
You weren't meant to have a boss - dfranke
http://paulgraham.com/boss.html
======
uuilly
I used to work for a defense company that eventually got bought by a mega
defense company. It was ~3000 people in various parts of the country and it
was started by a man who deeply believed in the power of the entrepreneurial
spirit. It had that free for all structure that PG says he'd never seen in a
tech company. It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the
same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for
beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to
bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights,
rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they
created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle
of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they
got bought. The good news is, the fist fights, duplicate (and sometimes
triplicate) efforts were stopped and everyone is one big happy family that
hasn't done anything new in 7 years. Their market share is in free fall but
they say it's fine b/c they are moving away from products in to large scale
integration which is too boring to even type about. All the cowboys have gone
to other places and I went to a startup. It was fun while it lasted.

~~~
ken
I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as
enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as
"like terrorist cells": it's understood (and encouraged) that 3 different
teams are all trying to implement the same thing, in completely different
languages and with completely different interfaces. They might not even know
the others exist, until they ship. Hopefully at least one will survive.

In some cases, more than one does. Amazon has at least 3 different data stores
you can use, last I saw.

~~~
ww
Theres a view in economics that you 'can not play market' within the
boundaries of the firm. That is to say if there is an overseeing committee
that can end a project prematurely then you are not really having market
forces operate 'within' the firm and are doomed to failure. There have been a
couple of companies that have tried to do this. It is documented in the
following book by Nicolai Foss:

[http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Economic-Organization-
Knowled...](http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Economic-Organization-Knowledge-
Economy/dp/0199205329/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206109584&sr=1-1)

~~~
BrandonM
Isn't it ironic that you say Amazon's strategy is "doomed to failure" at the
same time that you link to a book for sale on Amazon?

~~~
ww
The company(s) mentioned in the book still exist, but they no longer try to
'play market'. The more incentive you give people/subgroups to compete with
one another, the more incentive they have to _not_ share information(best
practices) with one another. Managers see this and reallocate resources.
Groups feel alienated that their resources are taken away from _their_ idea to
fund someone else's idea and then they go back to keeping their _real_ ideas
to themselves and/or starting a separate business outside of the parent firm.
Innovation in the mentioned companies increased dramatically when the 'play
market' strategy was initially adopted though.

~~~
raganwald
There's a certain 4 trillion dollar financial services firm I know. They
operate like this at a _country_ level: each country is graded against the
others on an elaborate score card. The idea is that when a country finds an
innovative way to "win" one year, althe others can use the idea the next year.

Only, the winning countries try (nicely) to sabotage the sharing process. For
example, Country "U" outsourced part of their self-service web applications to
a nice fellow I know living in Country "C." Although it is not in writing, the
understanding is that if he so much as has a coffee with anyone from that
company in Country "C," his home town, he is out of work.

Furthermore, the Country "C" guys don't really want to hire him, they're
afraid he'll report what they're doing back to Country "U," so when they ask
him out for coffee, all they really want to do is dangle contracts in front of
him while pumping him for information under the guise of establishing his
experience.

It sounds like a cheap spy novel, but it's business as usual when some bright
person at the top decides that a little competition is healthy :-)

------
prakash
"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."

I would say Mediocre hires hurt you _THRICE_. Twice for the reasons you
mention, and the third one is all the good folks leaving since they can't
stand mediocre people.

One big company that seems to do well, at least from the outside is Semco in
Brazil. Watch Ricardo Semler's "Leading by Omission":
<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/> and read his book "Maverick":
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553>. This is of course an anomaly since most
companies don't work this way.

~~~
arvid
I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can
check out their website: <http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/>

~~~
rms
Something about that design and the icons makes me feel vaguely happy. That's
a good emotion for an industrial equipment manufacturer to elicit...

------
ambition
Everything written in the article rings true. One effect he didn't mention is
that the poisonous confidence-destruction and the lack of learning are self-
reinforcing. It creates a cycle which discourages quitting.

I think, though, that the effect only hits ambitious, independent people.
Those with less ambition or less independence seem to enjoy themselves, and do
well. (There are also a few ambitious, independent folks, who aspire for the
top of the corporate ladder and have a good chance of making it. They do well
when their skills are matched to the needs of a large organization.)

I used to think that when big company employees "settled", it was a gradual
process that snuck up on them. Not always. I've actually had a conversation
with someone in which they told me about their conscious decision to settle --
that it was better to accept the circumstances and make the best of evenings
and weekends. She became upset when I tried to remind her of the higher
aspirations she had just the summer before.

[I work in a big company. I'm getting out in June when I'll have the funds to
not use credit cards.]

~~~
fendale
Woo, you sound just like me. I recall a conversation in the canteen with a
colleague recently where I said something along the lines of "... this place
is so mediocre ... there has to be something better ..." and she replied with
"well its just a job, you have to work somewhere, there are plenty of places
worse".

She has clearly decided to settle!

I also agree with the less ambitious people doing well - I liken it to Seth
Godin's book The Dip - those people are willing to lean into the organisation
and just settle for its way. The more ambitious can sometimes see just how
wrong things are and lean against it, hence doing badly in the company. If you
are going to do well in a big corporation, you have to learn to play by its
rules and settle unfortunately ... I haven't done that yet, but its a daily
struggle!

~~~
cnu
Most people I know of from college don't even care to look elsewhere for a
job. All they wish is to get into some big company and switch jobs every 2
years to another big company. Also for those people, getting into anything
small is not good enough to be told among friends.

------
crasch4
W.L. Gore and Associates
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates>) is a big company that
appears to try hard to avoid hierarchical structures. From a 2004 FastCompany
article (<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html>):

"So Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any
hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one
communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence,
he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To
promote this idea, he limited the size of teams -- keeping even the
manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most. That's small enough so
that people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on, and
who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished
-- whether it's creating an innovative product or handling the everyday
challenges of running a business."

Anyone who works for Gore care to comment on the actual practice?

~~~
PeeDee
I worked in the Gore HK office in the late 80's and even met the man himself.
He was adamant about keeping groups small; small enough that everyone knew
everyone else personally. New locations would start with about 10, and
whenever an office/factory grew larger than about 50 they would split into two
groups of 25. Another credo was that there were no "assistants" or staff
positions. Everyone either produced product or sold product. Two roles. There
were however senior and junior personnel, and decisions were made by rough
consensus among senior personnel. However, all remuneration was openly
discussed and agreed upon by the entire group in the context of production or
sales targets.

I liked being there, although my role as a freelance systems
analyst/programmer was not an authorised one.

------
fleaflicker
_"Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one..."_

My first job out of school was at IBM. This was invaluable not because I
learned a lot but because I witnessed firsthand the bureaucratic inertia
described in the article.

When I left to launch a startup, I never looked back or second-guessed myself
because I knew I wasn't missing anything.

~~~
Readmore
I'm also a recovering IBMer. It was awful... like 'Programming in a time of
Cholera'

~~~
sbraford
I'm a recovering SBCer (now AT&T, again?).

IBMers and SBCers compete over whose company was the basis for Office Space &
TPS Reports. (i.e. the TPS Report zero that started it all)

------
aflag
When I started reading this I thought it was going to suck. I thought he'd
rant on big companies employees and make startup founders seem cool because of
his background. When I was about half way through it started to change; what
Paul said really made a lot of sense.

I want to be a researcher, but I also want to make somewhat of a living before
getting a masters degree and stuff; so I can be completely independent. I
thought joining a big company would be a good start because it would pay me
good, I would be able to learn stuff and they could even help me out with my
masters degree.

What hadn't hit me up until now is that, by doing that, I wasn't getting
closer to my goal to be independent. I would just switch from the parent tree
to the company tree; different pressures, but the same dependence. I start to
think now that in order to be independent, to have the freedom of doing what
pleases you most, you have to start your own company. You have to be your own
means of survival. That's getting into the wild and finally living in a
democracy.

I'm disgressing a little now, but it's because of this thing someone told me
once. He made me realise that we actually live in a dictatorship most of the
time. Your parents tell you what to do, then your boss tells you what to do;
and you have very little say. In order to feel more like your opinions matter
and that you can actually do something about the world, I guess you have to
have the freedom to be able to say what you want, to code what you want, etc.

So, in the end, I was surprised. Very good article, as Paul usually writes.

------
JoeProgrammer
Unfortunately, student loans constrain the freedom of action of many recent
graduates. They have to have that income to make the payments, which can be
quite high.

This of course favors upper middle class people as young company founders.

~~~
pg
Yes, that is a real problem. I thought of mentioning this in the essay. The
problem is the same as with visas: the government's definition of work is a
job working for someone else.

I hope eventually they'll wise up and change the rules about student loans,
because the intent of the rules about repayment is not simply to get the money
back as soon as possible, but to discourage people from merely slacking after
college. And on that scale founders are actually doing better than regular
employees.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
How much of a hindrance are student loans to founders? Or inversely, how much
of an advantage is having no debt?

~~~
zinder
Well, in one sense, it's much easier having no debt. Imagine trying to found a
company if you owned a house with no mortgage, had a vegetable garden out
back, and owed nobody anything.

Realistically, what are your living expenses... how much money do you really
need to buy 3- 6- or even 48-months of your time?

Now imagine that you own no property of any sort, and have large loan payments
that you have to make every month. How much money do you really need to buy
even 3- or 6- months of your time.

The opportunity cost of starting the startup is roughly the same (adjustments
for interest between the riskfree rate and your credit rating
notwithstanding), but the actual number of dollars that have to come from
_somewhere_ is quite different indeed.

------
jimbokun
This made me think of something Peter Drucker wrote, and I think it came from
the article summarized here:

[http://knowledgeworks.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/article-
the-c...](http://knowledgeworks.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/article-the-coming-
of-the-new-organization-peter-drucker/)

pg says that the modern firm is the product of modern technology, but this
summary of Drucker's article points out that technology is also obviating the
need for much of the "middle management" layers that pg criticizes as anathema
to humankind's natural state.

I'm pretty sure somewhere Drucker also says that the only reason to keep
activities within a single firm is because the transaction costs are lower
than having activities performed by an outside firm. I think he also argued
that as transaction costs between firms fall due to technology, it makes sense
to "outsource" more and more, which of course we are seeing in today's
economy. Which suggests that we should see more small firms over time.

Too bad Drucker is no longer with us. I'm sure he would have a lot more
interesting things to say relevant to startups.

~~~
pg
I wouldn't say the modern firm is directly a product of modern technology. The
Roman army had the same tree structure. It's more that modern technology makes
it possible to produce things on a very large scale, and that means it pays to
have companies with thousands of employees, even though they are individually
only a fraction as productive as they might be.

------
dfranke
If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it:
rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just
have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls
allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines
about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in
charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired are basically unsupervised and work
for commission. The rest of the company is a bunch of small engineering teams
of up to 10. All functions other than sales and engineering are outsourced.
The most senior member of each team has hiring/firing authority for that team.
He gets to decide the size but 10 is the max. These generate their own ideas
and speak to the controlling committee only for budget requests. Salary is not
part of the budget request: everybody in the company gets the same salary.
Bonuses are awarded to teams that implement profitable ideas. More money goes
to bonuses than to salary. If a team shows a pattern of underperformance, the
committee fires the entire team. If this happens, they get 30 days notice that
they're going to be fired, and they can use that time to find jobs on other
teams within the company.

If I then had to scale this to 10,000, I still wouldn't add another layer of
management. Instead I'd just add more teams, and expand the controlling
committee to a confederation of committees, which all draw money from the same
pool but have specialized expertise. When teams request budget, they approach
the committee with the best understanding of their proposal.

The 1,000 person model looks a lot like a bunch of founding teams and one VC
firm. The 10,000 person model bears some resemblance to the federal
government, which is perhaps why an organization the size of the government
manages to function at all, however poorly.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
_If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people_

You might also want to read this: <http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Ricardo-
Semler/dp/0712678867>

~~~
dfranke
Just based on the summary, it sounds like he has a lot of good ideas and one
bad mistake: profit-sharing is socialized. So if the company does well then
the employees do well, but individual contributors would have trouble getting
rewarded.

~~~
ambition
It may not be as bad a mistake as you think. There's some experimental (if
unintuitive) evidence that rewarding individual contributions in organizations
is harmful, even to that individual's motivation. The extrinsic motivation
extinguishes the individual's intrinsic motivation.

Many high achievers have an attitude of "achievement for the sake of
achievement." Individual rewards crush that spirit.

Joel Spolsky wrote about it on more than one occasion. Here's one link:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html>

~~~
Alex3917
See also:

A) Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

B) Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory (Two Factor Theory). The idea is that
a very low salary can lead to dissatisfaction, but increasing the salary
beyond the required minimum isn't one of the things that increases happiness.
Link: <http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/herzberg/>

------
jcl
The idea that there is a certain "natural" size to groups of people reminds me
of the Monkeysphere essay:

<http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html>

The size of a monkeysphere is estimated to be 150 people, which is quite a bit
larger than the 10-person group Paul advocates, but I guess you need to know
at least a few people outside of work. :)

I wonder if the problem with large corporations is that you don't care about
the other people in them or that you feel the other people don't care about
you? Certainly the people in the highest positions can't care about everyone
under them -- assuming they can only care about 150 people -- so perhaps that
is the limiting factor of effective size.

~~~
pg
Dunbar's number is a limit on the size of a society, not on the size of a
group that can work together to complete a task.

~~~
imperator
So one might say that an optimal size of a business is 150 - family members -
external to business friends - significant acquaintances. With various
employees being more or less numerically involved in a company.

------
hunterjrj
I am a 27 year old programmer and have worked for two small companies ( < 20
employees ) and for one company of 200+ employees. The only thing I can say
about working for the large company is that it felt like breathing through a
straw. Go work for a small company or as Paul Graham suggests, go start up
your own. Leave the big companies for the burnt-out folk with kids and debt.

~~~
KB
I'm 26 and just passed my fifth year at a very large company (18000+), with
four years in IT and the past year in Software Engineering. I've been looking
for an oppurtunity at a smaller company, since my current one is stifling my
ability to learn and be productive.

The issue I'm finding is that small companies are typically looking for
someone with more experience than I could currently offer. Has anyone else
come across this issue? It seems to me (and others where I work) that we have
to somehow pay our dues and get experience at a large company before we gather
enough experience to become valuable assets to smaller companies.

~~~
pg
One route you could take would be to look for a startup with young founders.
They won't insist on experience, because they don't have it themselves.

Another would be just to look for a good startup. All a good startup cares
about is how good you are, not how many years it took you to get that way.

~~~
KB
Its also possible I haven't been looking in the right places either. From what
I've noticed, its hard to pinpoint jobs at small companies since they don't
seem to advertise as much as the larger ones.

However, Jamie from snaptalent was nice enough to email me and pointed me to
their job ads page. Unfortunately there's only one company on the east coast
listed so far, but I'm hoping once they get rolling with more job ads that my
chances for finding a small startup or company to work for will increase.

~~~
Xichekolas
You can also try:

<http://jobs.37signals.com/> (usually webapp jobs)

<http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/> (not always small companies)

~~~
KB
I keep my eye on the job boards for most of the major tech blogs and sites,
but even there it tends to be larger organizations.

The other issue would be the mass amounts of jobs posted for work in CA. I
would really like to stay here in the east (Boston) as oppose to moving
halfway across the country for a job that very well may exist where I'm
located already.

I think CA would be a great place to live, however it just doesn't fit into my
current situation at the moment.

Are there any other resources out there for startup type jobs other than the
major players (TechCruch, GigaOm, 37Signals, etc)?

------
brc
After reading all the nasty comments about this article on reddit and other
blogs, I can only come to one conclusion: none of them bothered to RTFA. I get
the point totally - humans don't work well when in large organizations. I've
gone from massive companies down to a organization of 1. I'm not as stable,
I'm more stressed, my income is lumpy. But I have ideas. Buckets and buckets
of ideas. I have so many I have to write them down in a book to stop them from
clouding my mind. And I have learnt - so much. Not so much about programming -
I already knew plenty on that subject. No, I have learnt about the 'way the
world really works'. I have learnt how to solve people's needs, how to sell
things, how to handle people who don't agree with you. I have learnt how to
dig deep and find the courage to keep plugging away, just so I can keep that
dark corporate cubicle and mindless 'team building' exercises at bay.

------
fleaflicker
Has anyone checked out the reddit comments for this same article? It's like
night and day.

<http://reddit.com/info/6cu0t/comments/>

~~~
Xichekolas
Oddly the thing that stood out in those comments was the discussion of living
expenses, and specifically health insurance.

Everyone is quoting things like $700/mo and $1100/mo. Even the guy with the
high deductible plan alluded to paying $116/mo for a $5k deductible.

Am I the only one that pays $55/mo for a $1k deductible plan? I must be lucky
or something. And that aside, seriously, you buy insurance for catastrophes...
not to save $150 on a doctors visit. Why the heck would you spend $1100/mo on
insurance?

No wonder these people think startups are hard. They'd need a VC round just to
cover their insurance premiums.

~~~
joshwa
A lot of people these days (myself included) have chronic conditions that
require ongoing regular doctor visits and/or medication. Even at a high
premium level, insurance is cheaper than paying out of pocket (my maintenance
medication costs $48k annually!).

I guess you could argue that that makes me not a good candidate for a
startup... which is why I still work for BigCo, and work on my startup at
night (N.B not the one currently listed in my profile).

~~~
Xichekolas
Ahhh, very true. I imagine it would be nearly impossible to get a plan outside
of a company with $48k guaranteed outlay, since you wouldn't have coworkers
helping to even out the cost for the insurance company. I guess there are
always government backed plans like COBRA for cases like that.

I think the best candidates for startups are the ones who actually make the
leap... everything else is accounting... best of luck to you!

~~~
joshwa
COBRA is pricey as hell! My COBRA premiums (if I had taken it when I left my
last job) would have been around $850/month.

This is why the company has to pay for this stuff. I'm pretty useless if I get
sick...

------
byrneseyeview
Bridgewater Associates is a large (~400 employees, $36 billion assets) hedge
fund that tries to avoid hierarchy:

<http://www.bwater.com/home/philosophy.aspx>

"Conflict in the pursuit of excellence is a terrific thing and is strongly
encouraged, in fact demanded. There should be no (or as little as possible)
hierarchy. Certainly there are organizational "superior-subordinate"
relationships; however, every "subordinate" is encouraged to argue with his or
her "superior" if he or she thinks they know the better way, and every
"superior" is required to encourage this."

~~~
nostrademons
I've got a friend that works for Bridgewater, and it's amazing the extent they
go to foster this independent culture. My friend can be kinda abrasive at
times - not really arrogant, but more an "I'm right, damnit, and I'm going to
be pedantic about it" personality. His first assignment was copy-editing some
client reports. He came back with a long list of grammatical mistakes in the
report, along with a lesson on proper grammar, for the fund manager. The fund
manager said, "This is excellent - keep up the good work," and made sure my
friend got his hands on all the reports going out...

~~~
byrneseyeview
That's excellent! How long has your friend been there (one issue with
Bridgewater is that I have met many people who worked there, and very few who
worked there for more than a year -- I think it's pretty jarring for most
people).

~~~
nostrademons
He graduated in 06 and started there soon after, so about a year and a half so
far. I think he really likes it...started out in reporting and I believe he's
now on the investment associate track, so obviously he's hoping to settle in
there. (He's also a foreigner though, and Bridgewater is sponsoring his visa,
so I don't think he could jump ship if he wanted to...)

------
zoltz
Let's assume humans are indeed "designed" to work in small groups of only 10
people, then at the bottom level of the company tree groups should only
consist of 10 people each. So far so good.

But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of
10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10
each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that
group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this
sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with
their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the
supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups
himself.

The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can
be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they
might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation
due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of
the leaves and company size can't be deduced.

------
kul
One of the things that drove me to leave Deutsche Bank was that I had much
less choice in who I got to work with. This is actually a big deal. By and
large, in a startup you choose who you work with (either by hiring them, or
being picky about which startup to join). In a big company, you have no real
say.

And it can be a real bummer not to work with dynamic, ambitious people.

------
abstractwater
I work for a large company and I also feel the way described in the article.
What baffles me the most is the constant need of approval in case I'm about to
do something that goes a little beyond the "company policies", like setting up
a public repository for code that's going to be released anyway.

Often these mysterious company policies are not explained in the first place,
yet I'm supposed to adhere to them. So I find myself pondering, "Is it ok to
do this?" Engineering-wise (and by common sense) it would be a no-brainer.
Then I waste time and energy asking approval. Sometimes I get denied and so I
wasted my whole train of thoughts related to an otherwise obvious choice. What
bothers me the most is that the majority of people seem numb to these
problems.

Why did you hire me if basically you're questioning my trust, and why are you
blocking me from doing what I'm supposed to do? Then why you invite me to
"fun" events afterwards?

------
libertarian
There are a couple of questions (otherwise great article). One small is right
only as long as it is economically viable. Do you believe Google would still
be viable as a search engine if they had _remained_ at 50-100 people size (or
whatever you think is the optimum size?)

Second, most YC companies don't yet have business models. That is not a knock
on them - I am simply making a statement of fact. Given that many (or most!)
are hoping for a nice "exit" from a large company, doesn't their success pre-
suppose the existence of large companies to take the other side of their exit
trade? In effect, does the YC model (mostly) require the continued existence
of large inefficient players? What happens when the (software & internet)
world were to be full of small, ultra-efficient start-ups? No exits? (the
second question is totally hypothetical - large firms do exist, but just
asking to clarify the argument myself).

~~~
pg
I wasn't saying big companies don't work, just that it's bad for one's brain
to work for them.

~~~
brent
I find this to be a major thesis in many of your essays, but I've got to
know... do you feel it would be bad for your brain to work in google research
or (gasp) microsoft research or academia? I mean, I would bet working for
Norvig is a more significant mental workout than founding many of the yc
companies.

~~~
pg
In earlier versions of the essay I had a sentence saying that in a
sufficiently pure research job, you're effectively working for yourself. I
don't know about Google specifically, but I get the impression Bell Labs at
its height was like that.

~~~
brent
I imagine Bell Labs would have been an incredible place if only based on
people that worked there. I wonder how close IBM and HP were at their research
peaks. Also, I should mention that I wasn't intentionally picking on yc
companies and perhaps that was the wrong choice. Some of the technology coming
out of a few of them seems to be more interesting than some of the best labs.
I know that isn't the goal, but it certainly isn't bad side effect! I really
only meant to pick on the droves of obscure, uninteresting <insert social
aspect here> startups.

------
CharlesEGrant
I roll my eyes whenever I see something like this ascribed to human nature and
evolution. Passing by the post hoc ergo propter hoc nature of the argument, it
doesn't allow for human diversity. Humans are very diverse, some of thrive in
small bands, and some of us thrive in huge hierarchical organizations. There
is no "one" human nature. Look at reproductive strategies: harems, polygamy,
polyandry, monogamy, serial monogamy, celibacy, all touted as by one group or
another as the one true, natural, reproductive strategy for humans. You could
argue that the evolution has best fit us to live in tropical savannas, but the
Inuit, Lapps, and Siberians would take it very much amiss if you told them
they should abandon the arctic because humans had not evolved to live there.
Evolutionary biology does not consist of telling "just so" stories to explain
the virtues of your tribe.

~~~
pg
What I would tell Siberians is to wear coats because humans had not evolved to
live there.

------
npk
In the context of "The people who come to us from big companies often seem
kind of conservative." --- how do founders coming out of academia fair?
Specifically, founders with, at least, a few years towards a phd.

~~~
pg
They seem smart but sometimes impractical. Fortunately smart people can learn
to be practical.

~~~
emfle
Can you give examples of impractical things they do? (Or practical things they
don't do).

------
astine
I think that this analysis only focuses on one half of the forces that direct
survival. Humans may work more efficiently as small groups, but we have also
formed into large hierarchical structures for as long as we have had history.
Egypt and Summaria were both hierarchically governed. Organizations survive by
becoming more efficient, but they also survive by have more labor available.
Napoleon would not have won a single battle if his soldiers had fought in
groups of 8 to 10.

I think that it depends more on the specifics of the situation and what you
are trying to accomplish. Large organizations have advantages that no small
organization can match. You gain your freedom at the price of security.

~~~
neilk
So what? Egypt and Sumeria were organized like North Korea today, worship of
the head of state. And Napoleon was a tyrant trying to impose his will on an
entire continent. If freedom is incompatible with Napoleonic dreams, that is
not a bug.

Freedom fighters have often chosen the guerilla way.

A better example for your point would be the Americans in WWII. But even then,
soldiers are not robots and the best commanders give their underlings the
freedom to get the job done.

~~~
astine
You're thoroughly missing my point. PG's argument is that man was designed,
via evolution, to live relatively autonomously. My point is that even a casual
glance at history disproves that. The German and Swiss states, for all their
autonomy, couldn't stand up to Napoleon's hierarchical tyranny. In fact, it
took a far more tyrannical society, Russia, to put Napoleon in his place.
Hierarchy is sometimes necessary for survival, and is thus favored by
evolution.

When we seek freedom, it is not because it is the evolutionarily superior
state. It is because their is a conflict between individual advantage and
collective advantage. When evaluating life decisions, you have to account for
both.

~~~
scottgnet
Because German and Swiss states couldn't stand up to a larger force organized
hierarchically is not proof that humans have _not_ evolved to work in small
groups, it is only very poor empirical evidence that a larger force with
better weapons can defeat a smaller, disorganized force.

As for why people seek freedom, I doubt most consciously think about it in
those terms. You seem to think that individuals ponder about the pros and cons
of going it alone or being part of a collective, but it just doesn't happen
that way. When you're brought up in a culture that is already one way or the
other, and that is all you know, you rarely choose because it's not even a
question that enters your mind.

I'd suggest reading Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn.

~~~
astine
The essential flaw in your logic is this: "evolved to" Evolution has neither
purpose nor end. That which is more 'fit' (a very vague term to be sure) is
what evolution favors. If a larger force with better weapons can defeat a
smaller, disorganized force, then evolution clearly favors the former.

Napoleon is a case example. There are many, many more I could call upon, but I
think a lesson in world history is beyond the scope of this debate.

------
johnyzee
And yet founders live almost exclusively on pizza...

~~~
kschrader
And Mt. Dew (or, when you're lower on money Citrus Drop), which is the epitome
of refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil

------
coglethorpe
>Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by evil companies
for the desperate and the foolish.

Best line of the whole article.

~~~
Xichekolas
Credit card _debt_ is foolish... credit cards themselves are great. Definitely
prefer to swipe plastic rather than carry around pieces of paper.

~~~
boucher
Thus the debit card was invented.

~~~
jamiequint
credit cards are great for building credit, which is useful for other things,
like buying a house

~~~
geebee
yeah, provided you pay it off. My brother called me while he was in college
and asked if he should get a credit card. I told him "if you can charge $20 a
month to it, and pay it off every month on time, then yes, get one. If you
can't, don't".

He was nervous about his organizational ability, and decided not to get one.
Four years later, he had a tough time getting an apartment in SF because he
had no credit.

It's stupid, and credit card companies definitely target college students
knowing that many of them will end up paying severe penalties and interest
charges. But the thing is, they'll give you a credit card because you're a
college student without the same credit history they'd want to see after
college. So if you have the discipline to charge very small amounts and always
pay it off on time, it is wise to get one.

------
diego
I agree with the sentiment of the article, although the title is a bit
misleading. It's not like you were meant to be a boss either, which is running
a company is about once you get past the startup stage. I'd say the message is
that if you can't be a boss yourself, try to make sure that your boss doesn't
have a boss (i.e. join an early-stage startup).

Large companies have many other drawbacks besides the hierarchical structure.
I've worked for companies of all sizes, and these are the things I
particularly disliked about large ones:

\- Information travels slowly up and back down. Decisions take time. For this
reason many projects, especially those having to do with rapidly changing
technologies, just cannot be done at large companies.

\- Sometimes your work gets lost in the noise. Your entire project may be
canceled and most of the company won't notice it. One of the perks of working
for a startup is the feeling of being in charge of things and knowing that
your work is immediately visible.

\- Human relationships do not respect the hierarchy, so there may be conflicts
between random pairs or groups of people. The larger the group, the higher the
complexity of politics. This non-linearity is perhaps the worst obstacle when
it comes to getting things done.

------
karcass
Some interesting problems require more than 8-10 people, no matter how
insanely great they are. I work at a highly interdisciplinary biotech startup.
My instrument SW team is eight guys, the tools-for-scientists team four,
mathematicians are about five, etc.; then you have a bunch of physicists,
chemists, biochemists, etc. etc. I'd rather suffer the problems of a large
company than work on a more pure software problem.

------
edw519
What specifically did the programmers in the cafe say or do to lead you to
believe that there was "something odd about them"? Perhaps you remember one or
two details that actually got you thinking about this.

~~~
pg
It was mainly their body language and facial expressions.

~~~
johnyzee
As a victim of several such team building ordeals I totally got that.

I imagine a sort of confused purposelessness with a touch of embarassment, all
concealed with forced cheer.

------
awg
Mr. Graham,

You write in your "cliff notes" follow-up to this essay,

"My guess is that this is an instance of a fairly common Internet phenomenon.
People are reacting to what they imagine I'd say in an essay on this
subject—that an essay comparing startup founders to corporate employees would
say that founders are great and corporate employees suck."

Is it wise to waste your precious time explaining yourself to any "reader" who
hopelessly injects his own peeves and anxieties into what others say, muting
intelligent discussion on any topic that Mr. reader happens to have strong
opinions about? I guess it is easier to thoughtlessly fire back than take any
of your suggestions under consideration.

You know this essay touches more than a few hot buttons. When you chisel away
at the social creed surrounding the safe job in our society, you're asking
many people to call into question a lifetime of decisions. Ones, I suspect,
that were made mostly out of fear of veering too far from a well-paved super
social highway promising happiness and fulfillment through Conformity rather
than Individual Desire. You're calling the bluff their life is literally based
upon, stripping away some of that veneer of dignity. If they fire back, it's
because they have nothing left to say and need to fill the emptiness inside.

If people worship the mavericks and company founders, it's because such
individuals exemplify attributes very far removed from the cowardice that most
people face in thesmelves even before their feet touch the floor out of bed
each morning. They may feel the energy of their own great potential, but have
painted themselves into a corner with what they regard as "acceptable"
behaviour and risk. So they stand in awe of the achievers and gawk at those
who try to be achievers, secretly praying for the day when it might someday be
their turn.

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful essays.

------
laudenslager
Back in the 70’s I started a burglar alarm company - I had the knowledge and
there was a need in my geographic area for another provider.

I’ve been self employed on and off ever since. At 63 I’m having trouble
finding a new business to start, not because I lack the drive, or ability to
start a company but in this location and economic times I’m having trouble
finding a way to leverage my knowledge and abilities into a new endeavor.

I suspect that a lot of your programers just haven’t found their “big idea”
yet. In computer related fields, the cost of entry is now so low that a huge
percentage of programers have some idea they are playing with on the side.
Like many actors, they will be overnight successes.

------
Mistone
in the notes of this essay there is a strong statement about not funding
startups with credit card debt. Just wondering if there is an acceptable limit
of cc debt to use to get from concept to prototype? Or if its all the same and
just a bad idea. beyong YC and friends & fam, there are limited options for
the small pop of cash that gives you the time required to work in your
startup. So far at my company we have been very tightly spending on a cc, not
incurred a lot of debt but still don't have the small cash cushion to ditch
the day job and jump in full time. sorry for the tangent.

~~~
nostrademons
One way to think about CC debt: if you fund your startup with credit cards,
you need to _guarantee_ that you'll grow earnings by at least 20%/year, just
to keep up with interest charges. If you can't do that, you're personally on
the hook for any shortfall, and have to make it up yourself out of future job
income (after compounding, no less).

There're very few startups where revenues are certain enough to take this
risk. Most likely, your startup will never make anything, and then credit card
debt for a startup is no different than credit card debt for a spending spree.
That's why startup founders are wary of debt financing. If you _can_ guarantee
that level of earnings growth (perhaps you have customers already lined up,
and just need to deliver on a well-understood technical problem), then it can
make sense.

------
paulrpotts
I keep reading negative comments about this posting, but I think I'm reading a
lot of defensiveness. I think it is important to keep in mind that, as I read
it at least, Paul is not trying to slam people who work for others. He's
really trying to inspire people, to get them to give themselves permission to
work for themselves instead.

If what you hear when you read this essay is a personal criticism of the
choices you've made in life, perhaps you should take a moment to evaluate
whether those negative thoughts are coming from the essay, or from within?

------
Jd
Have not the last 50,000 years of evolution primarily been of social
structures and culture?

Consequently, is being 'wild' necessarily a positive attribute?

Doesn't this (and comparisons to animals) to some degree reflect de-evolution?

~~~
neilk
Multicellular life is faster, smarter, and more successful than unicellular
life.

The corporation is usually way slower, dumber, and typically does not outlast
any of its component organisms.

The difference is that the components of the corporation are individually
intelligent and self-aware. The corporation's "thoughts" are comparatively
slow and stupid. Maybe one day there will be some Borg-like way of making
humans act together, which truly makes something smarter and more nimble than
any individual. But I don't think you can argue corporations represent the
next step in evolution.

~~~
CharlesEGrant
Argh! I hate these casual invocations of evolutionary biology that are really
self-serving fables. By numbers of individuals, diversity, and by mass,
bacteria and blue-green algae make up most of the biological world. Multi-
cellular life only appears dominant to you because that's who you eat and who
you mate with. Evolution cares not a whit for smart, dumb, slow, fast, it only
cares who has the most babies who live to make other babies. Making arguments
for the virtues of entrepreneurs is fine, just don't try to dress them up as
scientific truths, unless you actually can muster the evidence.

~~~
neilk
I do too... I thought I was arguing against one. But I see your point.

------
wumi
Has anyone else been to a Safari or seen wild life (read: Lions or Cheetahs)
in their natural habitat?

If you have, that metaphor of a caged Lion vs. a wild Lion is (almost) all you
need to extract out of this essay.

~~~
krishna2
I have been on African Safari as well and that point instantly resonated with
me. The 100s of 1000s of miles were theirs to freely roam around and do what
they wanted - and the humans who came to see them are the ones in the cages
(except that the cages moved around - in the form of a jeep with a guide).

I also used to wonder what is going on in the Lion's mind - some 10 jeeps
surrounding it while it is resting in the shade and some oohs-and-aahs (and
even though it is 1 pm, some idiot always has the flash-on by mistake).

~~~
wumi
I'll just say this.

When i was on the safari, our vehicle got stuck in the mud. There was a pride
of lions within 50 meters of our jeep. We had to get outside and push. One
member of our party was the look-out, and at one point yelled "the lion is
coming" at which point we all moved as fast as we had ever in our lives.

All the lioness did was get up and start pacing.

While I was at the zoo, there was a 3-year-old boy taunting the Lion in his 15
by 45 foot cage.

See the difference?

------
wumi
"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."

I believe Gore-Tex may work this way

------
menace
I don't disagree with the sentiment there's a small thing that I think is
slightly incorrect.

Baboons, particularly Hamadryas Baboons, can be found in troops ranging from 5
to 250 animals (although a troop of 400 has been reported). These troops have
a very strict hierarchy with about 4 "levels": a harem - containing one male
"follower" and up to ten females, two to three harems unite repeatedly to form
a clan, and two to four clans form a band.

Very large hierarchies do and can work in the wild, although they are rare or
last a limited period of time.

------
nendee
Hmmm. I don't think it takes brain surgery to figure out people are happier
when they own a piece of the pie (landowners vs owning land, Voltaire, etc) -
and obviously this means more when you are working in a small group that can
see results or achieve goals creatively and together. This article really only
address three divisions of labor - internet software service, defense
providers and investment banks. Which, at last check, combined employeed only
20% of the entire US workforce. To get into a larger, meaninigful discussion
on a subject that is studied across the world, you would have to understand
the dynamics of laborers, unions, operations and management. It's not as
simple as saying "If you build it, they will come". And, it's real hard to
feel sorry for white collar employees working for eBay, Google and Microsoft
when 10% of our country struggles to stay relevant at the poverty line. It
should be noted, that I've been both a successful start-up founder and a big
business employee.

I cite the comment above mine, haven't we all written a term paper like this
in college, titled "Utopia in the Workplace?". Paul, you should tour the John
Deere manufacturing plant in Illinois to see a large company, with the "old
school" top down management style - and try to figure out why that place is
thriving. Or the Kitchen Works in Elmira. Or the Soy Convertors in Iowa. On
and on.

------
RKN
A thoughtful essay, I agree with its spirit. Nicely written.

The arm-waving stuff about evolution disappointed me, tho. Supposedly, the
genes humans have are in aggregate woefully ill-suited for success in
modernity, at least this is what I hear from people who make similar arguments
relating to evolutionary psychology. Programming computers post dates by at
least 100K years the environment in which our genes were supposedly selected
for reproductive success. On theory, everyone of us ought to be clumsy at best
around computers, tho the evidence is all to the contrary.

Even granting your evolutionary premise tho, it has some problems. For one, I
think you overlook a number of notably spectacular successes in eusocial
species where size matters. Instead of lions in Africa, for instance, spend
some time observing an ant mound. I also wouldn't expect that reproductive
success and professional success would necessarily track each other. Or maybe
I misunderstood you.

My $0.02: I think fulfillment of the individual and the success of the
organization is more the result of the nature and motivations of the actual
individuals involved with it than, per se, the size of the organization.
Personally, I've worked as a programmer for big and small, but my best
experience was as a private contractor. The evolutionary equivalent of the
lone hawk if you'd like. (I'm now doing something ENTIRELY different).

I think most young programmers are well advised to spend some time in the box
before they can learn and appreciate thinking and working outside it.

------
scottgnet
I've thought about how we could structure a business in such a way that no
team became too large, and all functioned relatively independently across the
country or the globe. I called it a "federated" business, which had a
Constitution at its core that served the same purpose as the Constitution of
the United States: to hold together these "federated" business tribes as one
company. Each tribe did whatever work they wanted -- they had to find the work
and do it, but could always request assistance from other tribes in the
company who had expertise in areas they might need to complete a job. Any
individual or tribe would be free to leave at any time without any
restrictions. The only purpose of the "federal" part of the business would be
to manage office-type things like legal, payroll etc. and possibly maintain a
core tool kit that could be used by all of the others in their work. I figured
out how to map it to the current corporate structure: each tribe would form as
its own LLC; the core federated part would be an LLC as well, but would not
own the others. There would be an agreement signed between the "tribe" LLCs
and the federal LLC, but as I said, any of the tribal LLCs could "secede" at
any time, as long as they fulfilled any open obligations to other tribes'
customers. Also, all bylaws would restrict any tribe and the federal part of
the organization from going public, even if they seceded. That would be the
one restriction. I would only be interested in this kind of business if it
were for the long-term, and not with the goal of flipping or cashing out. Not
sure it would work as advertised, but it sure would be a cool experiment.

/s.

------
wave
The first thing you notice working at big companies is that they take away
your admin rights on your workstation. You can not be creative with a
restrictive environment. You are forced to use the tools everyone at the
company uses and force to think like everyone else.

For those who are working at small company, stay where you are. It is true you
don’t learn much at big companies. It is not much about how well you do
things, but it is how well you are connected and how well you can exaggerate.

------
vicaya
Not everyone is meant to be or want to be a startup founder either.

If you look at the history, most substantial technology innovations are not
from startups but universities and research labs of large companies.

Startups are more about the right idea (in business sense), the right time and
the right place than innovation and quality work. It's more like a monopoly
game than truly substantial and creative technical challenges. It attracts
more people who think they're good than they're actually good.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirts. For real hackers who're
incited/excited by the article to be a "founder", here're a few notes based on
real experience:

1\. Many top hackers are not interested in and bored by the financial aspect
of the business. But you have to learn the basics in order not to be taken
advantage of. It's not that hard to crack once you decide to bite the bullet.

2\. Pick your business partners carefully. Not just someone who's smart but
someone you can trust. To use a cliche, it's a jungle out there, which I could
only appreciate after experienced it the first-hand.

3\. If you want to go through the Y route, talk to the previous founders (esp.
not so successful ones). You learn the most from failures.

4\. Make sure you understand and make copies of every thing you sign.

5\. Beware of business people who boast photoshop chops.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I suspect that most good hackers can do well with the financial and legal
aspects of a business once they decide that it's an important system to
understand. Hacking a contract and hacking code are not all that different in
the skills required.

Still, having partners you can trust seems very important to me, too. Money
can either unite people or tear them apart. You have to know that your partner
has got your back.

~~~
vicaya
The point is every good hacker doesn't necessarily want to bother with
financial/legal aspects of a business, as they're not interesting to them. I
know a top hacker who's not only good at system abstractions but also knows
bare metal like the back of his hand, debugging live applications with heavy
OS interactions by patching running binary on the fly without needing to
lookup a reference. Everyone around him is in awe. However, he's not that
interested in money. He thinks he's rich enough with a few millions in options
and 300k in annual salary & bonuses. And he's happy with his job and his boss,
who, like everyone else, respects and pampers him. The big company can give
him resources a startup or smaller companies simply cannot afford. Why would
such a person do a startup?

The original article generalized too much, missing the most significant
contributions to the progress of technology from people who _like_ to work in
academia and large companies.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Oh, there are absolutely people who are not interested in founding a startup,
for many reasons. I'm just trying to say that hackers interested in becoming
founders have the skills and hopefully the drive to master the financial and
legal aspects. At least enough to avoid some of the major pitfalls. If they
aren't willing to face these aspects of founding a business then they should
definitely seek some other avenue of fulfillment. I think that hacking is a
necessary but not sufficient skill for becoming a successful founder.

------
mpgphd
The essay reminds me that autonomy is a glorious thing - we are ends in
ourselves, not someone else's means to an end. It takes courage to be
autonomous, both from the individual and from the group around that
individual. Teddy Roosevelt said it:

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit
belongs to the man actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and
sweat and blood; who strives valiantly ... who spends himself in a worthy
cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and
who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither
victory nor defeat."

Life itself requires audacity to be truly alive. Audacity, as you pointed out
needs no boss - no coach, no manager. It needs more than anything, freedom and
respect from others. This essay is one of enormous hope to me - young people I
work with are timid and aspire to the imprisoned safety of the cage not the
free ferocity of the wilderness. Too many aspire to be either the sheep or the
shepherd - to few aspire to be neither.

------
madgreek65
Excellent article. I am a lifelong corporate IT guy who has a life long
fantasy of working in a startup company. In my most recent job in which I have
been on for 13 years, the IT shop consisted of about 30 people when I started.
We were very entrepreneurial when I started and used to be rock stars who
would crank out solutions for the business. Now we are 200 people moving at
snail speed spending most of our time on compliance projects, infrastructure
upgrades, and mindless enhancements to monolithic systems. It is hard to
promote change because the status quo is rewarded. As I walk the halls, many
people look like they are serving time. Management (which includes me) is
always trying to foster innovation and new ideas. But only the newer employees
participate. They have not assimilated yet. I am sure after they hit the wall
a few times, they to will walk with slumped shoulders.

So your article hit home and was a great read. The next time I go to the zoo
and look at the lion in the cage, I will realize that I am looking in the
mirror.

<http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek>

~~~
madgreek65
Your article inspired this post on my blog.

[http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/programmers...](http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/programmers-
in-the-wild-23227)

------
smcnamara
Thanks for this Paul. I've spent time on both sides of the side spectrum in
addition to my own failed startup (but I'm not beaten yet!) and what you say
is at this point in my life glaringly obvious.

I'm making the jump this month from a (safe, established) monolith back to a
(exciting, dynamic, risky) small company and hope to be back on my own startup
path soon, and this post was a bit of inspiration precisely when I needed it.

------
adammichaelc
This article really touches on something I've thought a lot about. People are
supposed to be indepependent. The freedom-loving spark is in all of us, and
when we work for a behemoth organization or spend all day long taking orders
from some arbitrary boss, we lose something. We change somehow.

Not that following a great leader is a bad thing, because it's not. Following
a great leader is actually one of the best ways to learn (think getting
mentoring by a successful entrepreneur... or reading and trying to live by the
great works of Aristotle, Ghandi, Christ, etc.)

But there is a big difference between voluntarily choosing to follow a great
leader, and being told that you must follow a leader. And if you miss work for
3 days, "we'll find somebody else."

120 years ago, 90% of Americans owned their own land and their own companies
(usually farms).

Today, the opposite is true. 10% of Americans own their own land (sorry, a
$500,000 mortgage on a $501,000 house doesn't count. Try not paying your
mortgage for 3 months and see who owns that land)... and 10% of Americans have
their own companies.

Maybe Americans are mostly living below their potential today...

------
TimothyMayer
Nice essay, as usual. I've always found these to be a source of hope and
inspiration. At the end of the month, when I close the books on my company, I
like to sift through these writings for inspiration. Because he's right: there
is no guarantee you will be successful. I'm the partner in a struggling
chemical company. We actually make physical items, which makes us a rarity as
far as start-ups go.

------
spongefrob
You weren't meant to program computers either...

... nor, I daresay, were any of us meant for great wealth; which, as Graham
may yet demonstrate, is just a much a corruptor of character and insight as
poverty (if not more so...) Just as large corporations tend to stifle, indeed
put a halt to, the generation of ideas, so to does the imposition of large
sums of money. If that were not true, then the startups trajectory wouldn't
bend towards acquisition... (or, despite Grahams elisions, shall we call it
'surrender'? )

The whole point of evolution is to adapt and mutate and so there is no such
thing as 'normal' or 'meant to.' An interesting aspect of evolution is that we
get to thumb our noses at the very idea of 'normal' and that we get to shrug
off the very idea of 'meant to'.

Paul Graham has argued eloquently and succinctly this very line of reasoning
heretofore. It comes, thus, as a shock to read this essay, coming, as it does,
from the programmer who advocates bottom up design in opposition to top down
mandates. Of course, the point of evolution often contrasts harshly with the
point of cynicism: which is simply to justify any childishly satisfying, but
nonetheless, foul mood or thought. Or, as Mencken put it, ``The cynic is the
man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.''

So much of this essay strikes me as the worst form of 'sophistry at a
distance' that I scarce can credit Graham as the author. Surely some
philosophy undergrad, still pink and slightly damp behind the ears, has stolen
into Graham's study and slyly substituted his/her unfinished term paper for
some valuable slice of Graham wisdom. Perhaps a wily hacker is having sport of
Graham, and us, by subtly crafting an HTML parser that cleverly distorts, ever
so slightly, essays fed to it... The world waits, with held breath, for the
un-masking of the villain.

------
f_brandenberg
Yes. You weren't meant to have a boss, but get the feeling you think founders
are somehow better than the run of the mill coders, but that is just not the
case. We are all part of a system and need to work with each other. Hell, if I
had a 9 to 5, I'm sure I could be a better husband and father and golfer, but
I have worked an average of 12 hours a day for the last 10 years trying to be
an innovator and I'm probably not going to stop anytime soon.

Founders may have freedom of thought, but they don't have freedom of time
because they devote 90% of their time to their craft. It would seem that
founders are the ones missing out, unless you are talking about the MIT and
Stanford geniuses who's brilliance attracts funding.

I like what I do, but I don't think it is for everyone. If given a choice, I'd
be the VC who gets to pick which young guns have the best ideas and make them
share the wealth. The founders, who actually have to come up with the great
ideas and actually execute...they have the hard job.

------
meche
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean
by evolution.

Evolution is the change of a species over time--it does not have a
conciousness in order to "mean" to do things. The related reasoning in the
article appears to infer the superiority of the last 10,000+ years of "hunter-
gatherers" over the last few thousand years of larger organizations with
managers for a specific purpose (building pyramids, aquaducts, etc.)--but
these large public works projects are in fact the very hallmarks of the
advancement of evolution. I'm not saying that we were "meant" to work in large
organizations, but it is hard for your article to that conclusion using
evolution as a reason. Indeed, the concept of evolution would seem to
contradict your point. By definition, your ancient bands of hunter-gatherers
were less evolved than we technologists are today, and today the large
organizations (from government to google) reign supreme...therefore, large
organizations are more "evolved"...

~~~
pg
For large public works projects to reflect the advancement of actual
biological (rather than cultural) evolution, they'd have to affect people's
chance of having descendants.

There may have been some of that. Maybe people who could tolerate organization
into armies have been exterminating people who couldn't. But the time during
which that has been taking place is pretty short by evolutionary standards.

------
ecr
I don't think the evolutionary analysis works here. Small human groups on the
savanna only directly competed for resources with other small local groups.
Imagine if a single group, only 10% "better" than others, were able to catch
all the antelopes worldwide. Everyone else would have to find another niche.
Similarly, I might be confident I could be the best spreadsheet writer in
Peoria. I could "own" that market. But the entire spreadsheet market,
worldwide, is supplied by a few startups plus a few bigcorps plus a few open
source projects.

Corporations arose to enable and respond to global markets made possible by
industrialization. The Internet enables global marketing by small firms, but
doesn't protect them from global competition. Yes, individuals should be
encouraged to take a swing at forming a startup if they have some brilliant
new idea. But don't fault them for rationally choosing safety in a larger
group if they realize their ideas are not competitive on a global scale.

------
eddie_edwards
Paul, you should read some Stafford Beer - Brain of the Firm would be a good
start. He replaces your sentiment:

"each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the
entire tree"

With a theorem that states that the amount of freedom of each person is in
principle a computable function of the _purpose_ of the organization.

Beer describes how organizations could be run using a model called the Viable
System Model, which he hypothesises is not only sufficient but also necessary.

Large organizations do in fact seem to inhibit freedom to their own detriment,
but in Beer's view this is not an inevitable outcome of large organizations,
it is simply a failure to properly design them.

Anyway, I highly recommend his stuff. Brain of the Firm describes his main
theory, while Decision and Control is a fantastic voyage through his work in
cybernetics in the 50s and 60s. It's all highly thought-provoking stuff. I
tend to re-read his work every 3-4 years and always achieve new insight from
it.

------
taxalien
If you are interested in this subject, then a much more interesting reading
about this subject can be read in John Viney's book Drive. I wish I had
completed reading that book many years ago, yet I stalled and failed to read
the final chapters that mention all that Paul has written but with a lot more
explanation as to why things are the way they are. Groups are 7, 7x7 are
tribes and beyond that you have hierarchies. Anyone who has worked for or come
into contact with these different types of companies, eg. accenture will
immediately spot the difference. All software companies function well up to
tribe level, beyond that it gets very complicated and unattractive. A
succesfull company should always strive to build well functioning tribes and
keep hierarcial aspects of a company as transparent and non-intrusive as
possible. IT shops that try to reorganise into hierarchies are destined to
destroy themselves and if your's is, leave now.

------
jbrinnand
Thanks for the article. It bears out the experiences I have had working for
small and large companies. Engineers in startups are closer to the business
and (sometimes) to the customer. They are solving real problems and inventing
new things. Though it can be stressful, it also gives you a sense of worth.
The other thing is does is allow you to "play" in the sense of being creating
- making new things and having fun doing it.

Large companies tend to be political. Folks want position, title, etc. As one
person put it - "I handle 250 off-shore engineers". My instant reaction was
"but what have you, personally, built today."

There is the notion that hierarchies are good. That as you move away from
coding you are "rising" in the hierarchy. This substitution of image for
ability while gratifying to the ego, kills creativity and promotes mediocrity.

As you state, and experience bears it out: software works best with core
(small) teams with creative innovate people working for a common goal.

------
juanpablo
"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. (...) But I don't know any
technology companies that have done it."

I was thinking about this part and I realize Y Combinator doesn't look too
different from that.

------
jeremymooer
Great article. a) I liked the HFC / food comparisons. b) I've been thinking a
ton about the relationship between maslow's hierarchy of needs and the needs
of groups (and, potentially, their parallelism and that parallelism's
relationship to maturity and intelligence / technological singularity).
anyway... i dug (one g, not two) it.

------
davo11
I'm not sure if you have to go back as far as the savanna for a comparison.
I'd regard the lowest level in corporates as servants of the boss, the bosses
job is to fight off the other bosses and acquire resources for his people, so
that he can acquire more stuff and convince his bosses that he can use the
resources more efficiently.

Corporates are more a feudal hierarchy, whereas startups I liken to the old
guilds of Europe that evolved out of the feudal system, it has been said that
programming is one of the few crafts left, and so the comparison may be
appropriate. The guilds occurred because the craftsmen had skills that weren't
available to all, and so could demand a premium for there services, much like
programming (and writing, and graphic design - witness the recent writers
strike)

Maybe there is a new republic on the way all we need is to lop off the heads
of a few managers :-). Let them eat cake!

------
Fred_Schoeneman
Paul,

Good essay. I apologize for seeming nitpicky, but worry you may be encouraging
misunderstanding about the type of person who succeeds at sales inside a large
company:

<blockquote>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. </blockquote>

Sales people actually do build things. The things they build are called client
relationships. Each one is new and different in some way. Once the
relationship is created, upselling is pretty easy to do, as are yearly
renewals. Often, these renewals are sent over to the account management team
and taken out of the hands of sales.

There's actually quite a bit of strategy involved in creating these
relationships, especially for a complex sale -- complex in terms of the
organizational structure of the customer and the technology of the product.
There's an awful lot of time spent thinking about what questions to ask
different people in the organization and when in order to find their specific
problems and elicit the specific needs. Only after you know what you need to
know about the organization and the people in it do you pitch. A lot of these
problems and needs are similar, but the pitch has to be tailored to what they
have told you. This is how you show the customer respect, and build trust. A
lot of it is subconscious but a lot of it is learned behavior.

Furthermore, sales at a large company can be quite entrepreneurial. You either
make your numbers or you don't. If you don't, you get fired. If you exceed
them by a large enough margin, you get to skip sales meetings and show up
whenever you feel like it.

This is the first time I've commented on one of your essays, but I've bought
about 5 copies of your collection for friends.

------
bumzo
Brilliant article and well documented. I have always believed that nature
always has answers to very complex human queries and you brought this out well
in comparing organisation structures with animals that thrive in the jungle
and wilderness!! ... i like!

~~~
the_Tzar
You should read about eckart wintzen -edit, with you I mean Paul Graham. He
founded BSO - it-company- in the Netherlands, now known as part of Atos
Origin, but lost it old strategy of staying small while growing big, but that
old strategy is very interesting.

------
blored
Another appeal of big companies that wasn't touched on in the essay is that
'everybody's doing it'. I would argue that in addition to the economies of
scale of mass production a large reason why you see people in corporations,
eating crappy foods, and even wearing the same clothes is because 'everybody's
doing it'.

~~~
ivankirigin
There is some sound evolutionary reasoning in doing what lots of other people
are doing. With the ease of living today and the massive amount of information
available, the thinking is anachronistic. Too bad there are so many things
that we're hard wired to do.

------
zeusprod
Both Google and Oracle try to use the "market approach" with almost no
managers cited as a possibility in the article. At Google, it seems to lead to
a lot of people with no direction and a lot of projects with inadequate
resources. At Oracle, it led to outright warfare between departments and a
total lack of cooperation. The difference is that at Google, failing didn't
cost you your job. At Oracle, it did. So Googler's were independent but didn't
have to compete for scarce resources the way Oracle people did. People seemed
like happy lions at Google. They seemed miserable at Oracle, like bands of
warring chimps always afraid of being annihilated by those in the next cubicle
over.

------
paidTroll
reposted from <http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3721> \--- [-] [new] aangel on
March 21, 2008 - 11:07am | Permalink ... Also, personally I am uninterested in
eliminating hierarchy. Hierarchies are very efficient ways to organize to
produce results. In particular, they allow for accountability, that magical
quality of something being "count-able" and thus able to be quantified.
Quantification and lines of responsibility for those quantities are what make
managing large endeavors possible. There is on the opposite spectrum the "open
source" movement or "hive" approach to accomplishing large projects, but even
in those systems often you'll find a person or persons at the top who help
direct the system as a whole and frequently they have the final call for a
proscribed set of decisions.

When done right (and it is done right in many places), individuals perform
better when accountability is present. They are clear on their tasks and given
the resources (or not, as the case may be) to accomplish them they are able to
use their commitment and ingenuity and drive to accomplish them. People who
are unclear on their tasks report that they are unsatisfied and frustrated
with the system; anyone who has had conflicting directives from an employer
will appreciate that.

It's possible to spread accountability across multiple individuals and
strictly speaking accountability isn't by definition an individual phenomenon.
I can be accountable for the condition of the environment — but so can anyone
else and everyone else if they accept by the group the role of being
accountable.

But it does take a great deal more effort to manage an endeavor when
accountabilities are spread across more people simply because the
communication overhead increases to make sure omissions don't occur because
each accountable persons thinks that "the other person was handling that." For
that reason I will always set up projects (and advise my clients to do the
same) where it is quite clear who is accountable for what and for whom — in
other words, a hierarchical system.

------
connellybarnes
One counterexample to your theory is that if bosses limit autonomy, then large
universities should limit autonomy significantly; however, they're generous in
autonomy.

Now on the theory underlying your essays.

If it's barbaric to work, then one should note that it's feasible to stop
working immediately, without significant wealth. It can be done piecewise:
many of my friends save up and travel for a year or two, or get schools to pay
for their traveling. Assuming one is investing, and not increasing spending,
it will get easier rather than harder to take more and more time off from jobs
over the years. Of course most people shoot themselves in the foot by taking
out loans or increasing spending, but that's their problem.

If autonomy is important, then why assume startups and develop lots of minor
contradictions with autonomy? Why not assume autonomy, and see where this
leads?

Given your value set, which seems centered around autonomy and
creating/hacking, I can't see why you promote startups as a lone solution
rather than promoting a variety of solutions. For example, living cheaply,
moving to cheaper nations, taking years off to travel, only reproducing when
one's children need no longer work (so as to make the problem of work globally
and locally decrease, rather than increase), working to bring high tech to
areas without it (which might give different kinds of autonomy, as well as
cheap living), working contract type jobs where taking say six months off
isn't a problem, working in journalism in the areas of high tech or art (more
traveling, less pay), or working in academia, where the problems with autonomy
go away and hence work becomes non-pernicious.

Your work with startups is really great, but I think there are lots of other
options that are equally consistent with the values of long-term autonomy and
creating/hacking. I don't see that you have any particular duty to present
these options, but I do think that hackers should be trying to increase the
sphere of jobs known to be consistent with their values, by discussing them
publicly.

------
cleyva
I love the analogy about lions in the wild. When you are living by your wits,
there is a sense of "apprehension" (not sure I would call it fear) but that is
where the adrenaline comes from and also the sense of freedom. You are (more
or less) in control of your own destiny.

I am a veteran of the tech industry. Started a few companies and consulted for
a twenty year period. I haven't had boss (the wife excluded) during the entire
time except for a stint with Shell Oil out of school. Just recently graduated
from law school (went back as an "old man") and am in the process of launching
a "digital law practice" that feels in many ways like a tech startup. We are
doing it completing "on the cloud" with virtual offices in a couple of
states.It has gotten a lot easier (still not "easy") to do!

------
akmits
I think I found a middle ground before I started my startup. I spent about 10
yrs of early career in so called big companies. And I agree with most of what
you said in article. That place is no good for creative programmers.

My middle ground was to "toy with my own ideas" in my own (and sometimes on
company's ;)) time. While the big company job paid me well, my sharpness was
maintained by own small projects.

10 yrs later, I couldn't take it anymore. I also had some cash and started my
own startup. And needless to say, I think I am doing well. I also do not think
growing big is goal of my startup.

------
skyshine
You really should read up on the work of Clare Graves. Whether people work
better independently or with a boss is dependant on their dominant 'values'
system - this can change but does so slowly. As people grow through life we
develop through psychological states that oscillate between 'we' centred and
'I' centred. There are four main values systems that a programmer is likely to
be inhabiting. In the first(DQ) a boss is essential. The second(ER) will work
very well as their own boss. The third(FS) craves peer support - but not a
boss. The fourth(GT) can work in either way - as long as they don't get board
because they are out of there if they do.

(in reality people are complicated and can be inhabiting multiple values
systems - but most have a dominant one.)

------
onnb
"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."

one fundamental difference between managers one level up and beyond and
programmers is that peer collaboration amongst managers is _much-much-much_
less common than peer collaboration between programmers. This is inversely
proportional the higher you go up the hierarchy. it seams to be due to the
fact that managers have to deal with that one extra dimension of that
programmers don't have to. Apart from managing their own bosses and having
peers, they also have the extra dimension of managing their own team or group.

------
TestOneTwo
I think this is brilliant, because I have a friend who was recently fired
because he is basically smarter and more brilliant than anyone else in his
"programming" group. We work for a Fortune 100 "technology" company in which
the technical manager above him does not know a single programming language.
If you can imagine how demoralizing that is. I am convinced that they got rid
of him so they could outsource the actual work to India, while maintaining
their cushy managerial jobs doing nothing. In the meantime, the morale of the
rest of the real programming team is plummeting, and the managers are leading
blindly, because they do not know how to offer real technical solutions. Talk
about DUMB large companies!

------
rtwolf
Your point about being more worried and yet happier at the same time is
totally possible. According to the Big Five Personality trait theory from
personality psychology, good emotions and negative emotions are two seperate
scales, not one scale. Good emotion is Extraversion and bad emotion is
Neurotocism. link here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits>

Also, the two biggest things that correlate with success (three overall, two
presonality) are openness to new experiences (creativity) and
conscientiousness (discipline and willingness to work hard). The other one is
intelligence. I reckon YC weeds for those kinds of people.

------
RAGZ
That was a great post, and I recognized themes from the books: "The Tipping
Point", and "Freakonomics". What I like the most about Y combinator, from an
observers standpoint, is that there is an offered solution to the
entrepreneur's inability to raise capital with no track record. Other micro-
investment and advisory groups are popping up all over the place, and this
will stimulate more entrepreneurs to take a chance on themselves.

Couple comments here and what's written in Paul's post allude to our
capitalistic consumption-based society. I think Annie sums the state of our
world's affairs up pretty well, and you can see the relation to different
aspects of your lives and big business at, <http://storyofstuff.com/>.

My problem is the lack of solutions that I see offered by those that raise
objections to the status quo. Its good to make others aware, but always go the
extra mile and offer a suggestion to change what you feel is so messed up.

That is what is missing in our 2008 elections. Just look at Obama and Hillary
sputter about what they intend to do, with great passion. However, they never
actually say how America will get out of Iraq and what will become of the
Iraqis, how to fund the health care and education programs they propose, or
what solution they’ll put in place to get the economy rolling again. All I
hear is why race and sex matter so much in this election, and how historic it
will be when a woman, or black man becomes president.

Those are not reasons to be America’s president! I don’t care what color,
size, sexual preference, or country of origin our next president has. I want
to know how they’re going to fix this mess.

As a startup founder, I keep confidence by following several principles:

1) "Success is merely others recognizing what you knew you had inside you the
whole time." \- Will Smith

2) "Plan your solutions for the worst, and leave hope to others." \- Craig
Benson, founder of Cabletron

3) "Champions take chances and pressure is a privilege." \- Sharapova speech
after winning the last Australian Open

------
ClydeB
The challenge I see is how to do a really big project with small independent
groups of people. Open source is one concept that helps. In that paradigm, not
everyone has to start from scratch. You can grab someone else's code and add
functionality to it.

My pet project of the moment is to develop an "Industry wide SOA" with a
defined interface between the services. This would allow entry into (in this
case the medical) industry by smaller groups that can't do it all. See the
beginning of the idea at: [http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/km/med-
research/archives/open-soa...](http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/km/med-
research/archives/open-soa-as-a-model-for-medical-research-systems-21730)

------
leftside
I think Jeff Atwood has a good point, in that your essay does have this sort
of lofty view of startup founders, and implied condescension to the poor sods
who didn't do that. That may not have been what you meant, but that's
certainly how it comes across to someone with a more neutral view of startup
culture. Your addendum doesn't really change that, because you're still
positing a dichotomy of what software engineers can be: EITHER we're go-getter
startup founders, XOR we're caged animals suffering as our souls slowly die,
depending on which environment we end up in. In drawing those lines, I think
you're missing a pretty wide range of human experience.

------
jsc
Great essay.

I work at university (as assistant prof. in CS, not in US), and it feels a lot
like working in a big corporation.

The difference is that we are free to do what we want. But this is because
nobody cares about what we do, so it might be even worse in the long term.

------
ieclectic
Paul

I couldn't agree more, although my background in advertising was inverse as
well. From the world's largest agency (3 years at JWT), I spent 10 years at a
mid-sized outfit, and then I finally put my name on the door when I was in my
mid-thirties. What may make this different than programming, is that in
agencies we all tend to be given as much room to create as possible (the
exception being at JWT). However, to live is to create. Humans are in their
soul creative, as that is part of the life force, the source. Let that atrophy
and you become a waking/walking part of a whole. I love both your analogy to
animals and food. Great Post! ieclectic.com

------
chutla
Hi Paul:

    
    
       I like what you said about lions.  Here's a little essay I did on cats a while ago.  It should ring a bell or two.
    

Eric

...... I’ve discovered that the way people react to cats is a good indicator
of how they will react to people with vision. A certain number of people are
totally freaked out by cats. These same people are freaked out by visionaries.
This is really unfortunate. In reality, cats have at least seven admirable
qualities that every person who would desire vision would do well to emulate.
First: Cats are nocturnal creatures. When everyone else is asleep, the cat is
alert and aware. Likewise, visionaries do their best work when everyone else
is sleeping. You snooze, you lose. Second: Cats have astonishing eyesight.
They see things nobody else sees. They are particularly sensitive to things
that change; their eyes are custom-made to detect the slightest movement. On
the other hand, they are totally colorblind. They are not distracted by the
showy, the colorful, and the flashy. They only see what is important to see.
Third: Cats are totally oblivious to public opinion. A cat neither knows nor
cares what anyone thinks about him. He simply goes about his business. He
doesn’t surround himself with yes-men (or yes-cats). You will never see a
committee of cats. Cats never ask permission. Prophets and visionaries,
likewise, have a gift for thinking on their own. Fourth: Cats slip into and
out of tight spaces with ease. They are lean, mean, and adaptable. They are
totally unencumbered by entourages and bureaucracy. Fifth: Cats have
insatiable curiosity. If something in their universe changes in the least,
they want to know why. They know there’s always something out there to
explore. They take nothing for granted. Sixth: Cats are quiet (for the most
part). They don’t waste a lot of energy bragging about their exploits before
the fact, or trying to explain them afterwards. They know that nobody would
understand them, anyway. And finally and possibly most importantly: Cats
tithe. In fact, a cat will usually leave considerably more than a tenth of his
latest hunt on your doorstep. You may not feel you have any pressing need for
a third of a gopher, but that’s entirely beside the point. A cat understands a
tithe is not for your benefit, but for his.

------
chutla
Hi Paul: As always your essay is right on the money. I've worked for big
companies and I've worked for small ones, and let me tell you, small is
better. I've heard it described like this. A big company is like an engine
with a monstrous flywheel. If a couple of cylinders are misfiring (or not
firing at all) you really don't even notice. In fact EVERY cylinder can loaf
along at pretty mediocre performance, and the flywheel will still spin. The
problem is, most companies interpret a spinning flywheel as a useful function
in itself. They don't realize there's no useful load attached to the engine.

------
tonystubblebine
Paul, I think you need to take the next step here which is getting out of the
venture business. The whole venture industry is based on your startup founders
becoming bosses or being acquired by companies with bosses. Even if they end
up rich afterward, the availability of the money is directly tied to other
programmers getting duped into working unnaturally (with bosses). Have you
considered leading your startups toward a small business path? More here:
[http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2008/03/take-the-
next-s...](http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2008/03/take-the-next-step-
paul/)

~~~
pg
We actively encourage startups to stay as small as possible for as long as
possible. And like all investors we would prefer the startups we fund to go
public rather than get acquired. I bet if you outsourced all the inessential
stuff you could grow a company to that stage without needing more than 150
people, which you could do with only two layers.

------
gnudiff
[updated]: for some reason wuth all this login/acct creation, i lost first
half of the comment. here it is:

I liked the essay even tho toying with the word "natural" is pretty funny,
considering Paul's own later article on debating and arguments.

However, to talk about the main point: show me any startup/group that has
succesfully REMAINED small as their service/business started to succeed and
expand.

There is an upper limit of task switching and competence one can achieve in
diverse areas.8-10 people? Fair enough until one after another they start
doing something completely unrelated to their core professions just because
the idea is to keep it small.

------
tbourdon
I usually take PG with a grain of salt but he hit the nail on the head with
this one. Another phenomenon I've seen when working in larger
groups/organizations is the predatory ways developers will pursue the
core/api/library work so as to expand their freedom and limit their dependence
on others. The essay's comments about the programmer at Google reminded me of
this as I've seen it time and time again in my career. Whereas in the smaller
groups/companies I've worked, all the developers were responsible for the
entire stack. It felt more communal and I think the groups were healthier and
more productive.

------
chiliberto
Whew! Brilliant article. I've been having a lot of conversations about this
lately. I'm a freelancer. I became one because I wanted to get out of the
cubicle. Now I'm doing all sorts of stuff. I'm working on amazing projects,
things I never planned on (or could even conceive of.)

The hard part is that I'm working a ton. But I love it! I'm happier than I've
ever been. I feel stronger. I feel like I can do anything--and I will, without
hesitation. I am worried about the future at times. But I guess that comes
with being in the wild, like the lions you're talking about. Great analogy!
That really pumps me up.

------
thingsilearned
This is now one of my favorites. Could not agree more. You sum up very well my
reasons for leaving IBM to do a startup.

I keep trying to give my friends who're still there and working for other
companies this message. They don't get it.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Do they not get it, or are they unwilling to? Admitting to yourself that you
want to change is a hard step to take.

I think the people to whom this advice applies already know that something is
wrong, and that there must be something better than the corporate monotony.
All they need is some encouragement, and a bit of a support network.

------
Mishon8
Great essay thanks Paul. There are some who prefer to have a boss. I have
managed people who just want to come to work and be told what to do, to
function and know exactly what they are to do and that they will be paid for
it under defined terms. These people don't like risk (maybe they have enough
in other parts of their lives) or don't have the creative gumption (passion)
to want to do their own thing. Either way, bosses have a place. Sad thing is
for clients, you end up paying a lot for the infrastructure required to move
these people collectively to some productive end.

------
xcombinator
Thanks for the article. I found your articles professional quality and for
free. :-)

My father worked for a chemical company(10000 workers in Asturias, Spain) as
chemist . He realize that he could buy a conventional ceramic oven for doing
the same that another specific one that costed 100 times more. He tried to
convince management. They denied the permission.

He tried again with different ideas, it never worked.

PD: Well, it worked better in another (later) smaller(100) company. The trick
if he had a good idea, was to say it was an american method (Seems they didn't
trust in local intelligence, this was in Madrid, Spain)

------
Elepsis
Footnote [1] ("When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a
certain way, I mean by evolution.") makes me wonder...

If the most prevalent state of affairs at present is that people go on to work
at large companies, and by most accounts these people are reasonably
successful (in fact, in a reproductive sense they may be even more successful
than the average startup founder, since they have more time to pursue
relationships), wouldn't one logically assume that over time the footnote, and
the point of the article that it isn't how humans evolved to work, no longer
hold true?

------
jgr
M0 theory intro
[http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/r1/intro.h...](http://www.buildfreedom.com/content/reciprocality/r1/intro.html)
[http://www.datamodel.co.uk/Reciprocality/www.reciprocality.o...](http://www.datamodel.co.uk/Reciprocality/www.reciprocality.org/)

The idea that folks become addicted to boredom or ritual via producing
dopamine. People have suggested that startups are run by "mappers"
(associative thinkers) then are taken over by packers (people who like ritual,
rote-work).

Many techies are "natural immunes".

------
bricoleur
I don't agree with Paul's argument as to why others won't feel the pinch: "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." I don't agree with this
characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that
you never <span style="font-style:italic;">have</span> to write the same code
again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper
around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you
write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a
sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have
never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into
an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely
new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for
responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul
singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts
of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry
person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to
the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen
sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding
an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these
groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at
startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things
like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a
good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in
all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe. More
at: [http://www.bricoleur.org/2008/03/graham-dont-work-for-
compan...](http://www.bricoleur.org/2008/03/graham-dont-work-for-company.html)

------
benjaminclemens
Ripping off Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, he points out that
sharing sites like flickr allow groups of large size to collaborate
effortlessly around some tasks (his example is people taking pictures of the
Mermaid Parade in NYC) without having a boss or even knowing each other, on
Flickr through tags. More tools like Flickr could supplant some of the
hierarchy in large or medium size companies. Why shouldn't a company be able
to be a large group of individuals that self-organize like the people working
on Linux have?

------
qooiii
The assumption seems to be that only smart programmers will read these essays.
That's maybe 10% of programmers or less (maybe a hit count would help
estimate?).

Big companies are all about efficiency through division of labor. They want
guys who will write uninteresting Java applications for 10 years without
complaining. But for a few thousand dollars a year more (especially if you're
talking entry-level), they can hire a top-10% person overqualified for the
position, just in case they need the talent.

------
scorpion032
Brilliant! For sometime now, I have been contemplating working for a big
company or starting something myself. This is if not anything more, a trigger.
Thanks for all that u write!

------
never-was
I work for a Large Auto Rental Company. We need some unbridled programmers. We
have a HUGE IT dept, but I don't know what they do. "Managers" sit for hours
transcribing data from one program in the computer into another. Hours, days,
careers, lives wasted doing what a patch of VBA should be burping onto screens
whenever desired. The veterans have never seen what a computer can do, THEY do
it. They even use floppies twenty times a day. Please send me a cowboy
programmer.

~~~
papy
You don't need a cowboy programmer! You need to fire the IT boss. Also you
should fire the big-boss because he hired and kept the one who was in charge
of IT. The mediocrity comes ALWAYS from the top. Luckily for you the market in
which you are is more juicy than your company can suck. So it survives even
being inefficient!

------
suzymiller
It's the same with schools. My kids are at an eco school with a maximum of 12
in a class, and 3 classes in the whole school, by choice. They will not
'expand' but encourage other schools to start up and follow their model. It is
all about sustainability. Like the Transition Towns initiative - small
communities leading the way, because governments don't initiate. They don't
lead. <http://www.transitiontowns.org/>

------
keshet
As I read this article, I realized that if you scale its message up to include
not just companies, but the way modern society is structured, you will see
exactly the arguments presented by Theodore Kaczynski:
[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future).
If you read his words (ignore his actions for the moment), he is saying the
same thing about society in general.

------
kyto
> The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers

It depends on how you define 'restriveness'. Sure in a large company it's
difficult to make the types of decisions that will affect the whole
organisation. On the other hand in a small company you are typically very
restricted in terms of the numbers of users who you can make a positive
difference on their lives.

Startups are typically experiments to see if there is any mass appeal. Large
companies actually change the world.

------
1le
I agree, mostly... Anytime you work for anyone else you give up a part of
yourself. The more they pay you, the more of your soul you have to sell. The
only way to be free is to do your own thing. For some that's starting their
own business. For others it's walking in, working for awhile, learning what
you want, and walking out the door when you're done (not when the company is
done with you).

Oh, and what's the deal with note #1? That was a silly and unnecessary note to
add.

------
seebe
Clear! After CS.EE Eng school I completed comissioning as an officer in the
British Army. The hieracy, groups, rules, and orders were perfect to fight
other Armys. "Peace keeping" in Ireland was not nearly as well suited. I left
and joined a US start with 10 poeple (long story). The 10 person start became
3000, (10-60-120-240-480,900 now 3000 people). Relecting I feel like I'm back
in the Army. Small groups 10-100 people can run rings around 3000.

------
idealgarment
You are the greatest. Lonely for clear, precise thinking, and actual content
here in the midwest, and finding this site, this essay included, has been a
joy. Plus, for all my own start-up endeavors, these encouragements to
persevere are very helpful. True things do need to be said again and again and
in different ways all the time. Thanks. Thanks for the careful thinking, and
for advancing the idea of careful thinking in general. Thanks.

------
sdfjgh345jhgj
Well, since no one has mentioned the self serving nature of the article, I
guess I will. Seems like someone who founds startups and needs a good pool of
people to start those would need to convince people of all this.

Bravo, they seem to be buying it!

I worked at a few small companies and there are certainly downsides to small
companies. Likewise, there are downsides to starting your own company as well,
like friggin receivables.

I work in a 100ish person company now and it is awesome.

------
theoman
Here is what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about just this topic in a 2002 New Yorker
article: "Institutions are not just the best environment for success; they are
also the safest environment for failure--and, much of the time, failure is
what lies in store for innovators and visionaries. Philo Farnsworth should
have gone to work for RCA. He would still have been the father of television,
and he might have died a happy man."

------
bernardlunn
For programmers this was explained by Brookes in Mythical Man Month back in
1975 - a timeless classic. The return to smaller units is a bigger trend I
think. In 1955, Fortune 500 controlled 1/3 of US GDP. In 2000 it was 2/3. I
think we are at an early stage of a massive trend that will reverse this. Not
just tech/media but shops, farmers etc. Phew, it was all getting kinda white
bread boring out there!

------
captainpotato
Damn you, Paul. You had to post this just as I was trying to make the decision
whether to accept a relatively high-paying corporate job or keep struggling to
"live the life" running my own business. I'd almost convinced myself to go
back into the world of commuting, bosses, dark windowless cubicles, and soul-
crushing boredom in exchange for certain financial stability.

------
bummer
As someone whose startup was acquired by IBM, I whole heartedly agree. Every
day in IBM is rot. Can't wait to do another startup.

------
vwdiesel
Personally I think I saw what you were talking about - and by your notes I
certainly interpreted this essay differently then some folk.

Yours was a good read - and given other 'coincidences' made me think.

Thanks, Joe

[http://ponderousprog.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-tree-or-not-
to-...](http://ponderousprog.blogspot.com/2008/03/to-tree-or-not-to-tree-that-
is-big-co.html)

------
nevyn
>Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided
tree structure.

Valve, the makers of Half-Life and Portal, work like that. No one has a
dedicated role, there is no hierarchy, there's just a guy with a vision and a
large team of widely-talented people who work on what they want to work on.
Obviously it works, too :)

------
pheski
Nice essay, only scratching the surface but catching some important content in
the process.

Similar approach with more detail in 'The Future of Management' by Gary Hamel
(ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-0250-3), at Amazon

[http://www.amazon.com/Future-Management-Gary-
Hamel/dp/142210...](http://www.amazon.com/Future-Management-Gary-
Hamel/dp/1422102505)

------
bumzo
Brilliant article and well documented. I have always believed that nature
always has answers to very complex human queries and you brought this out well
in comparing organisation structures with animals that thrive in the jungle
and wilderness!! ... i like!

------
auferstehung
GE has a jet engine plant in Durham, North Carolina that has 170 employees and
one boss. It seems to work well. Although I have not heard that the concept
has propagated to other parts of the company

<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html>

------
jmvdpol
"groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of
50 is really unwieldy."

Amen. I like to state here my 2nd law of corporate's immutable entropy:
individual intelligence times somewhere between 50 to 150 leads to collective
stupidity. It's a rather sharp s-curve, really.

Great stuff Mr. Graham, thanks. Jurgen

------
matthewhurst
An interesting essay, but some misleading assumptions.Consider these points:
Animal groups do have bosses and hierarchies; Society at large is required to
be hierarchical in order to create enough cash to allow high risk ventures to
fund your 'wild' or 'natural' programmers.

------
chrisco
I made a similar point, albeit more briefly, in this post: "Pardon Me, But
Would You Have Any Grey Poupon?":
[http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/would-you-have-
any-g...](http://buzzpal.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/would-you-have-any-grey-
poupon/)

------
tiwiex
i think this is a universal challenge. i currently work fo a global oil
company with a worldwide staff strength well over 50. i am based in the
Nigerian operations. there is intense competition. But i really dont see what
the competition is all about. we tend 2 push solutions 2 users rather than do
what they need. there is a funny ranking system which forces u do workk and
not share. I have been here for a year and a few months and i look forward to
move on in the next 2 months. i think life was better even when i thought i
was earning 1/5 of what i earn now. it is miserable working for huge
companies. some people sure have to do it. But count me out soon. Life is
beautiful and free. I agree.

------
jpick
I'll have to ask my Birkenstock-wearing living-in-Berkeley friends what they
eat now... :-)

~~~
dfranke
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic-style_diet>

------
vikrant
I work for a really small company. But I am feeling unconformable since a
year. Now reading this essay I understand the actual reason. We have become a
typical outsourced branch of big giant tree since last couple of years!
Freedom has reduced!

------
WildWildEast
I've had a note to do a post based on the idea that no matter who I work for,
a company, or my own company, that I "always work for myself". I'll include a
link to this essay for sure. Right stuff. www.WildWildEastDailies.blogspot.com

------
GiffordPinchot
A very successful "free intraprise" system that creates very free small groups
is underway in the Forest Service. The focus is not on external products and
services, but on doing the work that is needed by the line officers.
Biological surveys, Oracle database management, trail building, planning, etc.
"Enterprise teams compete for these jobs. Line officers with budgets can hire
outside contractors, one of several competing enterprise teams in that
business, full time employees, etc. The enterprise teams have most of the
freedoms of a start-up. They have internal "bank accounts" that they can carry
earnings over from year to year. This provides security which allows risk
taking. They chose their own products and services and set their own prices.
They choose who to hire and have limited ability to fire (from the team, not
the Forest Service) team members who do not work out. This is an area of
weakness, but not enough to crater the system.

The result is very good. The intrapreneurs (people who behave like
entrepreneurs inside a larger organization) are 1.8 times as productive as the
average government employee and far happier. They tend to keep working after
becoming eligible for retirement. Most say they would never go back to the old
bureaucratic way.

There don't seem to be any fist fights. One team got too big and is breaking
up into smaller enterprises.

The system was designed based on the book "The End of Bureaucracy and he Rise
of the Intelligent Organization" by Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot. Note: I am
Gifford) It has also been applied successfully in a large semiconductor firm.

The largest organizations (nations or the entire planet) bring about order
using self organizing systems. They do so because, for all the reasons in the
article, the chain of command has limited ability to use the intelligence of
all the members of a large system. While decision making is concentrated,
intelligence is widely distributed, approximately one brain per human.

Very large commercial organizations are possible, but they must use self
organizing systems, which involve freedom of the parts, as a major element of
organizational design. After all, nations gave up on hierarchy as the method
of organizing their economies with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even though
it is large, the United States allows entrepreneurs considerable freedom.
Large companies can too.

Re: Size of enterprises see: The Dunbar Number at Life with Alacrity:

<http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html>

------
DanielLee
Great observation and well presented.

Try this if you want to get to the source (even though it will most likely
make no sense to you on first blush)

"The desire for guilt produces the fear of love"

or to say the same thing in Ken Kessy's words

"The desire for the mystery is greater than the desire for the answer"

TheD

------
ktundwal
wonderful analysis...

I can so much relate to this one. I work for a medium size business (~500
employees). I have been termed cowboy, SWAT and such - it took me around 5-6
years to realize I am more of an entrepreneur than a big team player. I have
an idea and I want to execute it to full extent.

Problem is, after all, software is for a business and to run a business you
need non-technical business mind, one that understands customers, their needs,
marketing, sales & support. Thus a need for that other half. I am still trying
to find one :)

Kapil Tundwal <http://ktundwal.blogspot.com>

------
Shooter
I'm just skimming the article right now, but I hit a couple tiny errors that
stopped my reading flow. For example:

"The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are [a?]
few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley."

------
gsharm
commented on jeff atwood's blog in regards to this - i think he misinterpreted
the point of your article to some minor extent (and so did I since I read the
quotes only at that stage). he seems to have homed in on a few particular
points (which may have admitedly been too much of a generalization on your
part - everything is open to interpretation), but I loved your discussion of
the tree concept.

hoping this doesn't put you off (I'd imagine it bought a lot more attention to
your site and let you tighten up anything that could have been mis-
interpreted), keep up the great writing.

------
tonyr
Very interesting article. Just last year I left a big (for New Zealand)
insurance co to work in a small start up internet co. I have no security, a
small salary but a much more fulfilling job.

------
davidsarah
There's pizza, and there's junk pizza. I think you mean the latter. A good
pizza can be pretty healthy -- certainly it doesn't seem to do the Italians
any harm in terms of life expectancy.

------
dmoney
I'd say working for a company is more like being in a circus than a zoo. You
have to perform silly tricks and act like you wouldn't rather be napping.

------
ungood
What a load of bullocks. Humans are a social species. They are supposed to
work in groups, and any group needs leaders _and_ followers - one is not more
important than the other. Comparing the life of a "company man" to that of a
lion in a cage is a straw man argument.

Some people, myself include, are more than happy to put in our 40 hours at our
jobs (I happen to enjoy mine), and than get to go home and define ourselves in
ways not related to our careers.

Your insistence that being a startup founder somehow makes you more human is
arrogant and offensive.

~~~
pg
I never said anything like that.

~~~
nickbauman
But you did make the analogy of lions to innovators. I confess I prefer the
notion of hunter-gatherers and "traveling light" as opposed to Greek Phalanxes
requiring entire cities to eat at night. So I give you that analogy.

But the biggest obstacle to me in becoming a startup founder is health care.
The difference between a W-2 job with benefits and self-insurance medical is
huge. Like I-could-lease-a-Laborghini-with-the-difference huge. That's not
all. Medical self-insurance goes up a lot: The costs went up double-digits-
percent every year when I was a contractor. And I have no medical problems!
PG, you should write about this as a barrier to startups.

------
per
Brilliant essay!

Rethinking the prevailing view on work is key to future success. Being driven
by interestingness is more important than title and money.

------
ex
My experience indicates the ideal group size to be five. The same holds for
board of directors. I will not serve on boards larger than five,

------
patmcg
Nice to see the first footnote in the article. However, unfortunate that it
needs to be there at all. Keep up the excellent writing.

------
khurt
My employer, a large pharmaceutical company, even uses the word "ONE" in it's
intranet portal; oneabc.abc.com

------
kyto
> Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley

Did anyone else find this as funny as i did?

Could you pick a more mainstream brand of shoe Paul?

------
RickBullotta
I've made this mandatory reading for the entire leadership team at my company.
Great writing.

Rick Bullotta/CTO/Wonderware

------
zeusprod
Can you make it so that recent comments are at the top rather than the bottom?

------
killerisation
I agree with your observations on the size of an ideal (human) group. So does
Jesus.

~~~
rms
I am curious to hear you relate this to Jesus. Please give me details.

~~~
killerisation
If it wasn't implicit, I was just pointing out that he led a group of twelve
(excluding himself of course), no more.

------
freddiep
Bravo man ... bravo... I am now going to consume your entire blog from now on.

------
JamesMitchell
My comments relate to Graham’s Cliff Notes summary of his essay, rather than
his underlying essay.

Every profession has a pecking order. The fact is some people are better at
doing X than other people are. There are at least four factors that could
determine where one sits in the hacker pecking order:

1\. How smart you are

2\. What you have contributed

3\. Do you have the guts to start a start-up?

4\. If you do, were you successful?

On that score, Graham does very well in the pecking order. He’s clearly
brilliant. He has made numerous contributions -- spam filters, author of the
two leading books on LIPS, ARC, just to name a few. He had the guts to start a
start-up and he was successful, having sold it to Yahoo. The only thing he is
missing is being co-founder of, say, Google or Microsoft or Apple or Adobe.

Graham says people think his group are elitists, implying the opposite, that
they are not. Of course they are elitists! But why is that bad? Graham does
not like Java is that it was designed with training wheels, to prevent
programmers from doing stupid things. That may be necessary for some
programmers, but it is not necessary for Graham and his target market -- the
very top programmers, who do not need training wheels, who do not need to have
the language prevent them from doing stupid things. (Have you ever met a LISP
programmer who was not very very smart?) His primary partner, Robert Morris,
is a professor at MIT. These are two uber elitists.

Graham likes to write essays that challenge orthodoxy and he is very good at
doing so. See, for example, his essay “Mind the Gap,” in which he argues that
a higher rate of income inequality may be a good thing rather than a bad thing
(www.paulgraham.com/gap.html). It’s hard to think of a more controversial
proposition than that. So me thinks that Graham’s next challenge-conventional-
thinking essay should be why elitism is good, not bad. And he does not have to
start from scratch, he can read “In Defense of Elitism” by William Henry
([http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Elitism-William-
Henry/dp/03854...](http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Elitism-William-
Henry/dp/0385479433)).

So why does Graham want to portray his group as non-elitists even though they
clearly are? Because elitism has a bad rap. Some elitists are smug and
arrogant but I do not think Graham is. I am pretty smart, or so I have been
told. But I do not think I am as smart as Graham. When I read Graham’s essay,
I feel, “OK, this guy is smarter than me, but he is not arrogant about it, he
is laying out his arguments in a clear concise logical manner so that others,
almost all of whom are not as smart as he is, can follow his logic.” That is
not arrogant.

Some people criticize elitists if they do not give something back. Graham is
clearly giving something back. His essays are free. If you don’t want to buy
his book, you can read all of them (I think) online for free. He is giving ARC
away for free. Although Ycombinator is hardly non-profit, I am still shocked
at little equity they take (an average of 6 percent) in exchange for what they
provide.

Graham argues that Ycombinator would not exist if all it did is fund “rare
geniuses.” That is true but misleading at the same. I have been an
entrepreneur all my life, so far successfully. The thought of working for the
man, I would just jump off a bridge and die. But starting and running a
company is a bitch, even for someone like me who is genetically programmed for
it (and for nothing else). Our society glorifies entrepreneurship, which is a
sign that our society is more advanced than others. In one of his State of the
Union addresses, President Reagan urged every schoolchild to consider starting
a business. The fact of the matter is that few people are suited to starting a
company. You have to be good at a whole lot of different things; most people
at best are good at one thing. You work all the time. There is currently a
best selling book, The Four Hour Workweek. Yeah, right. Try the 14 hour work
day.

Few people are suited for this, and that includes gifted hackers. Few people
have the balls to start a company and that is a good thing -- perhaps 2
percent of the population is suited to being an entrepreneur, I doubt it is as
high as 5 percent. Perhaps among hackers, or gifted hackers, the percentage is
higher, but I can’t imagine it is 10 percent. Most people are better off
working for someone else. That fact, by the way, creates a lot of opportunity
for the few who are suited to start companies.

Ycombinator’s thesis is that there is an untapped market of young
entrepreneurs who could start companies but do not and will if they are funded
by Ycombinator. Yes, there is such an untapped market, but it is not as large
as Graham implies. Let’s assume Ycombinator funds thirty companies a year,
twice a year, and each company has three hackers. That’s 180 people. A
rounding error of a rounding error, since every year more than 4 million
people reach whatever age is the minimum age for starting a company.

As far as I can tell, Ycombinator has been successful. There are several
reasons for this. There were the first to market, that always helps, people
think of them first. Graham’s awesome reputation and his Web site are
extraordinary marketing machines, so they get the pick of the litter. On the
other side are several brilliant people with a variety of backgrounds who are
not virgins, they actually have done it before; in short, they have the
perfect background to pick the right people to back. So Ycombinator may not
limit its investments to ideas proposed by “rare geniuses,” but the caliber of
the people they back is so close to genius it may be hard to ascertain the
difference. More than anything, Ycombinator has been successful because they
are able to attract an extraordinarily talented group of applicants from which
they choose a few to back. If Ycombinator started funding the “average” hacker
rather than rare geniuses or close to it, I guarantee Ycombinator would be a
flop. Graham’s statement that they are not limited to funding “rare geniuses”
is a misleading as the Dean of Admissions of Harvard or Stanford stating that
everyone and anyone should apply for admission to those universities. The fact
of the matter is that it is damm hard nowadays to get admitted to Harvard and
it is damm hard to get funded by Ycombinator, even if you are really really
smart.

James Mitchell jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com

------
undercontrol
in response to Notes: 1 why then always talk about evolution like its some
mysterious magical force able to "design".

"I'm sure if I studied it more intensively it would all make sense"

------
timtrueman
Holy shit this is inspiring.

------
JamesMitchell
My comments relates to Graham’s Cliff Notes summary of his essay, rather than
his underlying essay.

Every profession has a pecking order. The fact is some people are better at
doing X than other people are. There are at least four factors that could
determine where one sits in the hacker pecking order:

1\. How smart you are

2\. What you have contributed

3\. Do you have the guts to start a start-up?

4\. If you do, were you successful?

On that score, Graham does very well in the pecking order. He’s clearly
brilliant. He has made numerous contributions -- spam filters, author of the
two leading books on LIPS, ARC, just to name a few. He had the guts to start a
start-up and he was successful, having sold it to Yahoo. The only thing he is
missing is being co-founder of, say, Google or Microsoft or Apple or Adobe.

Graham says people think his group are elitists, implying the opposite, that
they are not. Of course they are elitists! But why is that bad? Graham does
not like Java is that it was designed with training wheels, to prevent
programmers from doing stupid things. That may be necessary for some
programmers, but it is not necessary for Graham and his target market -- the
very top programmers, who do not need training wheels, who do not need to have
the language prevent them from doing stupid things. (Have you ever met a LISP
programmer who was not very very smart?) His primary partner, Robert Morris,
is a professor at MIT. These are two uber elitists.

Graham likes to write essays that challenge orthodoxy and he is very good at
doing so. See, for example, his essay “Mind the Gap,” in which he argues that
a higher rate of income inequality may be a good thing rather than a bad thing
(www.paulgraham.com/gap.html). It’s hard to think of a more controversial
proposition than that. So me thinks that Graham’s next challenge-conventional-
thinking essay should be why elitism is good, not bad. And he does not have to
start from scratch, he can read “In Defense of Elitism” by William Henry
([http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Elitism-William-
Henry/dp/03854...](http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Elitism-William-
Henry/dp/0385479433)).

So why does Graham want to portray his group as non-elitists even though they
clearly are? Because elitism has a bad rap. Some elitists are smug and
arrogant but I do not think Graham is. I am pretty smart, or so I have been
told. But I do not think I am as smart as Graham. When I read Graham’s essay,
I feel, “OK, this guy is smarter than me, but he is not arrogant about it, he
is laying out his arguments in a clear concise logical manner so that others,
almost all of whom are not as smart as he is, can follow his logic.” That is
not arrogant.

Some people criticize elitists if they do not give something back. Graham is
clearly giving something back. His essays are free. If you don’t want to buy
his book, you can read all of them (I think) online for free. He is giving ARC
away for free. Although Ycombinator is hardly non-profit, I am still shocked
at little equity they take (an average of 6 percent) in exchange for what they
provide.

Graham argues that Ycombinator would not exist if all it did is fund “rare
geniuses.” That is true but misleading at the same. I have been an
entrepreneur all my life, so far successfully. The thought of working for the
man, I would just jump off a bridge and die. But starting and running a
company is a bitch, even for someone like me who is genetically programmed for
it (and for nothing else). Our society glorifies entrepreneurship, which is a
sign that our society is more advanced than others. In one of his State of the
Union addresses, President Reagan urged every schoolchild to consider starting
a business. The fact of the matter is that few people are suited to starting a
company. You have to be good at a whole lot of different things; most people
at best are good at one thing. You work all the time. There is currently a
best selling book, The Four Hour Workweek. Yeah, right. Try the 14 hour work
day.

Few people are suited for this, and that includes gifted hackers. Few people
have the balls to start a company and that is a good thing -- perhaps 2
percent of the population is suited to being an entrepreneur, I doubt it is as
high as 5 percent. Perhaps among hackers, or gifted hackers, the percentage is
higher, but I can’t imagine it is 10 percent. Most people are better off
working for someone else. That fact, by the way, creates a lot of opportunity
for the few who are suited to start companies.

Ycombinator’s thesis is that there is an untapped market of young
entrepreneurs who could start companies but do not and will if they are funded
by Ycombinator. Yes, there is such an untapped market, but it is not as large
as Graham implies. Let’s assume Ycombinator funds thirty companies a year,
twice a year, and each company has three hackers. That’s 180 people. A
rounding error of a rounding error, since every year more than 4 million
people reach whatever age is the minimum age for starting a company.

As far as I can tell, Ycombinator has been successful. There are several
reasons for this. There were the first to market, that always helps, people
think of them first. Graham’s awesome reputation and his Web site are
extraordinary marketing machines, so they get the pick of the litter. On the
other side are several brilliant people with a variety of backgrounds who are
not virgins, they actually have done it before; in short, they have the
perfect background to pick the right people to back. So Ycombinator may not
limit its investments to ideas proposed by “rare geniuses,” but the caliber of
the people they back is so close to genius it may be hard to ascertain the
difference. More than anything, Ycombinator has been successful because they
are able to attract an extraordinarily talented group of applicants from which
they choose a few to back. If Ycombinator started funding the “average” hacker
rather than rare geniuses or close to it, I guarantee Ycombinator would be a
flop. Graham’s statement that they are not limited to funding “rare geniuses”
is a misleading as the Dean of Admissions of Harvard or Stanford stating that
everyone and anyone should apply for admission to those universities. The fact
of the matter is that it is damm hard nowadays to get admitted to Harvard and
it is damm hard to get funded by Ycombinator, even if you are really really
smart.

James Mitchell jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com

------
truenorth
What about Ken and Dennis.

------
workpost
An enlightening article with equally interesting comments.

------
sim
pg is an enlightened man

------
kingkongrevenge
> producing fresh vegetables doesn't [scale]

The reason starchy and hydrogenated foods dominate is agricultural subsidies,
not so much natural economies. If you killed corn and soy subsidies a whole
lot of junk food would disappear. Fritos are only cheaper than sauerkraut
because you paid part of the frito bill when you filed taxes. Healthy fresh
vegetables are most definitely mass produced.

Running with the metaphor any way, government has a major role in perpetuating
huge corporations and preventing the emergence of smaller ones. SarbOx is an
obvious example. OSHA makes it very hard for a small group of guys to set up a
manufacturing shop, even if they know how to make it safe. Read this guy on
how it's basically illegal for him to run a small, traditional farm:
[http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-
Illegal1esp...](http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-
Illegal1esp03.htm)

~~~
pg
It's true that farmers of commodities like corn and wheat have the government
wrapped around their fingers. But the reason they're big enough to do that is
that their market scales. No one has invented a fresh carrot that can sit on a
shelf for six months the way a candy bar can.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
The subsidies follow the disproportionate voting power and political influence
of the relevant mid-west states, not the inherent marketability of corn.

Veggies and nuts are mostly grown at massive industrial operations in
California with desert sunshine and irrigation systems. It's definitely a
scalable operation not much different from corn and soy.

Not to nit-pick, but carrots keep really well even at room temperature. That
was the whole point of root cellars. Veggies store fine. Lots of "fresh" stuff
at the store routinely comes out of 9 months in cold storage, and that's
without the complex chemical processing and packaging applied to the junk
food. Then there's freezing and pickling.

The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan
to pump out more cheap calories. It might have made some sense in a Marshall
plan world, but we're still stuck with it. That's the story as I understand
it.

~~~
rms
>The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan
to pump out more cheap calories.

It was deliberately done by the government? I probably shouldn't be
surprised... I always assumed it was the corn farmers pushing for subsidies
that did it. Do you have any more information on this?

~~~
kingkongrevenge
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Career>

> Butz revolutionized federal agricultural policy and reengineered many New
> Deal era farm support programs. His mantra to farmers was "get big or get
> out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow
> to fencerow."

------
albertcardona
I agree with the assay, and I have personal experiences regarding workgroups
(mostly hackathons) that match precisely the (1) small group requirement -7 to
10 people-; (2) the avoidance of any tree structure: horizontal and unguided
development; and (3) the avoidance of mediocre people.

Yet I have a concern nagging my mind about the reduction of freedom in
hierachies. Ender's Game book seem to argue the opposite: that giving general
orders to a group while leaving the implementation details to each member is
the best of both worlds.

[Remember the school master Graff describing to Ender the hierarchical army he
had built with his toon leaders: moving in synchrony, yet each piece showing
initiative and creativity -as opposed to the single-minded, single-track
insector army lead by a single queen.]

~~~
nostrademons
There was a book I read recently...I can't remember the title, but it was one
of those generic "How to manage for innovation and creativity" books, by a
famous author.

Anyway, one of the examples used was that most-hierarchical-of-hierarchies,
the U.S. Army. It talked about how in Vietnam, the U.S. got its butt kicked
because basically "no plan survives contact with the enemy." The army would
have these detailed marching orders, but then Vietcong would come out of
nowhere and blow the plans to shambles.

The army's solution was to include a "Commander's Intention" section at the
top of every order, which was a one-sentence description of the overall
objective that the military hoped to achieve. At high levels, it would be very
general, like "Establish air superiority over the region between the XYZ and
ABC parallels". At low levels, it might be very specific, like "Capture the
hill overlooking the southernmost runway at XY Airbase, to allow the 3rd
mechanized division to enter the base without fear of artillery attack."

The crucial point was that if conditions on the battlefield ever made it
impossible to carry out their orders as written, officers were authorized to
use whatever creativity and judgment necessary to achieve the Commander's
Intention, including giving new orders to their own subordinates. So you had
plans, but each subunit knew where they stood in relationship to the whole and
could adapt on the fly to take into account changing battlefield realities.

Anyone here in the military that could confirm or deny this? Anyone know what
book it's from?

------
mroman
Thank you Mr. Graham.

Your essays never cease to inspire, delight, and amaze.

I feel VINDICATED upon reading them.

Always precise, yet loosely coupled.

Ideas and concepts that seem to exponentially expand within the mind of the
reader.

I have personally experienced feeling like an entirely new being after going
to work for myself . . . and I am going on my sixth year.

------
sebastian
Why do we have to compare programmers with wild animals?

~~~
ryles
Because they smell like them.

------
aswanson
I haven't read this yet but I know its a damn good essay just by the title.

