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.
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.

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