as to whether they make sense and what I should prioritize. I'd expect no more and no less from the relationship between a startup-accelerator participant and a seed investor. And in both cases, the boss/investor profits from the employee/founder doing good work. What's different is the risk model. If my ideas don't pan out, my management (well, my employer as a whole, but my management is accountable for how they choose to use headcount and salary budget) is still on the hook for paying me big-tech wages, until they decide my ideas are so bad that it's not worth keeping me employed. If the founder's ideas don't pan out, pg is only out a couple thousand dollars. (At the time, YC was paying $17K.) So, yes, pg earns his profit from investment and action, and that's precisely what's being pointed out here as a potential conflict of interest. (If pg's actual point, reading the article more closely, is "Google's organizational structure does not give you that freedom and will not help you grow as an engineer," well, that's one of the many reasons I declined a Google offer. But Google is not every big engineering firm.)
booleandilemma 6y ago
Aren’t humans naturally hierarchical? If alien biologists were studying humans, I think that’s what they would conclude. Hermits exist, of course, but most humans look down on them and consider them strange.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  Yeah, a reason founders could be seen as happier in this regard could be that they are climbing the hierarchy while employed ones are set in place but that doesn't mean hierarchical structure is unnatural, I find authority almost instinctual.
- cambalache 6y ago
  Define naturally I would argue the opposite. How long do you want to establish human history? Let's say 300k years, for more than 90% of that time the small hunter-gatherer groups were in the opposite extreme from the giant pyramidal institutions of modern day.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - arthurofbabylon 6y ago
    That is increasingly suggested to be incorrect by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists focused on human development. It’s now understood that prestige and hierarchy played a fundamental role in shaping the mechanics of human culture, starting at the beginning of the distinguishing of Homo sapiens. A mind-blowing book on the subject I recommend: “The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter” by Joseph Henrich.
    - cambalache 6y ago
      > It’s now understood that prestige and hierarchy played a fundamental role in shaping the mechanics of human culture, starting at the beginning of the distinguishing of Homo sapiens. This is too vague and general too have any value. Specially considering that anything older than the iron age is subjected to pure speculation.
kelembu 6y ago
damn, thanks for this, amazing piece!
Eduardo3rd 6y ago
This was written back when YC was a few companies per batch and all of the biggest successes were yet to materialize. Today? Stripe: 2,500+, AirBnB: 6,300+, Dropbox: 2,300+ I wonder if this stance changed a dozen years later now that there are several multi-thousand person organizations in the YC network. Does PG think differently today after seeing several examples of large companies run by people he knows personally, or would he tell a talented hacker not to work at Stripe because it is too big?
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  It’s the same with the article “Great Hackers” and Graham’s previous impassioned advocacy of private offices for every knowledge worker, even in dense urban centers. It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this. Instead he and other “thought leaders” around VC want to be viewed as progressive, forward-thinking people with an advocacy to avoid commodity thinking towards workers & their lives and workspaces. But it’s all lip service - bluster so Graham can sound like he’s the good guy but actually just function as the same exploitative commodity thinking old boys club kind of investor privately. All the PR credit without actually putting his money where his mouth is.
  - tomnipotent 6y ago
    pg has never actually run a large workforce, so I take all of his advice on this subject with a (huge) grain of salt.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      It’s interesting to see it in contrast to Joel Spolsky, who actually did put his money where his mouth is and give employees private offices, even in Manhattan, and has continued doubling down on private offices as the right strategy year after year.
  - ptero 6y ago
    > It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this. That is a strange sentiment, sorry. PG is not some omnipotent being that can "ensure" anything for the companies he originally helped launch. His "enforcement" options are probably minimal, based on his (by now many times diluted) ownership. The best he can do is advocate, leveraging a lot of respect he still commands in the startup community. And this is what he is doing there. My 2c.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
The article sounds pretty good but usually startup people who think they don’t need a boss will soon have to be the boss of many in order to achieve their hyper growth goals. It’s not like ycombinator supports companies that are small and stay small. They want companies to turn into sizable corporations with a lot of people working for the big bosses and investors. I wish there was a trend towards very small companies where every employee can own a significant part and be part of decisions. Ycombinator doesn’t support that model.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Is it a good model though to move the world forward? If I just look at Tesla's battery day, the amount of effort that's needed to stop air pollution & CO2 emissions is huge, and it looks like vertical integration is winning, as car companies that depend on other companies to make those risks while depending on eachother are failing to scale.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    That effort is huge because the “other side” accelerating these effects is also huge and and lead by big centralized companies. I tend to think that if these companies didn’t have as much power they couldn’t have bent the rules in their favor that much. So, shall we accept there will always be unstoppable big companies, and counter them with other big companies, kaiju movie style ? Or try to break them out and/or counter their effect through more decentralized efforts ? In the long run the second option seems more viable to me.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > I wish there was a trend towards very small companies where every employee can own a significant part and be part of decisions. There is. Look at the growing trend of indie hacking and the growing number of indie vc funds that specifically look for small companies planning to stay small-ish.
  - Errsher 6y ago
    Do you have any links for more info?
SeanLuke 6y ago
Humans, and their ancestors, have had one-level bosses for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans have had multilevel bosses for at least tens of thousands of years. In what universe are bosses "unnatural?"
- nprz 6y ago
  From the essay: > A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    How does he know how those prehistoric groups worked? The boss report relationship is more child parent like in a hunter gatherer context I guess. Obvously it just all guessing how stone age groups worked, but the biggest difference has to be that there were no formal enforced hierarchies. Maybe there was one elder and a shaman?
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      it seems to make sense. if you're the leader of a ten person group and you push enough of them to their limit, it's not that hard for them to replace you. if you're the leader of a ten person group, but also have the support of a thousand person hierarchy, your followers can't easily get away with replacing you.
dadoge 6y ago
Startups have to, generally, become pretty large in size. So the message seems to be: better to be on top of the pyramid in the early days than in the middle of some large pyramid. Well duh, but that’s not scalable by design. Only so few people can be on top.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > that’s not scalable by design. Only so few people can be on top [of the pyramid] Unless we redesign the nature of work and organisation. It's true only a few people can be top of the pyramid for most of their career. But in principle, everyone could be on top of a large pyramid for some of their career. It might be a good learning experience.
deleted 6y ago
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jariel 6y ago
"The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups." Unfortunately it's a foundational artifact in how we create and maintain civil culture.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
  It may be how governments are organized. But there is absolutely no need to organize companies this way. Check out anarcho-syndicalism.
  - jariel 6y ago
    'Anarcho-Syndicats' essentially do not exist in any material practicality. Perhaps in niches. You're not going to make an Airbus or 747 in such a formation. You want to know the real difference between 'poor' and 'rich' Europe? 'Rich Europe' aka UK, Germany, Netherlands etc. have significantly greater population working in companies of large size. Spain in particular, more people work in 'mom and pop' shops where they don't have the scale to tackle bigger problems. There's a lot of variation, but 'having a boss' is inevitable when it comes to coordinating large groups.
Terretta 6y ago
”... a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.” Ok, but perhaps not “no” structure. A market has structure... ”That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it.” We are exploring this for the Americas region of a global bank, which has us seeking engineers who have worked in autonomous teams but would be interested in helping with this shift within an enterprise — to help ship but also help socialize what it means to have initiative and be an owner.
glutamate 6y ago
This belongs on twitter.com/LeftAccidental
luismedel 6y ago
I love this essay so much I translated it to spanish some years ago (https://jcaramuel.es/jefe.html https://jcaramuel.es/jefe.html) I like to go beyond the superficial "be your own boss". After all, a world full of "own-bosses" is not possible. IMHO, the big lecture here is that big, fat hierarchies are poisonous and it's better for your happiness to search some small sized group to be on.
marketingPro 6y ago
I know his comments on food are a metaphor, but when it's blatantly incorrect, I couldn't make it to his main point. On a separate point, I highly encourage everyone to understand the scientific method. There are too many Engineers and programmers that can do labor, but don't ask about data, evidence, or methodology. Rather accepting Authority as fact.
- nocman 6y ago
  > I know his comments on food are a metaphor, but when it's blatantly incorrect, I couldn't make it to his main point. This comment would have a lot more "punch" if you explained how it was "blatantly incorrect". I'm not arguing for or against, I would simply like to hear the discussion.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    "If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. "Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley. If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale. Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't. Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth spending a lot to market it." All of this is false. Junk food isn't cheap calorie per dollar or various nutrients per dollar (source- efficiency is everything) further, fresh vegetables are the cheapest sources of nutrition. And humans are able to eat the foods mentioned and turn into energy through various metabolic processes. The author seems to parrot "common" knowledge, but it's not factual by any stretch. (Ok maybe trans fats, but those are borderline illegal)
jehna1 6y ago
Currently working as a developer for a company that organizes itself in small groups without bosses and I must say I could not think about going to work for a company where I would have a boss.
- d_watt 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you manage under performance in that setting?
  - jehna1 6y ago
    Team always shares the responsibility. We do a ton of work to establish trust inside a team so you would share things that are affecting your work instead of trying to hide them so you don't get sacked in performance review. We also make it very easy to change teams so everyone would find the best environment for themselves.
leto_ii 6y ago
It's not the first time I get an almost left-libertarian vibe from Paul Graham's writing. As before, I feel he almost nails it, but not quite. I do think that a world of small companies populated by intrinsically motivated people who are mostly equals would be much better than what we currently have. However, we have to acknowledge that the way the economic game is set up, this kind of endeavour is disincentivized. Neo-liberal capitalism favours concentration of power, mega-corporations with kill-zones around them and with huge lobbying power. Outside finding highly specialised niches, I think tech companies can find it hard to stay both successful and small. The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach is to fund lots of companies hoping that a few will make it big and accepting that most would fail. This is in complete contradiction with the idea of small, non-hierarchical enterprises.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach is to fund lots of companies hoping that a few will make it big and accepting that most would fail. This is in complete contradiction with the idea of small, non-hierarchical enterprises. The VC funding model uses the expectation that a few will make it big and the others will fail or be let go. However, they do spread out funding among many initially smaller companies, and to some extent grant a lot of autonomy to each company to decide for itself what to do with the money, including spend it poorly. Because VCs already expect many to fail, they are not panicked about it. I think that's relatively non-hierarchical, compared with the alternative where a big investor takes over a company and dictates how to run it. So it's not clear to me whether VCs are a cause of hierarchy overall when considering all companies in the world, or if they are merely incentivising growth in some, while providing more flexibility to others to do their own thing than if modern VC did not exist.
skrebbel 6y ago
Is having a board of directors full of VC big shots to answer to that different from having a boss? I listened to a Changelog podcast the other day featuring Sytse Sijbrandij (GitLab CEO) and he mentioned having to run stuff by his board and I was like woa, even someone as obviously self-made as @sytse has a boss. I'm starting to think that only by bootstrapping (or taking very little investment, at least) you really do work without a boss. Not sure if the YC path that pg promotes in this article fits that. (I'm thinking about this a lot lately because my company is currently at this crossroads. We raised a little, turned that into profitable growth, but we could raise more to grow faster.) EDIT: meta-level comment: it's kind of weird how we managed to create a world where nearly everybody has a boss. CEOs answer to the board, who answer to shareholders, who work at investment funds that have bosses and shareholders and LPs of their own, and down the rabbit hole it goes. I wonder if there's any general way out of this, different from "bootstrap a SaaS" which is a little specific to be good general advice.
- asperous 6y ago
  Even if you are totally self funded you still are accountable to your customers. For software companies this might not be so bad, but many small business owners will tell you they make extremely demanding bosses
  - sytse 6y ago
    And you are accountable to your employees. Take the board I have for example. It is a relief to know that if I’m not longer the right person they will replace me. If you are bootstrapped with 1000+ employees a board might be something you want even if you don’t need to do it from an ownership perspective.
    - sullyj3 6y ago
      I mean, at a certain point you're asking for ultimate power over everything and instead of attempting to become autonomous you find yourself attempting to become a supervillain
ThePhysicist 6y ago
I like most of PGs writing but being a smart and successful founder/investor doesn't automatically make you a proficient anthropologist. Arguing that you shouldn't work for large FAANG style companies because our early hominid ancestors hunted only in small groups is just comical. If you're really interested in reading about human evolution I recommend reading Robin Dunbars' work, who's an actual anthropologist.
- internet_user 6y ago
  What does Dunbar say about optimal work arrangements?
- calmworm 6y ago
  I don’t know that it’s comical, nor was the article really about human evolution. And there are other studies and evidence not based on early hominids showing that there is an upper limit on effectiveness dependent on group size.
- maxlamb 6y ago
  If you look at hunter gather societies, I don't see how PG's arguments are comical. They are by and large egalitarian and up until about 8k years ago almost all humans were part of small, egalitarian groups (i.e. hunter gatherer tribes), so our brains are evolved for that environment instead of being part of a multi-thousand people highly hierarchical organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_economic_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco... .
  - AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
    I mean, evolution hasn't stopped since the dawn of civilization.
o_class_star 6y ago
Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. 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. This is the part I agree with most. In your 30s, you start to see a bifurcation whereby the people who take the corporate grind seriously go into cognitive atrophy, while those who have a fuck-it attitude keep getting smarter but become less employable (due to age and their shitty job histories). You do turn into a moron if you buy into whatever role the corporates are willing to give you. The more you believe in it, the faster you lose intelligence. It's probably optimal to be able to pretend you buy into corporate, while not actually investing yourself in it at all, but most nerds aren't very good at this code-switching. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for. I thought it was lobsters the libertarians were all on about. Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people. Corporate is corporate. It's all trash. It shouldn't exist. Capitalism is a dinosaur. That said, it's usually better to work for a large company than a small one. In a big company, you can move around. There's more diversity of work, and there's more organizational experience with outlier talent. (That doesn't mean you'll be recognized as outlier talent. If you work at Google and have a 160 IQ but mediocre paperwork, you'll probably just get a regular assignment.) At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow except by becoming a manager. Which means it's not really any different from the old corporate grind-- it just has worse benefits and more ways to fall between the cracks (and that's by design).
- jlokier 6y ago
  > At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow This is kind of the opposite of what I've seen reported around here. Small startups, they say, are exactly where you should work for a while in order to grow and develop a lot of new skills, which are then valuable elsewhere. Meanwhile a number of people at large companies report being bored at work.
bosswipe 6y ago
The most autonomy I've experienced at a big company, and the best work I've done, is when a small cross-functional team is told "go build this" and then left alone. The small team is allowed to come up with their own processes and management is only used for consultation on how to remove external obstacles. Many companies know this is highly effective because they'll set up such teams when a very important initiative comes up.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
  Are these "very important initiatives" just a codeword for "Management doesn't know enough about what or how to interfere"?
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  "Many companies know this is highly effective because they'll set up such teams when a very important initiative comes up." I have been on a few such teams. The funny thing is that after the project has finished management will usually pad themselves on the shoulders, talk about the value of focused teams and immediately disband the team and go back to micromanagement mode.
DenisM 6y ago
It is my observation that most people who object to having a boss in reality only object to having a bad or incompetent boss, and would happily follow someone who is head and shoulder above them. The youthful rebellion is a part of the process of finding a worthy boss, or becoming one in the process if all else fails. When an industry expands quickly more people have to rise to the challenge of becoming new good bosses because the demand for good bosses outstrips existing supply. In addition, old good bosses retire rich mid-career, depleting the stock. In this situation you may find yourself thinking there are no good bosses at all, and you're the next King Arthur. Which you might be - someone has to be. When an industry grows slowly the stream of retiring good bosses is matched by the ascenders, maintaining an environment saturated in good bosses. When an industry stagnates the good bosses retire and their places are taken by the peace-time bosses, people who learned to follow in footsteps of the elders but never learned why. They will mostly be bad bosses due to lack of experience in making errors and for lack of selection pressure that would push them against their own errors to select the best.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I think the sentiment of "better boss" only works for middle management. My boss can be as good as he wants at management, but irregardless of his past, he is never going to get up to date practice in the details of what I do. So in what sense would he be better? For him to be up to date, I am being micromanaged or I am not actually working.
- aripickar 6y ago
  I’ll push back on that. I currently work as an SDE at a FAANG company known for being pretty demanding. My boss is phenomenal, pretty much everything you could ask for. Shielding us from other teams requesting stuff in an unreasonable time frame, not putting too much pressure to get things done in an unreasonable way, setting us up with mentors in different areas, building out explicit plans to grow to the next level, helping people plan breaks in the day to mentally recoup, the whole nine yards. Despite all that, I still am looking to leave and start my own thing. And it’s mainly because that “I want to be my own boss mentality”. I don’t think that I’m alone in that.
koluna 6y ago
Wow. I’ve known pg to sometimes make empty statements, but this one takes the cake. Read: guy with immense privilege tells others not to work for others. This doesn’t even begin to account for the risk that comes with startups that some people cannot take. When you make $7/hr and do a Bootcamp, and now can be employed by Google, you’re not going to abandon that for a tiiiiiiny possibility to build a successful startup just because “you weren’t meant to have a boss”.
- nezaj 6y ago
  Curious, is it possible to work at Google for a few years, save some money, build a bigger network, get inspired, and do your own thing? Perhaps one started off making $7/hr, but that's just where one was at that point in time. At a later time both skills and safety net will increase. At that point quitting Google is still a risk, but circumstances are much different now. Transitioning into software is already a leap, but if one has already done that and has the skills/safety-net/desire to be their own boss -- why not take the next leap?
  - deckard1 6y ago
    You're asking whether a person making $400k+ a year, even in a place like SV, with a network of other engineers also making $400k+ a year could branch out and start their own software business that requires almost $0 overhead because, you know, it's software. Gee, I don't know. I sometimes wonder if people on HN even know what privilege is or how they sound to the entire rest of the world. You think it's typical that people making $7/hr just happen to land a job at Google?
    - nezaj 6y ago
      FWIW I was replying to the GP's comment "When you make $7/hr and do a Bootcamp, and now can be employed by Google"
  - koluna 6y ago
    I mean, sure, but then not everyone ends up at Google.
wins32767 6y ago
The team has only one person worth of freedom bit could only be written by someone who doesn't understand big companies. When I was at Oracle, the majority of the constraints on me and my team came from a differing risk profile of the company. In a stand alone company with basically no customers, e.g. a small startup, a critical security issue isn't something to worry much about; you have no customers, reputation or revenue to lose. At a company that tries to brand on security with millions upon millions of existing revenues, a PHI leak could cause millions in damages. Similarly, I had to deal with arms control paperwork every release since we shipped internationally with encryption turned on by default. Again, not a number of employees problem but a high company profile problem.
nendroid 6y ago
>In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to. People aren't designed to be programming either. People aren't designed to be working for startups. People are designed for a hunter and gather lifestyle.
wuwuno 6y ago
I read that article 3 times and I'm still not sure exactly what the point was. It was a just a rambling jumble of disconnected thoughts. So a lion in a cage is equivalent to a human working for a boss? Yeah, OK. I've been at 5 startups and 3 very large companies. I've had more freedom at the large companies, granted I was running sub-divisions at the big companies, but I still had more freedom. I'm currently at a startup and between the CEO, the Chairman, and the other BOD members I feel like I'm in a cage wearing a tracking device, even though I'm in a cage. It's Saturday and I'm taking a break from working to browse through HN, full day today, full day tomorrow, wash, rinse, repeat, same as it's been for the last 2 years. I'm so glad I'm at a startup so that I can work like I'm meant to work.
mempko 6y ago
Adam Smith understood this. In Wealth of Nations.He said division of labour makes people as stupid as creatures can be. In the beginning of the industrial revolution, people called jobs Wage Slavery.Somehow we stopped talking about how bad jobs are for us.
amoorthy 6y ago
PG's main point is a good one, though perhaps obscured by a few cherry picked observations. Autonomy allows for faster learning. Learning brings happiness. Autonomy is easier to find in small group settings. The push-back that this is a privileged position is interesting. Initially I thought so but maybe that's too harsh. Controlling your expenses and keeping it to a bare minimum would allow a lot more people to pursue such autonomy than they might realize. I don't think it's the majority of people given wealth inequality but more than people might guess. The comparison to wild animals is incomplete and cherry picked. There are animal populations that seem to happily exist in larger communities than what PG mentions. But, as I learned from one of his better essays [1], let's focus on the main point. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
mathgladiator 6y ago
I've thought about this recently, and I think one that we have blurred is the difference between a leader and a boss. As a human, you were meant to have a leader. Your first leader (hopefully) are your parents since you don't emerge with a complete understanding of things, and then you pick up a series of teachers/mentors through-out life. The thing that fucks everyone up is power. Power will corrupt a teacher. Power corrupts managers. Power corrupts owners. The question is how to mitigate the corruption of power. A boss is a corrupt leader in my opinion, and I agree that we shouldn't have one.
- afarrell 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that what power really does is either: 1. Reveal the already-corrupt 2. Impose stress and poorly-assigned responsibilities that lead people to unhealthy actions.
sporkologist 6y ago
Why work for a boss 8 hours a day, when you can work for yourself for 16 hours a day?
zer0sand0nes 6y ago
Great read. Loved it.
deleted 6y ago
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the_greyd 6y ago
Drawing a parallel to Nassim Taleb's "don't hide the risk" (or atleast what I understood from his talks), working for a big corp hides risk (and reward). If you or the team do a shitty job, the feedback and the results are often not immediate, and absorbed by the bigness of the corp. I have seen fair share of disinterest and mediocrity in my place of work and I think it's a leadership problem partly, where they've pretty much failed to motivate or incentivize people to improve/move around the company and you have people working for years in the same role and project doing the same work, creating very little new value. Also great point that it might be a characteristic of somebody choosing to work for a big corp vs something else. In today's climate that seems a very safe decision for a new grad. Ultimately it's a job that you do to earn money, it's naive to think everybody wants the same thing from their job.
8bitsrule 6y ago
"Having a job is not an ideal. In fact, having a job is a severe attack on human rights and human dignity.... Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most of your waking life. An autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you that Stalin never dreamt of...." - Chomsky (recent) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lcDT_-3v2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lcDT_-3v2k (31:40)
deleted 6y ago
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iamjohnsears 6y ago
I feel like Amazon has most successfully fought this consequence of scale.
perilunar 6y ago
> Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. ... the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do. No need to imagine it — Ricardo Semler was already talking about and doing this in the 1990s. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

202 points by alexellisuk 6y ago

ginko 6y ago

Says the guy that profits from people starting their own company.

tux1968 6y ago
PG is a big boy and can defend himself from deserved criticism, but this is just a silly characterization. He profits from his contribution in helping people start their own companies.
- cambalache 6y ago
  So, as OP said: he profits from people starting their own companies. The pedantic semantic distinction is irrelevant.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    No it's really not irrelevant. The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy. PG earns his profit from investment and action, not exploitation or being anyone's "boss".
    - cambalache 6y ago
      > No it's really not irrelevant. It is, you can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest. > The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy. In no part of OP post is implied that PG is "undeserved" of his earnings from those companies. If you invest in oil companies or mining companies you absolutely deserve all the money that is legally yours, you are ALSO helping to destroy the environment. There is no contradiction at all.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - isoskeles 6y ago
        > It is, you can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest. Actually, no, it's not. You can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest.
    - geofft 6y ago
      No one said anything about exploitation, but he absolutely earns a profit from people who choose to not be in a traditional boss-employee relationship. That's a statement of fact, and that colors the argument he's making. I don't know what you mean by putting "boss" in quotation marks, but at the big company (1000+ engineers) I work for, my direct manager does not "boss me around" (if that's the sense you meant it), and the four more levels of management above him certainly don't. I have the freedom to propose and pursue new ideas, I'm regularly learning new things, and I set my own goals - with active feedback and input from my manager as to whether they make sense and what I should prioritize. I'd expect no more and no less from the relationship between a startup-accelerator participant and a seed investor. And in both cases, the boss/investor profits from the employee/founder doing good work. What's different is the risk model. If my ideas don't pan out, my management (well, my employer as a whole, but my management is accountable for how they choose to use headcount and salary budget) is still on the hook for paying me big-tech wages, until they decide my ideas are so bad that it's not worth keeping me employed. If the founder's ideas don't pan out, pg is only out a couple thousand dollars. (At the time, YC was paying $17K.) So, yes, pg earns his profit from investment and action, and that's precisely what's being pointed out here as a potential conflict of interest. (If pg's actual point, reading the article more closely, is "Google's organizational structure does not give you that freedom and will not help you grow as an engineer," well, that's one of the many reasons I declined a Google offer. But Google is not every big engineering firm.)

booleandilemma 6y ago

Aren’t humans naturally hierarchical? If alien biologists were studying humans, I think that’s what they would conclude. Hermits exist, of course, but most humans look down on them and consider them strange.

reader_mode 6y ago
Yeah, a reason founders could be seen as happier in this regard could be that they are climbing the hierarchy while employed ones are set in place but that doesn't mean hierarchical structure is unnatural, I find authority almost instinctual.
cambalache 6y ago
Define naturally I would argue the opposite. How long do you want to establish human history? Let's say 300k years, for more than 90% of that time the small hunter-gatherer groups were in the opposite extreme from the giant pyramidal institutions of modern day.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arthurofbabylon 6y ago
  That is increasingly suggested to be incorrect by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists focused on human development. It’s now understood that prestige and hierarchy played a fundamental role in shaping the mechanics of human culture, starting at the beginning of the distinguishing of Homo sapiens. A mind-blowing book on the subject I recommend: “The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter” by Joseph Henrich.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    > It’s now understood that prestige and hierarchy played a fundamental role in shaping the mechanics of human culture, starting at the beginning of the distinguishing of Homo sapiens. This is too vague and general too have any value. Specially considering that anything older than the iron age is subjected to pure speculation.

kelembu 6y ago

damn, thanks for this, amazing piece!

Eduardo3rd 6y ago

This was written back when YC was a few companies per batch and all of the biggest successes were yet to materialize. Today? Stripe: 2,500+, AirBnB: 6,300+, Dropbox: 2,300+ I wonder if this stance changed a dozen years later now that there are several multi-thousand person organizations in the YC network. Does PG think differently today after seeing several examples of large companies run by people he knows personally, or would he tell a talented hacker not to work at Stripe because it is too big?

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
It’s the same with the article “Great Hackers” and Graham’s previous impassioned advocacy of private offices for every knowledge worker, even in dense urban centers. It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this. Instead he and other “thought leaders” around VC want to be viewed as progressive, forward-thinking people with an advocacy to avoid commodity thinking towards workers & their lives and workspaces. But it’s all lip service - bluster so Graham can sound like he’s the good guy but actually just function as the same exploitative commodity thinking old boys club kind of investor privately. All the PR credit without actually putting his money where his mouth is.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  pg has never actually run a large workforce, so I take all of his advice on this subject with a (huge) grain of salt.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    It’s interesting to see it in contrast to Joel Spolsky, who actually did put his money where his mouth is and give employees private offices, even in Manhattan, and has continued doubling down on private offices as the right strategy year after year.
- ptero 6y ago
  > It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this. That is a strange sentiment, sorry. PG is not some omnipotent being that can "ensure" anything for the companies he originally helped launch. His "enforcement" options are probably minimal, based on his (by now many times diluted) ownership. The best he can do is advocate, leveraging a lot of respect he still commands in the startup community. And this is what he is doing there. My 2c.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

The article sounds pretty good but usually startup people who think they don’t need a boss will soon have to be the boss of many in order to achieve their hyper growth goals. It’s not like ycombinator supports companies that are small and stay small. They want companies to turn into sizable corporations with a lot of people working for the big bosses and investors. I wish there was a trend towards very small companies where every employee can own a significant part and be part of decisions. Ycombinator doesn’t support that model.

xiphias2 6y ago
Is it a good model though to move the world forward? If I just look at Tesla's battery day, the amount of effort that's needed to stop air pollution & CO2 emissions is huge, and it looks like vertical integration is winning, as car companies that depend on other companies to make those risks while depending on eachother are failing to scale.
- hrktb 6y ago
  That effort is huge because the “other side” accelerating these effects is also huge and and lead by big centralized companies. I tend to think that if these companies didn’t have as much power they couldn’t have bent the rules in their favor that much. So, shall we accept there will always be unstoppable big companies, and counter them with other big companies, kaiju movie style ? Or try to break them out and/or counter their effect through more decentralized efforts ? In the long run the second option seems more viable to me.
Swizec 6y ago
> I wish there was a trend towards very small companies where every employee can own a significant part and be part of decisions. There is. Look at the growing trend of indie hacking and the growing number of indie vc funds that specifically look for small companies planning to stay small-ish.
- Errsher 6y ago
  Do you have any links for more info?

SeanLuke 6y ago

Humans, and their ancestors, have had one-level bosses for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans have had multilevel bosses for at least tens of thousands of years. In what universe are bosses "unnatural?"

nprz 6y ago
From the essay: > A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  How does he know how those prehistoric groups worked? The boss report relationship is more child parent like in a hunter gatherer context I guess. Obvously it just all guessing how stone age groups worked, but the biggest difference has to be that there were no formal enforced hierarchies. Maybe there was one elder and a shaman?
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    it seems to make sense. if you're the leader of a ten person group and you push enough of them to their limit, it's not that hard for them to replace you. if you're the leader of a ten person group, but also have the support of a thousand person hierarchy, your followers can't easily get away with replacing you.

dadoge 6y ago

Startups have to, generally, become pretty large in size. So the message seems to be: better to be on top of the pyramid in the early days than in the middle of some large pyramid. Well duh, but that’s not scalable by design. Only so few people can be on top.

jlokier 6y ago
> that’s not scalable by design. Only so few people can be on top [of the pyramid] Unless we redesign the nature of work and organisation. It's true only a few people can be top of the pyramid for most of their career. But in principle, everyone could be on top of a large pyramid for some of their career. It might be a good learning experience.

deleted 6y ago

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jariel 6y ago

"The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups." Unfortunately it's a foundational artifact in how we create and maintain civil culture.

GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
It may be how governments are organized. But there is absolutely no need to organize companies this way. Check out anarcho-syndicalism.
- jariel 6y ago
  'Anarcho-Syndicats' essentially do not exist in any material practicality. Perhaps in niches. You're not going to make an Airbus or 747 in such a formation. You want to know the real difference between 'poor' and 'rich' Europe? 'Rich Europe' aka UK, Germany, Netherlands etc. have significantly greater population working in companies of large size. Spain in particular, more people work in 'mom and pop' shops where they don't have the scale to tackle bigger problems. There's a lot of variation, but 'having a boss' is inevitable when it comes to coordinating large groups.

Terretta 6y ago

”... a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.” Ok, but perhaps not “no” structure. A market has structure... ”That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it.” We are exploring this for the Americas region of a global bank, which has us seeking engineers who have worked in autonomous teams but would be interested in helping with this shift within an enterprise — to help ship but also help socialize what it means to have initiative and be an owner.

glutamate 6y ago

This belongs on twitter.com/LeftAccidental

luismedel 6y ago

I love this essay so much I translated it to spanish some years ago (https://jcaramuel.es/jefe.html https://jcaramuel.es/jefe.html) I like to go beyond the superficial "be your own boss". After all, a world full of "own-bosses" is not possible. IMHO, the big lecture here is that big, fat hierarchies are poisonous and it's better for your happiness to search some small sized group to be on.

marketingPro 6y ago

I know his comments on food are a metaphor, but when it's blatantly incorrect, I couldn't make it to his main point. On a separate point, I highly encourage everyone to understand the scientific method. There are too many Engineers and programmers that can do labor, but don't ask about data, evidence, or methodology. Rather accepting Authority as fact.

nocman 6y ago
> I know his comments on food are a metaphor, but when it's blatantly incorrect, I couldn't make it to his main point. This comment would have a lot more "punch" if you explained how it was "blatantly incorrect". I'm not arguing for or against, I would simply like to hear the discussion.
- marketingPro 6y ago
  "If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. "Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley. If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale. Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't. Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth spending a lot to market it." All of this is false. Junk food isn't cheap calorie per dollar or various nutrients per dollar (source- efficiency is everything) further, fresh vegetables are the cheapest sources of nutrition. And humans are able to eat the foods mentioned and turn into energy through various metabolic processes. The author seems to parrot "common" knowledge, but it's not factual by any stretch. (Ok maybe trans fats, but those are borderline illegal)

jehna1 6y ago

Currently working as a developer for a company that organizes itself in small groups without bosses and I must say I could not think about going to work for a company where I would have a boss.

d_watt 6y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you manage under performance in that setting?
- jehna1 6y ago
  Team always shares the responsibility. We do a ton of work to establish trust inside a team so you would share things that are affecting your work instead of trying to hide them so you don't get sacked in performance review. We also make it very easy to change teams so everyone would find the best environment for themselves.

leto_ii 6y ago

It's not the first time I get an almost left-libertarian vibe from Paul Graham's writing. As before, I feel he almost nails it, but not quite. I do think that a world of small companies populated by intrinsically motivated people who are mostly equals would be much better than what we currently have. However, we have to acknowledge that the way the economic game is set up, this kind of endeavour is disincentivized. Neo-liberal capitalism favours concentration of power, mega-corporations with kill-zones around them and with huge lobbying power. Outside finding highly specialised niches, I think tech companies can find it hard to stay both successful and small. The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach is to fund lots of companies hoping that a few will make it big and accepting that most would fail. This is in complete contradiction with the idea of small, non-hierarchical enterprises.

jlokier 6y ago
> The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach is to fund lots of companies hoping that a few will make it big and accepting that most would fail. This is in complete contradiction with the idea of small, non-hierarchical enterprises. The VC funding model uses the expectation that a few will make it big and the others will fail or be let go. However, they do spread out funding among many initially smaller companies, and to some extent grant a lot of autonomy to each company to decide for itself what to do with the money, including spend it poorly. Because VCs already expect many to fail, they are not panicked about it. I think that's relatively non-hierarchical, compared with the alternative where a big investor takes over a company and dictates how to run it. So it's not clear to me whether VCs are a cause of hierarchy overall when considering all companies in the world, or if they are merely incentivising growth in some, while providing more flexibility to others to do their own thing than if modern VC did not exist.

skrebbel 6y ago

Is having a board of directors full of VC big shots to answer to that different from having a boss? I listened to a Changelog podcast the other day featuring Sytse Sijbrandij (GitLab CEO) and he mentioned having to run stuff by his board and I was like woa, even someone as obviously self-made as @sytse has a boss. I'm starting to think that only by bootstrapping (or taking very little investment, at least) you really do work without a boss. Not sure if the YC path that pg promotes in this article fits that. (I'm thinking about this a lot lately because my company is currently at this crossroads. We raised a little, turned that into profitable growth, but we could raise more to grow faster.) EDIT: meta-level comment: it's kind of weird how we managed to create a world where nearly everybody has a boss. CEOs answer to the board, who answer to shareholders, who work at investment funds that have bosses and shareholders and LPs of their own, and down the rabbit hole it goes. I wonder if there's any general way out of this, different from "bootstrap a SaaS" which is a little specific to be good general advice.

asperous 6y ago
Even if you are totally self funded you still are accountable to your customers. For software companies this might not be so bad, but many small business owners will tell you they make extremely demanding bosses
- sytse 6y ago
  And you are accountable to your employees. Take the board I have for example. It is a relief to know that if I’m not longer the right person they will replace me. If you are bootstrapped with 1000+ employees a board might be something you want even if you don’t need to do it from an ownership perspective.
  - sullyj3 6y ago
    I mean, at a certain point you're asking for ultimate power over everything and instead of attempting to become autonomous you find yourself attempting to become a supervillain

ThePhysicist 6y ago

I like most of PGs writing but being a smart and successful founder/investor doesn't automatically make you a proficient anthropologist. Arguing that you shouldn't work for large FAANG style companies because our early hominid ancestors hunted only in small groups is just comical. If you're really interested in reading about human evolution I recommend reading Robin Dunbars' work, who's an actual anthropologist.

internet_user 6y ago
What does Dunbar say about optimal work arrangements?
calmworm 6y ago
I don’t know that it’s comical, nor was the article really about human evolution. And there are other studies and evidence not based on early hominids showing that there is an upper limit on effectiveness dependent on group size.
maxlamb 6y ago
If you look at hunter gather societies, I don't see how PG's arguments are comical. They are by and large egalitarian and up until about 8k years ago almost all humans were part of small, egalitarian groups (i.e. hunter gatherer tribes), so our brains are evolved for that environment instead of being part of a multi-thousand people highly hierarchical organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_economic_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco... .
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  I mean, evolution hasn't stopped since the dawn of civilization.

o_class_star 6y ago

Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. 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. This is the part I agree with most. In your 30s, you start to see a bifurcation whereby the people who take the corporate grind seriously go into cognitive atrophy, while those who have a fuck-it attitude keep getting smarter but become less employable (due to age and their shitty job histories). You do turn into a moron if you buy into whatever role the corporates are willing to give you. The more you believe in it, the faster you lose intelligence. It's probably optimal to be able to pretend you buy into corporate, while not actually investing yourself in it at all, but most nerds aren't very good at this code-switching. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for. I thought it was lobsters the libertarians were all on about. Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people. Corporate is corporate. It's all trash. It shouldn't exist. Capitalism is a dinosaur. That said, it's usually better to work for a large company than a small one. In a big company, you can move around. There's more diversity of work, and there's more organizational experience with outlier talent. (That doesn't mean you'll be recognized as outlier talent. If you work at Google and have a 160 IQ but mediocre paperwork, you'll probably just get a regular assignment.) At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow except by becoming a manager. Which means it's not really any different from the old corporate grind-- it just has worse benefits and more ways to fall between the cracks (and that's by design).

jlokier 6y ago
> At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow This is kind of the opposite of what I've seen reported around here. Small startups, they say, are exactly where you should work for a while in order to grow and develop a lot of new skills, which are then valuable elsewhere. Meanwhile a number of people at large companies report being bored at work.

bosswipe 6y ago

The most autonomy I've experienced at a big company, and the best work I've done, is when a small cross-functional team is told "go build this" and then left alone. The small team is allowed to come up with their own processes and management is only used for consultation on how to remove external obstacles. Many companies know this is highly effective because they'll set up such teams when a very important initiative comes up.

swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
Are these "very important initiatives" just a codeword for "Management doesn't know enough about what or how to interfere"?
spaetzleesser 6y ago
"Many companies know this is highly effective because they'll set up such teams when a very important initiative comes up." I have been on a few such teams. The funny thing is that after the project has finished management will usually pad themselves on the shoulders, talk about the value of focused teams and immediately disband the team and go back to micromanagement mode.

DenisM 6y ago

It is my observation that most people who object to having a boss in reality only object to having a bad or incompetent boss, and would happily follow someone who is head and shoulder above them. The youthful rebellion is a part of the process of finding a worthy boss, or becoming one in the process if all else fails. When an industry expands quickly more people have to rise to the challenge of becoming new good bosses because the demand for good bosses outstrips existing supply. In addition, old good bosses retire rich mid-career, depleting the stock. In this situation you may find yourself thinking there are no good bosses at all, and you're the next King Arthur. Which you might be - someone has to be. When an industry grows slowly the stream of retiring good bosses is matched by the ascenders, maintaining an environment saturated in good bosses. When an industry stagnates the good bosses retire and their places are taken by the peace-time bosses, people who learned to follow in footsteps of the elders but never learned why. They will mostly be bad bosses due to lack of experience in making errors and for lack of selection pressure that would push them against their own errors to select the best.

foolmeonce 6y ago
I think the sentiment of "better boss" only works for middle management. My boss can be as good as he wants at management, but irregardless of his past, he is never going to get up to date practice in the details of what I do. So in what sense would he be better? For him to be up to date, I am being micromanaged or I am not actually working.
aripickar 6y ago
I’ll push back on that. I currently work as an SDE at a FAANG company known for being pretty demanding. My boss is phenomenal, pretty much everything you could ask for. Shielding us from other teams requesting stuff in an unreasonable time frame, not putting too much pressure to get things done in an unreasonable way, setting us up with mentors in different areas, building out explicit plans to grow to the next level, helping people plan breaks in the day to mentally recoup, the whole nine yards. Despite all that, I still am looking to leave and start my own thing. And it’s mainly because that “I want to be my own boss mentality”. I don’t think that I’m alone in that.

koluna 6y ago

Wow. I’ve known pg to sometimes make empty statements, but this one takes the cake. Read: guy with immense privilege tells others not to work for others. This doesn’t even begin to account for the risk that comes with startups that some people cannot take. When you make $7/hr and do a Bootcamp, and now can be employed by Google, you’re not going to abandon that for a tiiiiiiny possibility to build a successful startup just because “you weren’t meant to have a boss”.

nezaj 6y ago
Curious, is it possible to work at Google for a few years, save some money, build a bigger network, get inspired, and do your own thing? Perhaps one started off making $7/hr, but that's just where one was at that point in time. At a later time both skills and safety net will increase. At that point quitting Google is still a risk, but circumstances are much different now. Transitioning into software is already a leap, but if one has already done that and has the skills/safety-net/desire to be their own boss -- why not take the next leap?
- deckard1 6y ago
  You're asking whether a person making $400k+ a year, even in a place like SV, with a network of other engineers also making $400k+ a year could branch out and start their own software business that requires almost $0 overhead because, you know, it's software. Gee, I don't know. I sometimes wonder if people on HN even know what privilege is or how they sound to the entire rest of the world. You think it's typical that people making $7/hr just happen to land a job at Google?
  - nezaj 6y ago
    FWIW I was replying to the GP's comment "When you make $7/hr and do a Bootcamp, and now can be employed by Google"
- koluna 6y ago
  I mean, sure, but then not everyone ends up at Google.

wins32767 6y ago

The team has only one person worth of freedom bit could only be written by someone who doesn't understand big companies. When I was at Oracle, the majority of the constraints on me and my team came from a differing risk profile of the company. In a stand alone company with basically no customers, e.g. a small startup, a critical security issue isn't something to worry much about; you have no customers, reputation or revenue to lose. At a company that tries to brand on security with millions upon millions of existing revenues, a PHI leak could cause millions in damages. Similarly, I had to deal with arms control paperwork every release since we shipped internationally with encryption turned on by default. Again, not a number of employees problem but a high company profile problem.

nendroid 6y ago

>In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to. People aren't designed to be programming either. People aren't designed to be working for startups. People are designed for a hunter and gather lifestyle.

wuwuno 6y ago

I read that article 3 times and I'm still not sure exactly what the point was. It was a just a rambling jumble of disconnected thoughts. So a lion in a cage is equivalent to a human working for a boss? Yeah, OK. I've been at 5 startups and 3 very large companies. I've had more freedom at the large companies, granted I was running sub-divisions at the big companies, but I still had more freedom. I'm currently at a startup and between the CEO, the Chairman, and the other BOD members I feel like I'm in a cage wearing a tracking device, even though I'm in a cage. It's Saturday and I'm taking a break from working to browse through HN, full day today, full day tomorrow, wash, rinse, repeat, same as it's been for the last 2 years. I'm so glad I'm at a startup so that I can work like I'm meant to work.

mempko 6y ago

Adam Smith understood this. In Wealth of Nations.He said division of labour makes people as stupid as creatures can be. In the beginning of the industrial revolution, people called jobs Wage Slavery.Somehow we stopped talking about how bad jobs are for us.

amoorthy 6y ago

PG's main point is a good one, though perhaps obscured by a few cherry picked observations. Autonomy allows for faster learning. Learning brings happiness. Autonomy is easier to find in small group settings. The push-back that this is a privileged position is interesting. Initially I thought so but maybe that's too harsh. Controlling your expenses and keeping it to a bare minimum would allow a lot more people to pursue such autonomy than they might realize. I don't think it's the majority of people given wealth inequality but more than people might guess. The comparison to wild animals is incomplete and cherry picked. There are animal populations that seem to happily exist in larger communities than what PG mentions. But, as I learned from one of his better essays [1], let's focus on the main point. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

mathgladiator 6y ago

I've thought about this recently, and I think one that we have blurred is the difference between a leader and a boss. As a human, you were meant to have a leader. Your first leader (hopefully) are your parents since you don't emerge with a complete understanding of things, and then you pick up a series of teachers/mentors through-out life. The thing that fucks everyone up is power. Power will corrupt a teacher. Power corrupts managers. Power corrupts owners. The question is how to mitigate the corruption of power. A boss is a corrupt leader in my opinion, and I agree that we shouldn't have one.

afarrell 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that what power really does is either: 1. Reveal the already-corrupt 2. Impose stress and poorly-assigned responsibilities that lead people to unhealthy actions.

sporkologist 6y ago

Why work for a boss 8 hours a day, when you can work for yourself for 16 hours a day?

zer0sand0nes 6y ago

Great read. Loved it.

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the_greyd 6y ago

Drawing a parallel to Nassim Taleb's "don't hide the risk" (or atleast what I understood from his talks), working for a big corp hides risk (and reward). If you or the team do a shitty job, the feedback and the results are often not immediate, and absorbed by the bigness of the corp. I have seen fair share of disinterest and mediocrity in my place of work and I think it's a leadership problem partly, where they've pretty much failed to motivate or incentivize people to improve/move around the company and you have people working for years in the same role and project doing the same work, creating very little new value. Also great point that it might be a characteristic of somebody choosing to work for a big corp vs something else. In today's climate that seems a very safe decision for a new grad. Ultimately it's a job that you do to earn money, it's naive to think everybody wants the same thing from their job.

8bitsrule 6y ago

"Having a job is not an ideal. In fact, having a job is a severe attack on human rights and human dignity.... Having a job means placing yourself under the control of an autocratic ruler for most of your waking life. An autocratic ruler has the kind of control over you that Stalin never dreamt of...." - Chomsky (recent) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lcDT_-3v2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lcDT_-3v2k (31:40)

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iamjohnsears 6y ago

I feel like Amazon has most successfully fought this consequence of scale.

perilunar 6y ago

> Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. ... the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do. No need to imagine it — Ricardo Semler was already talking about and doing this in the 1990s. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler