You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
And it's worth noting that Graham is working on creating alternatives (coughycombinatorcough), so your grumping seems a little out of place.
The jury is still out on that one. The trend lately has been in the other direction.
I find myself thinking of SpaceX, which is tackling a real challenge and "big problem". They have, according to Wikipedia, more than 1250 employees.
That, along with the trend of software being used to solve more and more problems (more stuff is being solved by computers), it would seem like that eventually, even something like spending people to space would only take a small team, as infeasible as that seems right now.
To farmers of yore, it would seem laughable that we are able to produce a lot of food with so little farms. To builders of yore (like pyramids), it seems laughable that we're able to build taller buildings with much less people.
Given that technology and pace of innovation keeps accelerating, we should be able to solve larger class of problems with less effort and less man power.
For example right now a duo are preparing to do a manned space flight, which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.
2 of them are described as "Lead" which is contrary to the point you want to make: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."
Additionally the problem of putting someone in space is different from putting someone on the moon and back again.
Taking this trend to it's extreme , when we have human equivalent robots and AI , one man could build anything he wants by commanding machines to do the work.
Obviously false. You write via the Internet, which from the beginning has been created collaboratively, not hierarchically. (The big organization of the time, AT&T, refused to participate. See "When Wizards Stay Up Late" for the history.) I read your comment via a Linux box. My OS was started by one guy and has been built up by a lot of individual voluntary contributors.
The pyramids are a great example of what's wrong with bosses. For each pyramid, hundreds of thousands of people worked for years so a rich tyrant could impress people and feel better about dying.
First off, it's hard to play good cop, bad cop to get someone to change their mind if someone isn't willing to play the bad cop.
Second, my boss has been at the company a number of years, and so can tell me what my sponsor is going to be looking for, and any political landmines I might run into.
Lastly, my boss is the one who goes toe to toe with upper management to get the raise that he thinks I deserve, not just the default raise.
And I don't think anyone would question the usefulness of "general politics person" and "general team sanity person". The problem is, the roles are convoluted with "the ruler," and the question is, is "the ruler" really necessary, and even if the ruler is necessary, is this really the same person as the "sanity" and "politics" people.
What are the unique advantages of having a boss?
" The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups." WHOA! really? I mean, I don't disagree but this is a fairly huge statement. He should back it up or <every intelligent reader> will assume that he's holding them for idiots.
"I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. " Oh, no! I'm not an animal! And if I am, I'm certainly the WILD TIGER FROM THE JUNGLE rather than a zoo-domesticated kitten. I SHOULD QUIT RIGHT NOW.
Again, very broad connection. Full-time employees are nothing like zoo animals. They can leave any time they want, for one.
The question is -- did PG ever work at a big company like Microsoft/Google/etc? Hard to tell from the article. Perhaps PG's intense imagination caused him to believe certain things are true while in reality they're illusions.
"It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. " This smells. Smells bad. This would be a lot better and believable:
I worked at <a huge company> and it sucked. I spent most of my time figuring out how to impress my boss and come to the office on time, and how to log my hours properly. When I quit because it got unbearable, I realized that my logging-hours-properly skills and and getting-to-the-office-on-time skills are unmarketable, and quite frankly, a bunch of bullshit.
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
" Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. "
That sounds like 12-14hr/day, including weekends etc.
Now you can see how the rate drops a lot when you divide $2200 by, uhm, what, 70-80hrs a week? It's barely minimum wage.
Of course, you can say 'well, but they're giving you most of the stock if you succeed'. Yeah, but that also means you'll have to pay YC back in hundreds of thousands of dollars if you succeed. (Say YC is getting 5% of your $4 mln startup).
The equity is not guaranteed. YC does not guarantee you'll get huge. They'll just pat on your shoulder and give you some pocket cash in return for a part of your company.
Which is not bad.
He told some of his experiences in http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html .(The second part, after "Hackers", is the more relevant to this topic.)
His usage of metaphors paints a more vivid picture of the point he's trying to get across. If you read enough of his essays, you begin to adhere to this tone. Interpreting the metaphors literally would be the equivalent of doing the same towards sarcasm. But like a sarcastic person you just met, it can take some time to figure them out and "really" understand what they're saying.
PG did work for Yahoo after they acquired ViaWeb in the late 90's. He doesn't mention this in most essays, so it's understandable to question that here.
Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context.
In other words, imagine your boss says that the web app must be written in C++ for political reasons, and you cannot convince him to switch to Ruby on Rails, and you just know that the project would die a slow painful death if written in C++. Well, supposing you are correct, you are in a crappy job: constrained to do the wrong thing and with a boss that cannot be convinced otherwise. And for whatever reason you've got to stick it out through this project.
Focus on being the best C++ web developer in the world. Do the absolute best job you can on the tasks that are assigned to you. Throw yourself into your work 110%. But to do this you have to shift your point of view. You cannot think about this as "wasted effort" since you know the project will ultimately fail. You must think about this as training. You are putting your mind through intense training, keeping your skills sharp, so that when the opportunity finally does come to leave your job (or perhaps a new boss comes along), your mind is in top form and ready to go. Sure, you've probably acquired some less than useful skills for web development (managing pointers) but you've probably acquired and maintained some very good transferrable skills.
Whatever you do, don't give up, because then your skills will atrophy.
If you were any good you'd solve the problem the absurd project was created to solve. Instead you can't solve it so you pretend to be elite by "learning" rather than doing.
Besides, not all crappy tasks can be bent like this. Sometimes, there is just no way to disguise it as an interesting challenge.
RESULT...I got severly REBUKED for not creating a word document and emailing it to him...in fact he threatened me about escalating my disobedience to senior management
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.
This is the most interesting bit in the whole article, to me. I honestly believe firms can be organized like this, and probably should be organized like this. Interestingly, there was a book that I read a few months ago.. I think it was this one (http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Enterprise-Sense-Respond-Orga...) that argued for something similar, and went into a lot of depth about how it could be done.
Anyway, I find it interesting that Coase argued that firms exist to mitigate transaction costs resulting from imperfect information... and then Downes & Mui argued that digital technology would reduce transaction costs to a point of eliminating the need for large firms, creating what they called "The Law of Diminishing Firms."
So far we haven't seen big corporations fading away, but I still come down on the side of an eventual transition to networks of collaborating (smaller) entities displacing some of the bigger firms.
I haven't heard an update for how it has gone.
How is it that this article is getting reposted? It's a great article, I know. But couldn't the HN community submit and upvote new and current articles? Wouldn't the community be better served by this? I suppose if enough members haven't seen it then the upvotes and front page placement are a net gain, but please don't let this stuff rise to the top just because pg wrote it. If it must stay up here, let it be because users who have not read the article prior find value in it.
/self-righteous rant
And towards your second point, as someone who has been on this site for little over six months, this is the first time I came across this article and found it interesting, insightful, and gave me lots of things to think about. I presume there were enough other people who also thought so.
As a general rule, if it's from pg, it's either new or it's been posted before. This opens up an entirely new debate over whether reposts are good for an online community or not. Generally, I'm for them, provided they are voted up because of their value to the current user audience, and not any sort of fanaticism.
I'd love to know how HN goes about deciding which content is OK to resubmit over and over again.
It is also just simple URL based limitations, adding some bogus parameters to a url, or a hash, would be enough to get around it.
I don't know the specifics of the algo, but it may also add sites to its cache if someone visits one of the old comments pages, which could make it look more sporadic and picky.
Also, could people stop spouting nonsense about what "humans weren't designed" to do or eat?
In a small group, formal rules and processes exist as layers of abstraction built on top of a substantive social context established by the complex interactions among the individual members. All of the cues, feedback mechanisms, and communication channels inherent in human nature are in full effect, and these usually generate appropriate and efficient responses to changing circumstances in real time.
But once you've gone beyond a certain level of scale, those mechanisms no longer function, and the more natural, emergent social context no longer forms a consistent substantive base layer. The rules and processes that originally existed as an abstraction layer instead become the lowest available level of complexity; and since these rules are the product not merely of design, but of design that originally took place within constraints that are no longer present, the formal rules are usually quite insufficient as a substitute.
Even those who recognize this problem at this point can do little about it, because there's no longer a workable context in which to generate and implement a solution. It may only be possible to avoid in advance by being very deliberate in the process of scaling, and building the organization as a 'confederation' of smaller groups divided along natural functional 'seams'.
This phenomenon may actually be more evident in politics than in business.
Both in the not so long term destroy me as a competitive creature.
Cleverly working around limitations on your freedom is where the real art is.
I was actually just remarking about that the other day when enumerating some advantages that startups and other small companies have over large ones.
You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.
In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.
This goes with life as well as work.
Although this article idealizes the romantic picture of a small creative, innovative startup that disrupts large behemoth-like businesses, the fact is that most game-changing startups these days are, in fact, middle-to-large companies. Facebook has over 2000 employees. LinkedIn, 1000 in 2010. Groupon reportedly has over 3000 people in 29 countries [1]. The exception here is Twitter which only has about 450. If you want to be big, you got to grow big, and once that happens you got your teams, and bosses and so on.
But I disagree with the statement that big companies necessarily stifle your creativity. Google, for example, is a great example of a company that actually fosters creativity. As for not being able to learn as much working in a large company as working in a startup.. Well, I'd say it really depends on the company and people there. I learned a lot from my mentors at my first job working as an intern at a large company, and I would definitely say that, if anything, it made me a better developer.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/3000-people-in-29-countries
I'm curious if this jives with what pg is saying about group size–or am I comparing apples and pears?
I think technology can certainly help an organisation work effectively together with weaker integration, but ultimately a huge portion of it will be culture and personality.
Developing effective technology that assists in the development of the right sort of culture for a fluid, large organisation would be an interesting challenge. I think it might address the same sort of things that 'team building' exercises and retreats usually spectacularly fail at.
The insidious thing the large organization teaches you is that this is how things operate, and that a successful career means never having freedom and never exercising your creative muscles on a succession of larger and larger projects for a larger salary, so that you can buy a house you can't afford that's just barely close enough to the office but still so far that it takes you two hours to get to work.
If someone decides they want to trade freedom and creativity for job security and a stable paycheck, that's perfectly fine, as long as they're making the decision. If your first job out of college is an entry-level gig at a bigco that you barely managed to get, 8 years of inertia later you'll be coasting along at some mid-level position at a bigco, doing basically the same things. Inertia combined with the peer pressure of seeing everyone else doing what you're doing can be a powerful thing.
We can talk about what diet leads to greater cardiovascular health or what employment strategy is more productive. But trying to talk about something as amorphous as having more "meaning" is a lost cause.
Think of YC as a company, and all the YC-founded startups as tiny, self-governing units under this big brand, you'll come to realize that despite the company lacks any form of management and a real boss in the traditional sense, it's working well and profitable.
Do you think that humans will eventually evolve to work better in larger groups if they keep getting pushed that way?
Eitherway, good luck to us all!
Not everyone is cut out to be a CEO or President, etc.
EDIT: Reference -> http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html