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Comment by anthropodie | Hacker News Reader

I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it:

Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of the group. Such a group is optimal communication wise and it also offers greater incentive for it's members to work harder as you are directly participating in your own growth unlike our current structure where people are helping other people get rich.

This is very extreme take but imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it might. What do you guys think?

0: You were not meant to have boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

Edit: rewording.

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In Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 book "Pacific Edge" (part of the California Trilogy) he envisions a utopian future where company sizes are legally limited to stop the formation of huge, multi-national corporations so that control and profits stay in the local community. I forget the exact number and some quick Googling doesn't help. I remember being really inspired by the book though.

Something similar he used in the Mars trilogy where there were COOPs where every employee owned a share of the company and there were no other shareholders. I don’t recall exactly how entering a company worked in the sense of buying or diluting stock.

The inspiration for the coop in the mars trilogy actually exists in the real world.

I think it’s called the mondragon collective and it’s a meta-coop ?

Here is the wiki about it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

I don’t have time to skim it now but it’s not small potatoes, it’s in the top ten of Spanish coorporation.

If it’s not in the Mars trilogy; it’s in another of Robinson book

I think corporate income tax should scale with headcount ^ 0.8

Not sure that will be enough to cover the welfare for all the unemployed. It'd make a nice experiment...

>This is very extreme take but imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it will. What do you guys think?

I don't think.

I cannot imagine companies doing GPU, CPUs, Windows, etc. with just 20-50ppl.

Well you'd have to imagine a lot more collaboration between companies, so say company A just markets CPUs in the US nothing else, while company B works on just shipping logistics (to stores which handle the actual delivery to end customers). I think the real problem is that so many boundaries between disciplines make novel collaboration strategies between the parts much harder. It's difficult for say a marketing person to suggest a change to the box design

So, Intel would be split into ~2400 50-person companies. Coordination of those, through contracts, threats and lawsuits would be nightmare. A basic economic theory ("theory of the firm") says that large companies are created, because they decrease the friction that exists when many small companies (or even just individuals) cooperate to achieve a large and complex thing.

I think I agree it would be worse, though not without advantages. It’s really hard in the normal economy to work out how much a subunit of a company is contributing to the overall success and it can be hard to contain the urge to exaggerate. I think this is why big companies grow inefficiencies and at least with many small companies the individual parts could compete and occasionally fail.

I don't see how those small companies would make money

Some of those businesses arent really viable, meanwhile other are really good

I don't see it working with them not being together, working as teams under one budget, so just as normal company.

Valve would like to disagree with this sentiment ;)

Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale tech product (whether that's software or hardware).

A 250 person organization assembling semi-off-the-shelf components and gluing mostly-preexisting software together is a very different proposition than 20-50 people building a modern CPU from scratch. That's an order of magnitude more complexity than the steam deck, and an order of magnitude fewer people.

How many people designed the CPUs we use? I read a few days ago that due to deadline pressure, a single man did most of the work on (I believe it was) the 8080. But that's obviously a "trivial" design compared to the monsters we have today.

Right. It means there's a lot of things that don't get created--or companies cooperate in some sort of fairly tightly coupled network that doesn't look that different from one big company. (But probably less efficient if you follow Coase.)

One specific example you agree isn’t even a good comparison does not make a case.

Presumably you would, only what are different departments within a single company now would be separate companies. Probably similar kinds of blessings and curses as microservices.

The once CEO of Sears tried splitting the corporation into thirty to forty companies: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay... (I recall reading a more entertaining and detailed write-up, but this is what I could find on a quick Google Search)

In short, turns out aligning thirty to forty competing profit motives is hard.

Exactly... just as 50 people can not design, build and test a 747 jumbo jet.

You can work together with other organizations (but that quickly becomes a sliding scale towards megacorparations)

Wouldn’t companies collaborate with shared interest and risk?

For me, it feels like corruption would be more the risk from a cap.

Good point. Maybe companies working together? Like teams in a larger corporation.

> imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it will. What do you guys think?

This theory conflicts with Bullshit Jobs' theory (or more likely the truth) where power in an organization is derived from amount of reports someone has therefore companies must endlessly grow, only being limited by the amount of cash they can give their employees compared to the money coming in.

having a boss is not so bad when you're making good money. Short-term pain for long-term gains and financial independence. Yeah, the boss is earning more, but how many opportunities are there in life to make solid 6 figures while someone else takes the risk; all you have to do is show up? Sure beats crypto gambling, shoppify, and shit like that which is marketed as an alternative, which has way more risk and most people make nothing.

I agree. From my experience a team of about 20 individuals treated as roughly equal works best. Their likely need to be some hierarchy, but it should be a high amount of trust. I think this works well to about 25-30 individuals at which point splitting the teams might be considered.

Even in a company of 1000s, how many people are you actually interacting with on a daily basis?

In the PG blog he says:

  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.

But even in a "true" small tribe, is there individual initiative? You are still beholden to someone or something. If you're the alpha male you may still worry about feeding the family or protecting them from outside threats.

WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook bought them out.

> 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do

Citation needed. Even wolf packs have alphas, as I understand "hunter gatherer" societies were even less flat, if you disobeyed the leader you had your head chopped off.

The irony is that the whole alpha thing in wolves is itself a myth.

I read a great takedown of the whole "alpha" thing a while back, but can't remember where. Its message was that "alphas" are kind of losers, when all is said and done.

One thing I remember from my degree in cultural anthropology is that there's not much you can generalize about hunter gatherer societies. At least some of them were quite egalitarian.

I looked into the whole Alpha thing when I was training my husky and found it’s actually an outdated model/idea

in a cooperative framework instead of competitive framework, i think this would be the ideal structure.

So, i could guess, the general theory is, having a boss will eventually lead to a failure ?

Instead of capping company headcount, cap team headcount.

Paul does not have a, he has bosses; it’s called economic demand. His privilege evaporates if the mind palace built to empower VCs, b2b SaaS vanishes.

He adjusts to government policy. More bosses.

He’s just trying to sound like he lives on his own world, like the entitled child he is.

Having responsibilities and being affected by the state of the world is not the same as having someone you directly report to.

Hmm you seem to be interpreting “boss” as “any concept that impacts your decisions”, rather than the more specific definition I got out of the article, along the lines of “a person who tells you what to do and takes a large cut of the value you create.”

and yours flourishes? thanks for your feedback, now go sweep the entry-way.

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