You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss | Hacker News Reader

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

paulgraham.com

93 pointsjeremynixon51 comments

But I think this is the weakest part of the article :

  "And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only
  way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no 
  structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way
  components of a market economy do."

There's a reason for that . Ronald Coase in his Theory of the firm explained that the reason we don't have an arrangement like pg describes above is that

  "According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms 
  when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, 
  given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm .."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Sometimes , I think that the zeitgeist has swung too far in favour towards being an entrepreneur instead of working for someone and making something awesome.

> Sometimes , I think that the zeitgeist has swung too far in favour towards being an entrepreneur instead of working for someone and making something awesome.

I can agree with this. There's definitely some long term, large scale projects that require more coordination than a bunch of disparate groups working together. I doubt the pyramids, the statue of Liberty, or the Empire State Building could have been built that way.

Case study: At Sears, Eddie Lampert's Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles

  Eddie Lampert’s big idea is that markets and competition rool, so
  he’s forcing the different parts of Sears to compete for resources
  just as if they were independent firms, with individual division
  profitability the only criterion for success.

  ...

  If the different divisions of Sears have no common interests,
  if the best model is competition red in tooth and claw, why should
  Sears exist at all? Why not just break it up into units that have
  no reason not to compete?

  For that matter, why should any large firm exist? Why not just have
  small firms, or maybe just individuals, who make deals for whatever
  they need?

  ...

  There are some things you don't want to leave up to the market — the
  market itself is telling us that, by creating islands of
  planning and hierarchy.

More here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-th...

And here: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-edd...

My own company works this way. It's absolutely ridiculous. Each division hoards good programmers , projects and expertise, and people sometimes get stuck in other divisions without much work , while a few efficiently managed divisions land all the good work , leading to all the good people in the poor divisons leaving because they aren't growing , it's almost like working in a different company if you're in a different division.

I am a bit mystified as to where people get the idea that competition is fundamentally better than cooperation. The only time competition has ever done any good is when it leads to greater cooperation.

That's not always true. Competition always produces better performance , atleast in individual activities.

Individual activities are precisely not what we're talking about, and at any rate you're wrong even at the level of an individual.

There is huge difference between theory/Theory and practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Baťa#Career

In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not.

I agree with the diagnosis, but there's something important that's omitted here: the point of a startup is to create the type of large business that PG is advising against joining. The entire point of a startup is exponential growth. A company that stays small is generally derided as a "lifestyle business" and Silicon Valley investors seemingly have absolutely no interest in funding that sort venture, even if it's more sustainable for most people.

"We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company."

Can't say this has been true based on my experience so far at startups - there are a lot of bad managers/executives out there who have no business managing a business and the damage is probably a lot worse at a startup than at a big company. Based on a lot of anecdotal stories from developers, this seems to be an all too common pattern at startups.

Also, startups tend to have a bad problem unless bootstrapped - they're beholden to their funders, who can sometimes recommend courses of actions counter to what a good long term business should be doing, causing executives to make bad decisions with regards to treating their employees properly.

>they're beholden to their funders

This. Once you accept funding, you're working for the money people.

Forget those narratives of heroic freedom. Your situation isn't really all that different to any other corporate environment.

If the money doesn't like you as a founder, you can lose your job (at best) or be back-stabbed out (at worst.)

And if the project isn't viable, it dies anyway. So you're still out of a job.

There's a cultural difference, in that you have more agency at the start. But the script you follow is already written by the surrounding financial culture.

You have no freedom at all to deviate from it - unless you bootstrap.

And if you bootstrap, you lose freedom in other ways. What kinds of businesses can be bootstrapped constrains your options. The market becomes your boss, and no amount of soft-skills or convincing arguments can change its mind.

Put that way, with investors you can say "At least my bosses are human"

(Note, I'm not saying one is better than the other in all cases, just that "bootstrapping gives you ultimate freedom" isn't true)

... all of which I've seen play out at big companies, too.

Yes, having poorly-perfoming individuals in key roles can hurt a startup much more than a big company. But the experience of working for the startup in that case sucks no more than working for the big company.

> so many ... that we have enough data to see patterns

I believe that there's enough data to _see_ patterns, but is there enough data for these patterns to be statistically significant?

While I see some value in his practical insights the logic is deeply flawed. I would much rather he just share his observations on optimal work environments than try to explain what we are "meant" to do in some kind of incomprehensible pseudo-science.

By precisely the same reasoning we are meant to rape women to impregnate them and murder members of competing tribes, and are not meant to have birth control, surgery, or a level of technological complexity in the world that is beyond the power of any one human to fully comprehend.

Woah. It's not like he's saying "this newfangled thing is bad because it's new", he's citing specific health and well-being effects that he has observed. I doubt you could make the same case for rape.

And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.

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.

Isn't Valve such a company?

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

github too

http://www.fastcompany.com/3020181/open-company/inside-githu...

And Morning Star, Zappos, Stripe, Medium, Semco, W L Gore, Whole Foods, and others... http://danieltenner.com/open-cultures

Also, the guy who founded VISA has spent his later years putting forward ideas on how build large organizations that still maintain the anarchic qualities which allow independance from too much central control.

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Birth_of_the_chaordic_ag...

I also thought of Valve when reading that sentence. Being anarchic is a compelling idea. There are some conditions to be met though. You would need highly autonomous people who have good grab of the big picture to drive the group forward.

>Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

It's not technology, it's society. The notion of "working from 9 to 5 until 65" is a relatively recent construct brought on by the industrial revolution. There's a great section on this in the book Your Money or Your Life. If you read some of the literature of the times, there was a period in which some authors and thinkers started saying that people would have more leisure time, and thus be more creative. Industrialists didn't like this since it limited productivity and the potential for growth. Moralists didn't like this, since they believed idle hands lead to trouble. A massive campaign was waged to get society to buy into the concepts that growth (not sustainability) is needed, and that productivity is important. This also coincided with the growth of consumerism, as people started thinking they needed more stuff.

>> It's not technology, it's society. The notion of "working from 9 to 5 until 65" is a relatively recent construct brought on by the industrial revolution.

I'll buy this if by "brought on by the industrial revolution" you mean "demanded by organized workers in response to the excesses of the industrial revolution." If it weren't for unions I don't think the 40 hour work week would be anything like the norm.

If not for unions it would be 'work from 7 to 7 until dead.'

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Unions played a role most certainly, but so did some industrialists like George Johnson. I believe the term is welfare capitalism.

But yes, the 40 hour work week was definitely put in place to ensure people weren't just worked to the bone and then discarded.

Sure, because no hunter/gatherer tribes had a chief, medicine woman or other revered person who both gave direction to their tribe, and to whom the tribe was responsible.

A pretty weak argument against bosses. Humans naturally tend to form hierarchies - the boss is simply one node in that hierarchy.

That some people thrive in such positions doesn't mean it's our natural state.

Humans don't naturally form hierarchies. At least I don't always look to an authority figure to tell me what to do. I usually want independence and creative space, along with the advice and aid of knowledgeable colleagues. I chafe under the yoke of arbitrary authority.

But maybe I'm not human.

You're human, but you're not all humans. I think people have a continuum of attitudes on what they're willing to trade autonomy for. I've met a lot of people who are happy to have someone tell them what to do, because it means they don't need to figure it out for themselves. That's not bad, it's sort of a necessary ingredient of working together that some people need to be more willing to follow than to lead.

I think people confuse division of labor with hierarchy. The former means other people make decisions I don't care to. The latter means others tell me what to do and are acknowledged as my superiors.

Yes, this is true. There's definitely a difference between "this guy is making strategic decisions and interfacing with the rest of the company on my behalf" and "this guy is my superior and should be paid more than me". Unfortunately, the bosses make the salary decisions, so it just sort of falls out of that

Hunter/gatherer tribe is an oxymoron. Hunter gatherers are grouped together in bands, not tribes.

By the time a society has a chief, it is always larger than a band, and almost always larger than even a tribe.

The great mass of data from anthropological studies of these types of societies contradicts most of what you said.

There was a lot of this going on: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

"(...) a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure (...) 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."

Isn't this what Valve has done?

we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

The size of the company has little relation with the size of the groups you work in. I've worked for a couple of companies with around 8-10k employees and a couple more with around 1000 employees, and all those cases I've always worked in groups of 2-20.

Also, having a (good) boss is great. They handle all the shit work (like sales and customer relations) and run interference so that you can do you real job.

> Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size.

This is another reason why we should really limit companies to a maximum size. Other reasons are that companies should not become too big to fail, and that smaller companies lead to a more modular economy, where one company uses the outputs of several other companies, instead of having a few MegaCorps with an opaque, internal economy.

smaller companies lead to a more modular economy

This is a very interesting point, which I would extend to saying that it might lead to a more resilient economy.

The trouble is, scale is such a powerful thing. When you look at industries like the automobile industry, or even inside technology the chip industry, you appreciate that. It's hard to imagine modern fabs being run by groups of less than 100 people, for example. (Interestingly, this is something that might change in the extremely long run as production technology matures.)

There's an argument to be made for larger companies in terms of resilience: they will usually be able to absorb more risk. Modularity of small companies is good for if they fail, but I suspect they are more likely to fail. I don't have an opinion one way or another, just musing.

I always imagined a system where companies could only get so large unless they had a charter for a big project. (Which would expire, and they'd have to break up.)

One important aspect to take into account is the fact that a company 's size is determined also by the size of the market it operates in. In US or China you'll get megacorps while in tiny countries the size will be way smaller. If we add in the fact that the economies get globalized, all of the sudden you Apple and the like. Any successful startup in a global market, starting out in a large national market will be flooded with capital and still grow to fit the size of their success.

I've always wondered about a debate about limiting the size of businesses. Only state-owned enterprises building or running base infrastructure could be over x,000 employees. What would that world look like?

You always have a "boss", either the regular one you report to in a company or if you are the founder/owner/CEO of a company it will be your clients, your board or stockholders. Also having a good boss that shields your from the BS may be better than no boss at all.

Animal analogy is interesting. Any animals that cultivate crops? Are there any Human hunter/gatherer societies that scaled?

Here's a snippet of dialog from one of my favorite movies:

Jeremiah Johnson: You wouldn't happen to know what month of the year it is?

Bear Claw: Why no, I truly wouldn't. I'm sorry, pilgrim. Winter's a long time going?

Jeremiah Johnson: [exhausted] Ah.

Bear Claw: Stays long this high.

Jeremiah Johnson: March. Maybe, April.

Bear Claw: March maybe. I don't believe April. [rising to depart] March is a green muddy month down below, some folks like it, FARMERS mostly.

---

Recently, a company that I worked at was acquired. Felt like like farming. So, I bailed; hunting for something new.

> Are there any Human hunter/gatherer societies that scaled?

I'm not aware of any, and I think that it would be impossible. You can't really achieve a lot of density with hunting and gathering because before long you've hunted and gathered everything around you at a rate beyond which those natural resources can regenerate. Thence cometh agriculture.

> Any animals that cultivate crops?

Yes. Some species of Ant domesticate fungii, there are crabs that cultivate bacteria and there are fish that farm Algae (damselfish).

We aren't meant to have bosses, but we are social animals who are meant to work in groups. Groups often do need leaders who are able to synthesize a path that is mutually beneficial and help people to work in concert.

The problem is that we have developed economic structures that make it hard for individuals to reject bosses who are not leaders.

pg said: "We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company."

I assume he's funding companies in the States? One of the bigger advantages of working for a large(r) company is health insurance. Or do all of Y Combinator's startups have good health insurance?

And as others have written, things involving "stuff" tend to need to scale. This might not be a problem in that pg might be confining his remarks to software startups, not things like engineering or science companies?

The odd thing, is that many bloggers have written that while it's great to do a startup, it's crap to work for one. So if it's crap to work for a startup AND for a larger company, I guess everything will be done in groups of 2-4 people?!

Financing a startup with debt is usually a stupid move.

Why? Isn't that better than giving away equity, assuming that you actually believe your company will reach multi-billions in valuation in the future?

Debt is a bond, and your creditors have priority for payment. Creditors generally adopt a "FU, pay me". So you end up burning hard cash to make your payments + interest.

An equity investor theoretically has an interest in the enterprise actually succeeding.

It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_%28theory%29

oh my.

let's look at animals again, shall we. ants? bees? any form of colony or swarm? penguins? birds all over?

cherry pick examples to fit a narrative, nicely worded but utterly wrong.

for some things small and nimble is best. for other things, like flying to the moon or producing hardware scale is needed.

you don't like big corp environments? fine. but just like being a vegan it is a choice, not an absolute truth.

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