You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - The Diigo Meta page

• 20 Oct 09
  

  mikeem em

  business advice paul graham

• 29 Jul 09
  

  S C
• 07 May 09
  

  Leonardo Nobrega
  • each species thrives in groups of a certain size
  • each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
    size of the entire tree
  • 4 more annotations...
  • • In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally
    • He said he has
      learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has
      to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at
      least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
    • to have no
      structure: to have each group actually be independent
    • It will always
      suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization,
      the more it will suck.
• 11 Apr 09
  

  Todd Suomela

  by Paul Graham

  work freelance management culture entrepreneur startup freedom bosses

• 24 Jan 09
  

  Ken Sheppardson

• 07 Jan 09
  

  Pratik Stephen
  • groups of 8
    work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
    is really unwieldy.
  • If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
    marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
    expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
    think most will choose?
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
    • companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger,
      no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo
• 16 Dec 08
  

  Geekgirl 397

  management business paulgraham life jobs work blog article advice psychology productivity organization startup

• 09 Aug 08
  

  C P

  article

• 04 Aug 08
  

  Sudeep Bhaumick

  Blog Human_Behavior

  • Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
    each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas
    might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans
    also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
    hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
    experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
    work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
    is really unwieldy.
  • In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • 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. The people who've worked for a few years
      do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only
      because they're that much older.
    • Three
      months later they're transformed: they have so much more
      confidence
      that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
      [4]
      Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
      time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
      wild.
• 07 Jul 08
  

  Sean Fleming

  PaulGraham Entrepreneur

• 08 Jun 08
  

  Takuya Homma

  PaulGraham Entrepreneur

• 25 Apr 08
  

  Jessica Winblad
  • 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.
• 

  Chuck Brands
• 15 Apr 08
  

  Martin Koser

  large organizations weaken people's innovation capabilities as well as many other talents

  freelance bureaucracy collaboration knowledgework creativity innovation work career

• 13 Apr 08
  

  Daniel Jomphe

  entrepreneurship tips

  • Humans
    also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
    hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
    experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
    work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
    is really unwieldy.
  • Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
    together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
    working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
    person—the workers and manager would each share only one
    person's worth of freedom between them.
  • 13 more annotations...
  • • And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
      each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
      size of the entire tree.
    • 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 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.
    • It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group
      above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.
      Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.
    • It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work
      at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
      and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job
      equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
      only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
      malaise.
    • The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on
      programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new
      things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support
      people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a
      piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer
      working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
      And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each
      person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're
      going to face resistance when you do something new.
    • An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you're not allowed
      to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when
      you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.
      So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same
      way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.
    • You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size
      of company you work for. If you start the company, you'll have the
      most freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees you'll
      have almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company with
      100 people will feel different from one with 1000.
    • Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if
      they avoided tree structure. 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 is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves
      as sponges: they can stay small. If I'm right, then it really
      pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.
      Particularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly important
      to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
      less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
      them to solve a given problem.
      
    • The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately
      was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious
      programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than
      going to work at a big company. Certainly they'll learn more. They
      might even be better off financially. A lot of people in their
      early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even
      faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school.
      At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
      zero rather than negative.
    • The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of
      conservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companies
      made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
      made them work for the big companies in the first place. But
      certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen
      it burn off.
    • Founders arriving
      at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three
      months later they're transformed: they have so much more
      confidence
      that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
      [4]
      Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
      time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
      wild.
    • Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear
      that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
      in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to
      programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own
      startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
      the way people are meant to.
      
• 09 Apr 08
  

  Jeff Kubina

  business startup career management culture

• 01 Apr 08
  

  Martin Carel
  • The point is that a large organization is compelled
    by its structure to be one.
• 28 Mar 08
  

  Rafael Alvarado

  Paul_Graham agile programming work_practice

• 26 Mar 08
  

  Thomas Torfs

  business startup career work freelance self-employment self-improvement

• 

  Matt Vance
• 

  Adriana Lukas

  "In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally." So now I have an essay explaining away why I am so insane. love it!

  paulgraham work boss artifical food extremists companies natural delicious

• 25 Mar 08
  

  Lynette Webb

  career collaboration entrepreneurism

  • Working for a small company doesn t ensure freedom. The tree structure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom, not a lower bound. The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant. The point is that a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one.
• 24 Mar 08
  

  Wade Ren

  entrepreneurship start-up

  • What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of
    the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
    groups.
  • Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
    each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas
    might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans
    also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
    hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
    experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
    work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
    is really unwieldy.
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
      each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
      size of the entire tree
    • For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
      at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows
      that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in
      America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
      Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
      fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if
      you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
      find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
      "Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat
      what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
      weirdos in Berkeley.
      
      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.
      
      If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
      marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
      expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
      think most will choose?
      
      It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work
      at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
      and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job
      equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
      only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
      malaise.
      
      And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like
      the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority
      of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.
      In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
      
    • This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even
      in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who
      considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to
      work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there.
      He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing,
      and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes
      because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's
      code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead
      of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions
      imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a
      fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has
      learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has
      to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at
      least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
      
    • There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves
      as sponges: they can stay small. If I'm right, then it really
      pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.
      Particularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly important
      to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
      less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
      them to solve a given problem.
    • In an essay I wrote a couple years ago
      I advised graduating seniors
      to work for a couple years for another company before starting their
      own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want
      to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
      startup, go ahead.
• 

  Matthias Schwenk
• 23 Mar 08
  

  Fabio de Miranda

  What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root
  of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
  groups.

  work career

• 

  Thomas Vander Wal

  I am really impressed with this Paul Graham essay on development teams in large business. I have seen great developers lose their edge in large firms. I am intrigued by Paul's comment about flat development culture and market approach.

  advice tech dev developer enterprise technology development economics groups management entrepreneur employment culture business essay paulgraham projectmanagement

• 

  Steve Lynch

  2008 culture business management organization sociology

• 22 Mar 08
  

  elukka riikonen
• 

  Chris Weige

  anthropology commentary creativity ideas social work

• 

  commonpreyr

  work freelance corporations productivity Working

• 

  Janet Tokerud

  independent paulgraham selfemployed smallbusiness startup work

• 21 Mar 08
  

  Doug McCaughan

  business startup career work paulgraham culture jobs

• 

  Marcin Jagodziński

  career organization productivity startup

  • 
    What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of
    the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
    groups.
  • Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in
    groups of several hundred.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • A group of 10 managers is not merely
      a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really
      a group of groups.
    • once you've written a
      piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer
      working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
    • If you're not allowed
      to implement new ideas, you stop having them.
    • And vice versa: when
      you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do
    • companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger,
      no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. It's a
      consequence of the tree structure that every large organization is
      forced to adopt.
    • For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always
      suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization,
      the more it will suck.
• 

  kaketoe kaketoe

  boss corporate graham startup

  • An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you're not allowed
    to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when
    you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.
    So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same
    way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.
  • The head of a small company may still choose
    to be a tyrant
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • Work for another company if you want
      to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
      startup, go ahead.
    • The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately
      was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious
      programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than
      going to work at a big company.
    • The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of
      conservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companies
      made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
      made them work for the big companies in the first place. But
      certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen
      it burn off.
    • Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that
      convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small
      group, is the natural way for programmers to live.
    • In the first couple weeks of working on their own
      startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
      the way people are meant to.
• 

  Colas Nahaboo

  psychology

• 

  Adelbert G

  dailycheck toread paul graham productivity delicious original

• 

  Christopher Billich

  business culture work

• 

  a77ila

  quickd

  • These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your
    boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when
    you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
    something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention
    explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss
    represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely
    a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really
    a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
    together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
    working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
    person—the workers and manager would each share only one
    person's worth of freedom between them.
  • So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels
    both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels
    like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major
    is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
    syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,
    but is disastrously lacking in others.
    
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on
      programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new
      things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support
      people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a
      piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer
      working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
      And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each
      person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're
      going to face resistance when you do something new.
    • At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
      zero rather than negative.
• 

  Wei-Jing Zhu

  1-TeenVentures

• 

  Wei-Jing Zhu

  1-TeenVentures

• 

  Frank Colcord

  Parachute

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