8 ms·

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

144 points by downbad_ 5mo ago

debo_ 5mo ago
[flagged]
- microsoftedging 5mo ago
  I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).
- antfarm 5mo ago
  I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer. http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail657.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conv... http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...
  - antfarm 5mo ago
    Unfortunately, the download links on those pages are broken.
- samrus 5mo ago
  I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
lordkrandel 5mo ago
If I hear the argument of "naturality" and "natural design" I explode. We are "naturally" meant to die at 21, after getting whatever illness, never to move with massive transport, not even speak. 'cause all we naturally are is monkeys, right? AaaaaRGHHHH This argument makes me nuts
- jjulius 5mo ago
  There's a lot more nuance to the "natural" conversation than the assumption that we should go back to stone tools and all die before we hit 25. I've not really seen someone with that general belief, and I'm one of them myself, argue for such an all-or-nothing approach. It's about balance.
- bradrn 5mo ago
  Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant: > “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.” > Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
- wavemode 5mo ago
  > We are "naturally" meant to die at 21 Not really? Historical life expectancies were low because it was so common to die in infancy and childhood (thus dragging down the "average"). For people who made it to 20, it was common to live past 60.
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    Yeah people get that one wrong all the time. They don't realize what a bad argument it is. I'm guessing they are ignorant of historical facts and are just repeating what they heard from somebody else.
    - Filligree 5mo ago
      People do get that wrong. But the corrected version is “you were supposed to die as a baby”, and… That doesn’t sound any better.
zkmon 5mo ago
I don't think the analogies of animals in the wild or groups of hunter-gatherer is correct to the modern companies. A better analogy is the teams who built pyramids or armies who empowered Alexander or the medieval peasant settlements who regulated societies. It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process. Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.
- randallsquared 5mo ago
  That collective effort resulted in something very impressive, but there are lots of achievements in the present day which are, organizationally, at least as impressive, and which do not seem to require hierarchy (though they include various hierarchies). The chain of processes and activities that result in a modern supermarket and all its products, for example, has no overarching boss, and some of the steps along the way are handled by self-employed people (truck owner-operators, for example).
  - jimbokun 5mo ago
    But the modern supermarket also has many large hierarchical organizations contributing well, from the supermarket chains to industrial farms to giant processed food brands. For better or worse.
- rglullis 5mo ago
  > Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building For what, a glorified tomb? I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
  - tetromino_ 5mo ago
wavemode 5mo ago
None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC). Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.
- Arodex 5mo ago
  In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning. Modern-day sophistry.
  - Nasrudith 5mo ago
    That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.
- rramadass 5mo ago
  Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful. A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively. One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly. For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-what-we-do/ https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
hnhg 5mo ago
We weren't meant to have windows made of glass. Such items are entirely unnatural. According to pg, we must be wary of them.
- tryauuum 5mo ago
  sounds still more natural than windows made of brick or other non-transparent material!
jleyank 5mo ago
Beholding to a boss or to owners. Not a whole lotta difference unless everybody is a sole proprietorship. And that would be way too hand to mouth for most people. Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.
phyzix5761 5mo ago
Working for a large corporation feels like being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions make as much of an impact as a tiny leaf rustling in the Amazon forest. I've worked at, both, startups and large mega corporations and I can tell you the difference is night and day. I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency. I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes. I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing. I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer. Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire. But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
dangus 5mo ago
This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type. If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc. If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams. I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.
- rhines 5mo ago
  The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE. [1] or maybe that’s not the right term
k_plankenhorn 5mo ago
Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.
- smithcoin 5mo ago
  Good luck! You might not find anything out tomorrow, but it still might work in the long run.
- mizzao 5mo ago
  Good luck, and please don't be discouraged if it takes 20 launches to figure out what works! That's completely normal.
Aurornis 5mo ago
Re-reading old Paul Graham essays is revealing for how much my startup experience has changed my views. I remember this essay resonating with younger me. Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me. Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others. My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people. Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years. I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.
- cloche 5mo ago
  I couldn't agree more. At this stage of my career, if I were to go back to an early stage startup, I would only consider a startup where the founder(s) had successful experience as at least a frontline manager. That provides a high chance that they will understand what it takes to successfully manage a team and, hopefully, a larger organization.
dentemple 5mo ago
Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it? I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead. Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
- antipurist 5mo ago
  I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure. I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment. Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help. This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure. Can this work? No idea.
  - voakbasda 5mo ago
    Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels. Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
lazy_afternoons 5mo ago
I once worked for a unicorn (1B valuation) company where there were there were <35 engineers and all of them reported to the technical founder. No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out) The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one" Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges. But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers. May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.
- samrus 5mo ago
  Man its amazing when you have that high trust environment. You get treated like an equal, your opinion gets respected, and you can really make a difference in the company's prospect. Its addictive
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- rco8786 5mo ago
  It's a coordination problem. 70 amazingly responsible adults still need to coordinate amongst one another. Ad hoc coordination and communication always breaks down eventually.
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  Maybe a Dunbar’s number thing?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
stephbook 5mo ago
The naturalistic fallacy needs to die. Then a metaphor about food without any expertise and "programmers are special" sprinkled in. Holy lord, what a wild ride of an article. Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible. Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?
- Asraelite 5mo ago
  It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".
- smsm42 5mo ago
  > that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible. Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.
- cindyllm 5mo ago
  [dead]
WalterBright 5mo ago
I don't know why this should be surprising. Large corporations tend to prioritize process over results. In other words, they strangle themselves with bureaucracy. This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.
interludead 5mo ago
Plenty of startups recreate the same dysfunction at a smaller scale, just with less process and worse boundaries (I think...)
musicale 5mo ago
I've seen flat structures (with a "boss" who is almost entirely hands-off) work very well for teams with several dozen people. Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well. I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
- WhrRTheBaboons 5mo ago
  > I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it. Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.
  - musicale 5mo ago
    Would be interesting to hear how (well) it worked, why they abandoned it, what they replaced it with (and why), and whether the replacement actually helped to expedite Half-Life 3.
tolerance 5mo ago
The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same. Also: pg's "cliff notes" https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html And a standout comment from the original submission > I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210 The parent comment is an interesting read as well > It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.
lasky 5mo ago
I think it's about how much agency you need/want your job to give you in that specific moment/season of your life. starting a business is agency-maxxing. you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.
shoman3003 5mo ago
why it feels like charismas when a new essay drops out
khanmaria 5mo ago
by boss if you mean engineering managers? yes, in some cases you might not need them. Startups with flat structures expect ICs to manage their work and team, this role feels redundant. More than that, we need a PM.
mempko 5mo ago
As someone who has been a startup founder across several and who has basically been under-paid for the last decade as a result I am constantly thinking if I should have went to work at big tech again as many of my peers are much richer for doing it. But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss. I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.
ziptron 5mo ago
What PG wrote here truly resonates. I worked for a large Co and then 7 years ago started my own thing. At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision. My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill). Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back. It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time. Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.
green_wheel 5mo ago
I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.
silexia 5mo ago
Keep in mind that if you take angel or VC money, you WILL have a boss. Bootstrap your business for true freedom.

144 points by downbad_ 5mo ago

debo_ 5mo ago

[flagged]

microsoftedging 5mo ago
I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).
antfarm 5mo ago
I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer. http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail657.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conv... http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...
- antfarm 5mo ago
  Unfortunately, the download links on those pages are broken.
samrus 5mo ago
I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

lordkrandel 5mo ago

If I hear the argument of "naturality" and "natural design" I explode. We are "naturally" meant to die at 21, after getting whatever illness, never to move with massive transport, not even speak. 'cause all we naturally are is monkeys, right? AaaaaRGHHHH This argument makes me nuts

jjulius 5mo ago
There's a lot more nuance to the "natural" conversation than the assumption that we should go back to stone tools and all die before we hit 25. I've not really seen someone with that general belief, and I'm one of them myself, argue for such an all-or-nothing approach. It's about balance.
bradrn 5mo ago
Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant: > “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.” > Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
wavemode 5mo ago
> We are "naturally" meant to die at 21 Not really? Historical life expectancies were low because it was so common to die in infancy and childhood (thus dragging down the "average"). For people who made it to 20, it was common to live past 60.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  Yeah people get that one wrong all the time. They don't realize what a bad argument it is. I'm guessing they are ignorant of historical facts and are just repeating what they heard from somebody else.
  - Filligree 5mo ago
    People do get that wrong. But the corrected version is “you were supposed to die as a baby”, and… That doesn’t sound any better.

zkmon 5mo ago

I don't think the analogies of animals in the wild or groups of hunter-gatherer is correct to the modern companies. A better analogy is the teams who built pyramids or armies who empowered Alexander or the medieval peasant settlements who regulated societies. It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process. Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.

randallsquared 5mo ago
That collective effort resulted in something very impressive, but there are lots of achievements in the present day which are, organizationally, at least as impressive, and which do not seem to require hierarchy (though they include various hierarchies). The chain of processes and activities that result in a modern supermarket and all its products, for example, has no overarching boss, and some of the steps along the way are handled by self-employed people (truck owner-operators, for example).
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  But the modern supermarket also has many large hierarchical organizations contributing well, from the supermarket chains to industrial farms to giant processed food brands. For better or worse.
rglullis 5mo ago
> Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building For what, a glorified tomb? I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
- tetromino_ 5mo ago

wavemode 5mo ago

None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC). Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.

Arodex 5mo ago
In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning. Modern-day sophistry.
- Nasrudith 5mo ago
  That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.
rramadass 5mo ago
Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful. A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively. One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly. For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-what-we-do/ https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...

hnhg 5mo ago

We weren't meant to have windows made of glass. Such items are entirely unnatural. According to pg, we must be wary of them.

tryauuum 5mo ago
sounds still more natural than windows made of brick or other non-transparent material!

jleyank 5mo ago

Beholding to a boss or to owners. Not a whole lotta difference unless everybody is a sole proprietorship. And that would be way too hand to mouth for most people. Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.

phyzix5761 5mo ago

Working for a large corporation feels like being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions make as much of an impact as a tiny leaf rustling in the Amazon forest. I've worked at, both, startups and large mega corporations and I can tell you the difference is night and day. I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency. I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes. I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing. I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer. Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire. But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

dangus 5mo ago

This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type. If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc. If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams. I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.

rhines 5mo ago
The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.
- dangus 5mo ago
  Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE. [1] or maybe that’s not the right term

k_plankenhorn 5mo ago

Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.

smithcoin 5mo ago
Good luck! You might not find anything out tomorrow, but it still might work in the long run.
mizzao 5mo ago
Good luck, and please don't be discouraged if it takes 20 launches to figure out what works! That's completely normal.

Aurornis 5mo ago

Re-reading old Paul Graham essays is revealing for how much my startup experience has changed my views. I remember this essay resonating with younger me. Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me. Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others. My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people. Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years. I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.

cloche 5mo ago
I couldn't agree more. At this stage of my career, if I were to go back to an early stage startup, I would only consider a startup where the founder(s) had successful experience as at least a frontline manager. That provides a high chance that they will understand what it takes to successfully manage a team and, hopefully, a larger organization.

dentemple 5mo ago

Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it? I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead. Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?

antipurist 5mo ago
I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure. I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment. Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help. This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure. Can this work? No idea.
- voakbasda 5mo ago
  Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels. Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.

lazy_afternoons 5mo ago

I once worked for a unicorn (1B valuation) company where there were there were <35 engineers and all of them reported to the technical founder. No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out) The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one" Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges. But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers. May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.

samrus 5mo ago
Man its amazing when you have that high trust environment. You get treated like an equal, your opinion gets respected, and you can really make a difference in the company's prospect. Its addictive
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
rco8786 5mo ago
It's a coordination problem. 70 amazingly responsible adults still need to coordinate amongst one another. Ad hoc coordination and communication always breaks down eventually.
jimbokun 5mo ago
Maybe a Dunbar’s number thing?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

stephbook 5mo ago

The naturalistic fallacy needs to die. Then a metaphor about food without any expertise and "programmers are special" sprinkled in. Holy lord, what a wild ride of an article. Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible. Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?

Asraelite 5mo ago
It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".
smsm42 5mo ago
> that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible. Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.
cindyllm 5mo ago
[dead]

WalterBright 5mo ago

I don't know why this should be surprising. Large corporations tend to prioritize process over results. In other words, they strangle themselves with bureaucracy. This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.

interludead 5mo ago

Plenty of startups recreate the same dysfunction at a smaller scale, just with less process and worse boundaries (I think...)

musicale 5mo ago

I've seen flat structures (with a "boss" who is almost entirely hands-off) work very well for teams with several dozen people. Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well. I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.

WhrRTheBaboons 5mo ago
> I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it. Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.
- musicale 5mo ago
  Would be interesting to hear how (well) it worked, why they abandoned it, what they replaced it with (and why), and whether the replacement actually helped to expedite Half-Life 3.

tolerance 5mo ago

The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same. Also: pg's "cliff notes" https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html And a standout comment from the original submission > I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210 The parent comment is an interesting read as well > It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.

lasky 5mo ago

I think it's about how much agency you need/want your job to give you in that specific moment/season of your life. starting a business is agency-maxxing. you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.

shoman3003 5mo ago

why it feels like charismas when a new essay drops out

khanmaria 5mo ago

by boss if you mean engineering managers? yes, in some cases you might not need them. Startups with flat structures expect ICs to manage their work and team, this role feels redundant. More than that, we need a PM.

mempko 5mo ago

As someone who has been a startup founder across several and who has basically been under-paid for the last decade as a result I am constantly thinking if I should have went to work at big tech again as many of my peers are much richer for doing it. But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss. I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.

ziptron 5mo ago

What PG wrote here truly resonates. I worked for a large Co and then 7 years ago started my own thing. At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision. My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill). Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back. It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time. Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.

green_wheel 5mo ago

I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.

silexia 5mo ago

Keep in mind that if you take angel or VC money, you WILL have a boss. Bootstrap your business for true freedom.