You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
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.
Was there a concrete point at which you and your co-founder agreed to accept a minority stake and therefore give up absolute control? Was it a hard call to make or, already then, a relief because of the employee accountability?
The board of directors is legally responsible for running the company, in practice through major company decisions and scrutiny, so you can take some relief from that if you're a CxO doing what you think best "day to day" but not entirely sure you really know by yourself. Your board will get the legal blame if it goes seriously wrong and you've kept them sufficiently informed and involved in key decisions.
But you can still have a majority ownership stake while appointing a board. In doing so, you keep ultimate control (as shareholders) but you won't often exercise it.
Having ultimate control might change the social dynamics, but shareholders are not responsible for the company, the board of directors is and they should know it. Shareholders have the power to pass resolutions which effectively override directors, but most of the time they don't. Even if they do, it's up to the directors to figure out how to do what the shareholders want in a responsible and defensible way.
Anyone comparing a customer to a boss has had the luxury of never having a terrible boss.
Rentiers are an exception.
2 main differences:
1) your customer's requirements are pure (usually) - "please add a frammel button so I can manage my widgets better". Your boss's requirements are less so - "please satisfy corporate by attending this compliance training".
2) you can fire any customers who you don't like. Not so your boss.
Despite 400+ opinions, the pull on the team is one way: client needs.
My previous Companies has outside money, board, etc. That's three directions of pull.
We've saved a lot of time that way on investor management but our growth was limited by cash-on-hand.
Not-Compatoble request is a bit harder. But, with like 10+ prior years in consultant I'm generally able to direct thing to a multiple compatible solution.
Lots of research and customer development play for that.
Compliance training is about legal requirement. A little extrapolation suggests it is going to be things that your bosses are only asking you to consider because they are legally mandated. If they were going to be considerations anyway, why mandate them?
A lot of stupid things businesses do are to satisfy legal requirements that the business thinks is stupid. That one isn't the boss, it is the government.
That's the thing -- oftentimes your Boss thinks that X is a "legal requirement". When really it's "so-and-so is bugging me to cram this down your throats saying something about 'legal' and I'm too busy to even bother googling to find out whether it's really so. Plus even if I did some basic research I might have to actually think about it for a minute or two - and you know how much I hate that. So to save myself time, I think I'll just cram it down your throats."
My favorite X in this category: drug testing. (Contrary to popular belief, it's almost never an actual legal requirement - even if your company is getting state or federal funds.)
Remember that solo founders are widely encouraged to incorporate in Delaware just because it's the least legal risk. One state! Out of fifty, and several non-state entities! There's no legal requirement, and you can absolutely incorporate in your home state or many other places, but the advice is that if you want to focus on what your business does best, don't spend time thinking about any states' corporate law other than Delaware's, which is well-explored. If that's the bar, basically all other forms of compliance are well above it.
I get that good hackers have an instinct to ask "Why?" or "Really?" at every step and to understand the whole system, and I have it too, but one thing I've learned with experience is you need to train yourself to put a stopping point on "Why?" if you want to get anything done at your current level of descent. You absolutely can go arbitrarily deep, nobody is goin to stop you, and there are all sorts of fences that have no reason for existing, but you have a limited amount of time to do whatever work you want to do and show results. Do you want to build the next great social network, or the next great form of corporate structure? You can absolutely do either - you can't do both.
(One caveat: there are a few things that are legal requirements or near enough thereto that only apply when you have more than a few employees. If you're a solo founder, you presumably can't create a hostile work environment for yourself, for instance. However, if you're a solo founder pursuing B2B deals and having meetings with companies, it might be worth being aware of what sorts of things your target companies consider hostile work environments and would cause them to not invite you back for the sake of their legal risk - and that's even more about the standard corporate view of the law than the law itself. So, you may not be able to get away ignoring these conventions even as a solo founder, after all.)
I know what you mean, but I think there's an alternate way to look at this.
Every time I've moved jobs, I really look at it as firing my boss. The process is pretty much the same as firing someone:
* First, I voiced my concerns and gave my boss a chance to improve.
* When he wasn't improving, I began searching the job market to find his replacement (my future boss).
* After a few interviews, I found a replacement that was a really good fit for the role of "my boss".
* I let my old boss know that his performance had not improved enough, and I was forced to let him go, but I wished him all the best in his future endeavors.
* I gave my new boss a start date, and so far everything is going great.
CEOs only answer to shareholders insofar as they're expected to deliver a profit, which is actually very easy to do because most business "profit" is actually rent-seeking derived from resources (including intangibles) the business already owns. You have to be incredibly hubristic to fail as a corporate CEO. It's an easy job.
That's not true for small companies. Startups are harder, and startup CEOs are basically middle management within the "hive company" of venture capital. The true executives are the VCs who float from project to project, careers and fates diversified, and can peel their names off anything that looks like it's going to fail.
In big companies, though, most CEOs would do better not to show up, except once a quarter to give a speech or something. All they do is fire people, producing churn, and get in the way of the people who do the actual work. They can only fail if their egos get the better of them and they get so hubristic that they break something that used to be working. The same is mostly true of executives in general, although they have a little more vulnerability insofar as (a) if their bosses screw up, they may end up eating blame, and (b) if the CEO screws up so bad he himself gets fired, they'll probably also be replaced during the regime change.
CEOs may not be smart in the IQ sense we nerds tend to worship, but they understand leverage and positioning, and they understand how to hack complex human systems for personal benefit, because it's what they did to get their careers in the first place.
It makes you wonder how important those big wigs really are. In my current company (a big bank), from what I'm seeing the execs are so far removed from reality by layers and layers of middle-managers who distort and manipulate facts to their favor when reporting upwards, that what the execs think they're managing is really some kind of alternative-universe avatar of the bank. Essentially they're operating in a Matrix created for them by their army of underlings.
The one about electric companies colluding, where the execs kept telling their subordinates not to collude with competitors, while said subordinates thought it was some sort of inside joke and just kept doing it.
Funniest part is, the execs apparently did not know, while their subordinates thought they were "clearly" communicating they were.
The morale, to me, was that management, at any scale or level, really only has as much power as their subordinates let them have.
And that implicit meanings, in communication, are absolutely and deeply unreliable.
- Investors don't have a boss.
- A founder/CEO who owns 100% of a private company doesn't have a boss. But (s)he is putting up with very high risk, betting on self, and living with the consequences.
This is one of the many points Kaczynski makes in his argument that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The complete lack of true autonomy seems inherent to the system.
Actually, yes I do. It depends on which hunter gatherer society, but there is some indication from Sumerian scripts that before statecraft came a laisser-faire world, where people did not need to respond to a higher power, because one could always choose to bugger off to somewhere else.
It only works of course when there is excess food compared to the amount of humans, which is not a stationary situation as humans multiply to fill that gap.
Money abstracts this away, but if you achieve “financial independence”, that just means you have accumulated enough wealth tokens that you can indefinitely have enough to exchange for things that someone actually had to go make. You’re “autonomous” in the sense that you’re utterly dependent on an entire society that agrees with the practice of doing work in exchange for fiat currency. But the Pharoahs were also utterly dependent on a society that agreed with the practice of doing work because if you didn’t, the pharoah’s bureaucrats wouldn’t keep your land irrigated and you would starve to death.
But autonomy as a person who actually does work is another thing entirely. Industrialization introduced time clocks, shift work, Taylorism, and all kinds of stuff that eroded that autonomy.
The boss ultimately dictates how this is to be done. Businesses fire customers, pivot the business to seek better ones, abuse/shortchange/swindle their customers all the time.
There are Bureaus of Consumer Protection, but no Bureaus of Boss Protection.
When you seek product-market fit, or decide which features to prioritize for development, you are in effect seeking to satisfy this boss. When you make pricing decisions, you’re likewise being guided by the constraints of your target customer base. The customer can ultimately shut you down, firing everyone, to stretch the metaphor. Can you fire the customer? Sure. But you always need a customer of some kind, and as a going concern you ultimately serve at the pleasure of that (aggregate) customer, and not the reverse.
It’s a feature. Cycles get rid of hierarchies and individual corruption.
Hunter-gatherers have patterns we can also describe as hierarchical as well, but it's meaningfully different.
Given the cultural, and possibly even genetic, coevolution of this strategy, bosses are going to be 'sticky'.
A fascinating alternative has been proposed by Yanis Varoufakis in which financial markets are eliminated, but labor and commodity markets remain: i.e. you can only own a single (variable value, single vote) share in 1 company at a time (usually a company you own are employed at); that share is tied to you as a person like a library card (you can't give it to someone else). Essentially all enterprises become cooperatively owned by the people who WORK for the enterprise. People have accounts with the Central Bank of their nation, etc... This stuff is pretty straightforward to do since banking is almost entirely automatable now.
But that's far too egalitarian to catch on with the current state of affairs. :-)
Companies survive because they don't die. That seems trite, I know. The consequences of it are important, as the equation is one where no matter how well you do, avoiding death is what matters.
SHL at Gumroad is a great example. SHL was encouraged to quit by the VCs when Gumroad was not a clear unicorn[1]. SHL chose not to let Gumroad die, and Gumroad lives.
The problem with all the ideas like the one Yanis Varoufakis proposes, is that they will almost certainly do well in good times, but companies survive because they don't die, and any system like the one you mention will lead to more dead companies.
That's a big claim I know, but imagine a situation where a company has 20 people - 4 sales and 8 support (secretaries, returns, admin) in the office and 8 people who work in fulfillment - a warehouse and lets say deliveries. Times get tough, and they are forced to have a vote on who needs to be sacked - how do they vote? 12 of the 20 work together, do you really think they will vote to have their friends in the office sacked?
And would they even get to that point? Why would anyone ever vote to lose their job? And what about pay rises? How do you negotiate pay rises when everyone votes? In a multi-division company, lets say 3 divisions, would everyone vote to take a lower pay than people in a more productive division? Would hiring be run along profitability lines, with one division growing large, or prestige/some other political goal like maintaining voting block power?
Capital has clearly aligned goals that round to "don't die". Capital will be assigned in productive areas, pay rates will be higher in more valuable divisions (AWS vs Amazon Warehouse workers) and kill off products that aren't working (See Google).
At the meta, system level, there is also alignment. Capital can be reassigned to different companies, aligning the individual players with the system overall. That is why Blackberry was valued below its cash on hand at one point - capital was reassigned as Blackberry was more likely to blow through the cash than grow. A system where shares can not be reassigned has no system level optimisation which saves the system, even as individual companies die.
The same is not self evidently obvious or clear in collectivist systems, and always needs a series of extra steps to overcome self interest to be possible, none of which are convincing over longer timeframes.
Any collectivist system would only need a very small bias towards something other than optimising profitability to have long term terrible consequences. Homo Sapiens had a tiny advantage over Neanderthals and other Hominids, and we are here and they are not. The casino advantage in most games is < 3% and think how much money they make.
Collectivist business ideas will have all the same problems of politics, combined with the ability to die completely, which Governments do not suffer outside of war, as they have a taxation monopoly.
[1] https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting - "Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings — and their money."
It’s also interesting you think capitalism allocates capital effectively. I would argue the opposite, that it aims to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few. How many life saving startups die while Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars of cash? How many brilliant people are born into poverty and can’t enact their ideas, while Bezos buys his sixth house?
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.
For him to be up to date, I am being micromanaged or I am not actually working.
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.
It is of course not just the boss, it's also the entire business structure. Do you believe in the cause you are serving? Do you feel like you contribute well to that cause?
When you are your own boss you can say "I have enough" and stop making new features, stop getting new customers. One probably still needs to have profitable customer base before saying so but I am working for profitable company as SDE and they look how to grow more all the time.
In that sense, I guess you have the feeling of being your own boss as an employee too, as long as you believe you can say "I have enough" and stop working there whenever you feel like it.
I find that most people actually really want clearly defined work / goals from their manager and for the manager to be pretty hands off unless they need help, more resources, etc.
There's also another class of problem which is that, as a corollary to the above: "You weren't meant to have a job" - ie it's not always easy to execute / enjoy work even when the work is interesting and your boss is great. Anything worth doing is probably going to be challenging and that's going involve some measure of stress.
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?
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.
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.
He is just profiting from pushing worse working conditions onto the end employee - conditions he has himself criticized but nonetheless does not actually put his money where his mouth is to engage in much more direct advocacy or culture building within YC & its companies - most likely because his views actually are hypocritical.
When it was himself and a few people dealing with a small family of startups, then he cared. He did not want those people treated in a commodity way. When his stake is in a nameless batch of companies each trying to grow huge staffs while offering very poor total comp (even accounting for equity) on false promises that YC startup workplaces would let you avoid the bureaucratic blockers of established companies that pay better, his view has shifted to see those workers as commodities, not to be invested in to do good work, but to be given the most threadbare open office working environments with the least investment and high built in expectations of turnover due to employees gradually realizing how poor the total comp is (even accounting for equity). YC is a sort of nicely branded start-up mill. Not an incubator, but a mill.
This is obviously much lower status than what Graham wants to be known for, so he talks a big game like it’s a very productivity-centric incubator environment, while tacitly endorsing practices that make it more like a mill, with poor commodity treatment of workers in terms of total comp and workplace conditions.
“Diluted ownership” is a poor attempt at an excuse for that.
> In a way, every scaling startup is an experiment in empirical microeconomics research on “What parts of the typical corporate form are necessary and which are pageantry which we only keep around due to anchoring, the sunk cost fallacy, and tradition?” Every time a startup bites the bullet and hires a VP of Sales, a lifecycle email copywriter, a retirements benefits administrator, or a cook, count that as a published result saying “Yep, we found this to be necessary.”
How much do you pay inhouse councils in your country?
Also, the management chain still exists, it's just at a different company. But from the worker's perspective that's irrelevant; just as many people still have bosses.
A hypothetical 'outsource everything' company would be perfectly agile because everything else is fungible replaced with whoever is doing the outsourcing regardless of what is going on everywhere else. The downsides are not only that they are the reverse ofvertically intergrated in that they give up margins to everyone else in the chain and that they have no differentiator other than what they can provide as 'middleware' and outsourcing everything to stay that agile means that it is shrank by design. They would have to provide real value margin as a middleman in order to exist long term vs the clients 'just putting all of the pieces themselves'.
People can talk all day about how people shouldn't have bosses, but they don't stop and consider what civilization would actually look like if that were true. It would look radically different from today.
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”.
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?
The initial comment mentioned that the person making 7 dollars an hour finished a bootcamp and _could_ work at google. Nezaj went from that
—-
In general, discounting what’s beneficial to people, by labeling it as “privilege” is only a disadvantage to the non-elites. The elites will continue to do just fine.
If not having a boss, living a certain kind of life is advantageous, we should do what we can do go for that. If our means don’t allow for it, let’s work towards it.
—
(This comes from an immigrant without a degree, who got one of those great jobs, and now works without a boss. For now at least.)
I also suspect that the USSR was "Communist" in practice in the same way that many companies are "Agile".
If you're really interested in reading about human evolution I recommend reading Robin Dunbars' work, who's an actual anthropologist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Hermits exist, of course, but most humans look down on them and consider them strange.
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.
This is too vague and general too have any value. Specially considering that anything older than the iron age is subjected to pure speculation.
But, generally, people who are not accountable to anyone often end up not performing well.
We also make it very easy to change teams so everyone would find the best environment for themselves.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, no, it's not. You can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest.
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.)
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.
1. Reveal the already-corrupt
2. Impose stress and poorly-assigned responsibilities that lead people to unhealthy actions.
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.
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.
Unfortunately it's a foundational artifact in how we create and maintain civil culture.
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.
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.
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).
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.
No, that's Jordan Peterson and his crowd. There's a lot of overlap, but Peterson is more socially conservative than most libertarians.