
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008) - cow9
http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
======
jqcoffey
So I'm a manager in a large engineering org (~600 devs) and I've managed from
2 (and was therefore an IC) to ~40 people. I can definitely relate to this
blog post and if the author's intent is to say that working in small groups is
easier and more natural than working in large ones, then I agree
wholeheartedly, but I think there are a few other things to keep in mind.

> One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no
> matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo.

He goes on to say that this is a consequence of the tree structure, which may
be technically correct, but I think this is actually a consequence of the
natural conservatism that develops at a large company making lots of money and
paying lots of salaries. This doesn't change the validity of his message, but
I think it's worth pointing out the motivations of a large company.

> The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers,
> because the essence of programming is to build new things.

So this is also, on it's face, completely valid. The only exception I take
with it is that "new things" is ill-defined. If he means to say, "building
entirely new systems from scratch is nearly impossible at a large company,"
then yes. That is 100% true. If in that he includes, "building critical new
functionality into an existing system that will make hundreds, thousands or
maybe millions of users insanely happy," then, as you can probably read from
my phrasing, I think he's wrong.

I personally prefer doing the second than the first. I think it's a harder
challenge to work within legacy systems and make them adapt than to be a full-
time greenfield engineer. (sidebar: If any of my colleagues are reading this
they may be rolling their eyes given a project we have in motion at the moment
because it's perceived as greenfield--come see me I'll do my best to convince
you it's not :D)

> But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their
> own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup.

Implicit in my previous comment is that, because it's harder making things
move in Big Corp one tends to learn more, both as an engineer and as a human.
Finding the right technical path through a heavily used, critical system is an
interesting challenge, and evolving legacy systems, or spawning new work in a
large org requires lots of communication, as well.

All that said, I do fully agree that working in such a large corp generates a
different sort of stress than working in a small company (I've worked in
many). In a small company you're worried, fundamentally, about the company's
viability and therefore your paycheck. In a large company I think the major
stress is knowing whether you still have a voice that carries any weight.

Anyway, it was a great post and I thank the sharer of it :).

~~~
kartickv
I wonder how one would structure a big company to keep it more agile. Some
thoughts:

\- Salaries would be lower, so that people coming for the money wouldn't.
There's be more variable pay. This will eliminate the "who cares if the
product fails? I get a big paycheque anyway" attitude I've seen in a big
company.

\- When a product fails, each individual on that team will have something to
lose: skin in the game. Maybe he won't get a bonus. Or will get paid less next
year. Or gets demoted one level. Or something.

\- Each VP would have the flexibility to pay his team the way he wants. The
only thing he'll be held accountable for is the results. No salary band for
each level, etc.

\- He'll also be able to hire people he thinks are better. Maybe people who've
been a founder or early employee of a startup more than people who've worked
at other big bureaucratic companies.

\- Engineering practices won't be centrally enforced, as they're in some big
companies. If a team believes that unit testing every class, or code reviews
that drag on for weeks, or <insert other practice here> have a low ROI,
they'll be able to choose different practices. Maybe each (S)VP would get to
define his team's practices.

These are just ideas. Maybe you can come up with better ones.

What would you to do to make a big company more like a startup?

~~~
watwut
\- Seriously, having lower salary does not make people care more. There are
plenty of lazy people who don't care who are not paid maximum possible.

\- You will have people unwilling to work on risky projects. Good engineers
assigned to troubled projects will be resentful more then normally and leave
faster.

~~~
matfil
What if employees were offered a substantial degree of choice in which
projects they're assigned to. At that point, risky projects would need to have
commensurate rewards attached. Does this solve the problem?

Valve, for example, seems to take this sort of approach, and while it's not
without criticism, it seems to work okay for some people.

~~~
watwut
That will attract gamblers and repulse systematic workers who care more about
craft itself and less about estimating, choosing and negotiating projects.

------
GuB-42
We aren't meant to have a boss.

We also aren't meant to use computers, let alone build them. Big and complex
organizations are required in order to build big and complex things. And it
turns out that it works best by having bosses.

Now, I work most of the time for large companies and what I notice is that you
have much more freedom than you might think. But you have to work for it. You
may not get to choose a framework, you may have to follow a process, but you
still need to make decisions, even if they are on a small scale. You may be
handed over procedures and recipes, don't follow them blindly, try to
understand them and maybe improve on them.

No matter where you are working, you are not a robot. You are the human, the
problem solver, the decision maker, the repetitive tasks are for the computer.
As a programmer, there is always a way to make a boring job more interesting
in a way that benefits the company. And if your boss is competent, he will
appreciate it.

As for what a boss is, I always see my boss as a partner, not a "superior". My
boss works for me, he looks at the big picture, meets with customers, and
feeds me work. I work for my boss by doing the work he wants me to do.

~~~
xfitm3
I generally agree with you. I would opine with we aren’t meant to have a
single boss. If you own a business your customers are effectively your
collective boss with a much more diverse set of satisfaction criteria. In my
opinion this is a better way to love and plays into many of the points you
raised.

------
imgabe
People have always read way too much into this essay instead of looking at it
for what it is: marketing material for Y Combinator.

It doesn't speak to you? Ok. That's fine. You aren't the target audience.
Obviously there have always been millions upon millions of people who live
perfectly happy, productive, successful lives working for large organizations.
However, some subset of people have always felt dissatisfied in this
arrangement. For some of those, this essay might be the spark they need to
look around and find something that suits them better (and maybe Y Combinator
can fund them.)

I'm feeling old that the average HN reader anymore doesn't seem to know who
Paul Graham is.

~~~
paulcole
Yeah pretty obviously pandering to the desired audience:

> There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as
> bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

Could almost hear all the heads nodding in agreement.

If only he'd mentioned intermittent fasting or the fact that the hiring
process for developers is broken...

~~~
edanm
FYI, this was written in 2008, before IF became a thing.

~~~
paulcole
Back then we just called it anorexia. Really shows what marketing can do.

~~~
MarsAscendant
It's deeply unfair to compare a wilful, meaningful calorie intake reduction
with a pathological anxiety over _any_ sort of consumption of food.

If you didn't know the difference "back then", it was due to ignorance, not a
marketing image.

~~~
paulcole
I am quite stupid.

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

I made more money at my web agency when I had 10 employees than when I had 20.
I kept growing the business through inertia and the thought that bigger was
better. I decided to sell with 20 employees rather than drop back down to 10,
but by 20 it was unweildy for me to manage on my own.

The overhead described in the article from growing beyond a group of 10 I felt
everyday. If I had to do it over I'd stay at 10 or less for as long as
possible and prioritize connection and profits over revenue and headcount.

~~~
jdhawk
Or add another layer of Management?

~~~
everdev
That's what I did when I grew to 20 and part of what increased our revenue but
decreased our profitability.

The article talks about the challenges of managing managers and my experience
lines up with what the author describes.

~~~
jacquesm
Companies also have economies of scale. The 10-to-30 transition is so hard
_because_ it has to pass through 20, the moment when overhead as a fraction of
total turnover is at a maximum. After that things get better again. But
getting through that is a really hard thing to do.

------
dazc
Once I had a great job, I managed myself most of the time and was trusted to
just 'get on with it'.

Then the company got busier and started hiring more people who were less able
to manage themselves. As a consequence, I acquired a manager who wasn't quite
sure what he was supposed to be doing. This led to situations where he would
need to do things that justified his existence, like phoning me every hour to
ask 'how it was going', 'where was I, and so on...

Needless to say, I started enjoying my job much less...

Then, when it became obvious my new manager wasn't coping so well, they gave
him an assistant. You can probably guess how that panned out?

~~~
vinceguidry
> This led to situations where he would need to do things that justified his
> existence, like phoning me every hour to ask 'how it was going', 'where was
> I, and so on...

You missed a great opportunity to manage upwards. Surely you have some
meaningless menial tasks in your job that you hate to perform? Excellent
delegation material!

You know what they say, many hands make for lighter work. They hired him an
assistant? Looks like you just acquired a whole department!

------
_yosefk
If you work on/for a startup and that startup succeeds, it will more often
than not have to grow. If you're unlike Paul Graham who sold his startup and
then invested in countless others and made lots of money but did not keep
working on the thing he'd built - meaning, if you're what he likes to call
_maker_ as opposed to primarily a _money-maker_ \- you will want to keep
working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing
is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people
thrive and lions and sugary food. And when you'll see what a hundred people
can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding.

~~~
lmm
> you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to
> keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on
> group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food.

I've grown attached to projects in small companies and large ones, sure. What
you've written can be read as an explanation for why people continue to work
at companies even as they grow larger and get worse, rather than any
contradiction of what Graham said.

> And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started
> by ten, it will be very rewarding.

Really? I don't think I've experienced anything rewarding/inspiring being made
by more than ten people; even in large companies, the most rewarding/inspiring
projects I've worked on have been those that were worked on by a small,
relatively isolated team. Scaling up may be necessary and/or lucrative, but I
doubt it could ever be as rewarding as making the thing, and AIUI the
economics research backs that up - productivity is concentrated in small
companies, successful companies grow until they get too bloated to be
successful rather than stable (because if you're successful, growing is the
default path) rather than improving through growth.

~~~
_yosefk
A group of 100 is 10 groups of 10. Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink
as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might
not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a
10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any
better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a
10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team.

Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM _without getting paid
for it_? (Of course lots of them get paid to do this, but many are not.) It's
not exactly easy calories for a caged lion, the way Graham describes a
corporate job taken by recent college grads. Instead, people choose to work in
these large groups because they want to make an impact. You can instead
contribute to TinyCC or MenuetOS - smaller team, less impact. Are Linux or
LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most
of their current practical uses?

If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X -
why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? I
think that market realities point in the direction of there being economies of
scale and diseconomies of scale, without a single one-size-fits-all procedure
for determining the optimal firm size for any particular endeavor.

~~~
hopler
It's interesting that YC's moneymaking model is to take small companies and
turn them into big companies (by growth or acquisition) that pg claims are
bad. Is YC a knnowing scam to soak dumb money, killing the supposedly
wonderful small-team products in the process, or is the post misguided or
disingenuous?

~~~
lmm
The claim is that big companies are uninspiring drudgery for the people who
work there, not that scaling up isn't an effective way to make money (though
VC as a category is known for poor overall returns). There's no contradiction
- indeed in
[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
pg argues that a lot of moneymaking opportunities are overlooked because of
the drudgery involved.

------
rafiki6
My fundamental issue with this viewpoint is that it takes away the inherent
entrepreneurship that exists in an employee/employer business relationship.
Whether I'm on a team of 10 in an organization of a 100 or a team of 100 in an
organization of 10,000, the reality is I still have much work to do to be
valuable. I'd argue that if you are truly ambitious and hardworking, making
your way up a corporate ladder can be just as challenging, risky and rewarding
as being a startup founder. It requires time, dedication, sacrifice, risk-
taking and developing skills that most people who chose programming as a
career seem to forget about. People who program shouldn't box themselves into
being code monkeys. I still need to pitch ideas at my corporate job to ensure
they are valuable. I still need to use other people's code as any person
building a shiny web app will do with open source projects and frameworks. I
still need to manage finances, ask for raises, manage budgets. I still need to
deal with HR, accounting, sales, product management, project management,
marketing etc. At the end of the day a truly valuable "employee" is one who's
really figured out the system and learned to sell themselves within it. As a
startup founder you are still beholden to many people much in the same way as
an employee who's working up the ranks. As a founder you will still deal with
unproductive slow people. You will deal with aggressive investors, finicky
customers etc. I think a corporate job is what you make of it. It's safer in
some cases sure, although since we work in an at-will employment world, your
never fully safe. But if you really want to grow, you need to take risks and
try things and learn all the same skills an entrepreneur would need to.

------
jondubois
I've been trying to escape having a corporate day job for 8 years now
precisely because it doesn't feel natural; I constantly get the urge to escape
and I change companies often.

I hope that this kind of article doesn't promote the mindset that if you're
not financially successful by the time you turn 30, then you're either lazy or
unskilled (I.e. thinking that leaders are fundamentally different than
employees). There are a lot of business leaders today who harbor significant
contempt towards their own employees; you can see it by how they talk about
their employees and how they interact with them.

It might seem like some employees aren't ambitious, don't take initiative and
don't want to step outside of their comfort zone but that's rarely true; most
employees do want to take control of their lives and they devise plans to make
it happen; but dumb luck is just a much more powerful force. You can't beat
dumb luck.

~~~
rafiki6
Why not start by becoming a consultant? I think that's always a good question
to ask yourself. Consulting has many of the challenges you'd face running your
own business, except the product you're selling is yourself.

~~~
jondubois
I did do contracting in the past and I do consulting from time to time related
to an open source project that I created but it's not enough to turn into a
full time business yet.

------
dang
From 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9751767)

From 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760732)

And twice from 2008:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143735)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141898)

------
hevi_jos
I agree with this article, as I have experienced what is working for myself
and working for others.

On the other hand, people need other personalities to complement their
personalities. Organizing this environment is not simple for most people, as
it requires a complete different set of skills than most technical work.

People will have to enter a company to get this environment, as it is already
created for you. Usually not well created, but something is better than
nothing.

IMHO Paul Graham acquired these skills from his now wife, thanks to that they
created YC and you have all this environment of mutual support, the "family",
the "Church".

It always surprising when you go to the US, how isolated most people is from
each other.

This makes PG advice extremely damaging for most people in the US. The
technical people that will listen to it are already not very social. Without
social support, you will perish. No matter how good you are, people are social
creatures.

------
austincheney
So completely torn on this.

In the corporate world I completely agree. I feel like a vegetable. I am numb
and stare out a window. I enjoy taking long walks and picking fruit on my
corporate neighbor's property.

In addition to working for a Fortune 50 company I am also an officer in the
army. In the army this idea about bosses is and large organizations is mostly
(not completely though) upside down. In the military this can really work for
you if you are engaged and your primary leader isn't a criminal.

This is perhaps the biggest difference between these worlds, and I cannot put
it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you have shared a
similar experience yourself. Seeing and living this difference shapes your
world perspective more than any other objective quality (there are
catastrophic subjective qualities that will shape anybody's world).

~~~
tome
> I cannot put it into words in a way that could possibly relate until you
> have shared a similar experience yourself

Could you try? This is really interesting!

~~~
austincheney
Bear with me on this...

In the corporate space many of the younger people I have worked with feel, to
me, extraordinarily fragile. We all have fear and we all make mistakes.
Sometimes I would rather shoot myself in the face than point out a minor
shortcoming. Sometimes the result is a long series of excuses and
justifications (deliberately not listening and having a one way conversation
with themselves to you) and on rare occasions the response is immediate
hostility. I don't know everything, but I have been in this line of work for
20 years and I do feel justified in thinking I might be able to offer advice
or technical guidance to somebody who has been doing it for 6 months or less.

Older developers I have worked with in the corporate world tend to be a bit
rigid and stuck in their ways, which is completely expected. Although this is
not a surprise it does prove a bit frustrating when it comes to exploring
newer technologies or open-mindedness to new approaches.

In the military you often don't get a vote upon the technology, the
environment, the people you work with, or really anything. You realize you are
an adult. You suck it up and try to make the best of it. As crappy as that may
at first sound it is a forcing function with some really positive results. You
have to be flexible. You have to embrace new things. You have to work with all
kinds of people.

Confrontation is common in the military. There really is a such thing as
positive confrontations. Positive confrontations are necessary to develop
people. This exists in the corporate world as well, but its generally hidden
behind directors and senior managers where tiny contributors like me don't see
it.

Ownership of work is vital to motivation. The military has figured this out.
Some of the corporate world has figured this out, but usually not. People have
to be allowed to fail in order to feel the pressure to grow. Let's not forget
corporate employees are adults and they need mentorship not helicopter
parents.

As an example tell a JavaScript developer they can't use their favorite
framework. Tell them they actually have to write original code and solve
problems. Oh, the crying...

~~~
tome
Thanks. You said

> In the army this idea about bosses is and large organizations is mostly (not
> completely though) upside down. In the military this can really work for you
> if you are engaged and your primary leader isn't a criminal.

Does that means that in the military people lower in the ranks are much more
self-motivated and self-directed?

~~~
austincheney
Yes, when the proper leadership is in place. If you are given a large amount
time with no responsibility and no structure it comes down to an individual's
personality like anywhere else.

The minimal expectation is that low ranking service members have the proper
pieces in place to make good decisions. When they make bad decisions it is
them plus their boss (and sometimes the boss's boss) that gets destroyed. This
puts pressure on the boss to ensure their people are well informed. In the
corporate world if a contributor fails horribly you simply fire them and wash
your hands of it. It is highly unlikely the boss will receive legal
prosecution for the contributor's failures even those failures result from a
lack of governance or proper policy.

------
NKCSS
I love this quote: "Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people.
Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big,
because you need more of them to solve a given problem."

------
darkerside
Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his
thinking, but this article has not aged well. Or perhaps my understanding of
organizations has simply matured. I think the biggest problem, for which this
article was a lagging indicator, with working for large companies pre-2008 was
that they hadn't really figured out how to work with technology yet.
Disclaimer, I've never worked for a truly huge firm, but I get the sense folks
are getting closer and closer to figuring it out. We've learned to build and
support disruptive units inside of larger ones, managers are more often
technically skilled and able to properly support their employees, and we've
adopted more agile ways of writing software. Or maybe I'm just lucky to work
where I do!

~~~
golemotron
> Perhaps controversial to say, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham and his
> thinking

Does Paul Graham have cooties? What happened?

------
exergy
This article again.

 _sigh_

What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all, coupled
with a tone that deals only in absolutes. There is no space for doubt, for
hesitancy, for understatement. It is grandiosity dialed up to 11 in a way I've
seen precious few "essayists" do. Even that word grates me. Oh, no sir! Paul
is above mere 'blogging'. He is an "essayist" because his blogposts feature
more than 2500 words. Look at what he claims:

> And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the
> Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the
> population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial
> world, only extremists live naturally.

> It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the
> organization, the more it will suck.

My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such
idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything
approaching sensitivity. Here's Jeff Atwoods take on it:
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-
nar...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-narcissism/)

It's an opinion I sympathise with a lot more than PG's.

I work for a big company (CERN). Group of thousands upon thousands. It's
_wonderful_ here. I wouldn't trade it for the next "Uber of...". My 'boss' is
just someone who has worked on my topic for a lot longer than me, and is
therefore a veritable treasure chest of knowledge. I LOVE working for him
because I learn a shitload on a weekly basis, and the projects that he is
responsible for align with my interests. I LOVE working in my 'group of
hundreds', because that group of hundreds can accomplish a lot more than a
full-stack developer straight out of Stanford thinking he can disrupt
everything just by ignoring zoning laws. I also imagine there are a
significant portion of people working for places like NASA/ESA etc who share
my view. Where does this jive with Mr Graham's World Of Absolutes?

Further, even if we limit ourselves to the corporate world, 'groups of
hundreds' can afford to do more than one guy. A large group can, for example,
dedicate resources to lowering the environmental impact of the product chain,
in a way that a three person startup couldn't. They can have customer service
that a small startup just cannot match. Is all of that worthless?

And if it isn't, just what is Graham getting at in this article? Is it limited
to young graduates? Then why the far reaching claims and the excessive
overreach? And if not, is he genuinely so delusional as to think he can speak
for everyone?

I will give another example, at the risk of outing myself, just because this
article is _still_ fucking grinding my gears. My mum is working on the Polio
program. In a couple of years, they will have rid the world of this killer
disease. Millions of lives saved. It's not necessarily the glorious work
environment that gives Paul Graham a hardon. Doesn't mean it 'sucks'. Just
means that most of the people working there are capable of understanding that
there are some necessary evils involved in taking on such an enormous
challenge. You need to talk to Politicians the world over. You need to
coordinate the door to door vaccine distribution. You need to balance the
books for millions and millions of dollars in funding. You need to set up
secure enclaves for staff that are going into dangerous zones and risking
their lives for the project. I would like to see some fucking bossless
Ycombinator graduate try their hand at that.

~~~
xb121
CERN is not what he is talking about. Of course being employed in Europe by a
_publicly funded institution_ is great.

The people in Europe who actually work are suppressed and exploited.

~~~
exergy
Otherwise known in the industry as 'weaseling'.

He _doesn 't_ explicitly exclude publicly funded institutions. He says working
for big organizations will _always_ suck. I quoted him verbatim. And this
highlights my problem with him: absolutes.

Also, does your final sentence insinuate that people at CERN aren't actually
working?!

~~~
bxmeyers
Like most public institutions, CERN is overstaffed and has produced
comparatively little.

Publicly funded people in Europe act and feel like royalty and build
themselves Veblen goods. In several German cities, the only buildings that are
in good shape are government buildings and universities.

Normal people do not have money to paint their houses (if they have one,
that's another thing only civil servants can afford).

~~~
ahartmetz
Yeah, no. There is probably quite some inefficiency at CERN like at all large
institutions, but none of the rest is true according to my observations. Even
in Berlin, which is a relatively poor German city, there are plenty of well
maintained private buildings of all kinds. I've also seen somewhat rundown
looking government offices.

------
jatins
Assuming what that article says is correct, that it isn't natural - what's the
solution to this? Surely, everyone can't be a startup founder.

Just curious how the world should work for that article to not exist.

~~~
jp_sc
Maybe cooperatives? The book "Developer Hegemony" talk about that.

------
frogpelt
Two thoughts: pg says we are designed but then in the notes he says "by
evolution." Since evolution is changing to fit and survive your environment,
perhaps humans working in groups is better for their survival.

Also, specialization of labor has created this concept. Humans used to provide
their own food, shelter and transportation that's all they needed to do. But
when one person specializes in transportation, one in farming or hunting, and
one in building shelters things start to change.

And we end up with companies that only build pipe fittings.

------
frederikvs
There are some interesting books regarding organisational structure, that also
reflect some of what's in the blog post.

Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux is one that especially struck my
interest.

------
bryanrasmussen
In the really big companies I worked at we were in small teams of about 10,
and communication outside that team was infrequent. It's the medium sized
companies that were the drainers.

------
setgree
> I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own
> startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders
> seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe
> the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your
> body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts.

I this this is a good analogy but I don't draw the same conclusion Paul does.
I trained for a marathon last summer, and it sucked. Long distance running and
racing has been associated with diminished lifespans [0], organ damage [1],
weakened immune system [2], and lowered sex drive [3]. This research isn't
conclusive by any means, but it's a lot easier to explain if you believe in an
upside-down U-shaped relationship between exercise and well-being than a
monotonic relationship. (I personally found that my sweet spot was under 100
km/week, any more than that and I got sick and tired and felt beat-down.)

Same with being a CEO. It's great to be your own boss. It's generally hard on
your body, soul, and relationships to work 100 hours a week. If your ambition
is to have a 5k/month side project and live on that, that's probably good for
your health. If it's to make and sell a billion dollar company, that's
probably not.

That's not to say that _working_ at a startup isn't great. I just wouldn't
want to start one. And unless you do, you're probably going to have a boss.

[0]
[https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196(...](https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/%20S0025-6196\(15\)00621-7/fulltext)

[1]
[https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386(17)30536-X/fulltext](https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-6386\(17\)30536-X/fulltext)

[2]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17465622)

[3] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-
workout...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-libido-men-
workouts/years-of-intense-exercise-tied-to-dip-in-male-libido-idUSKBN16O1Y8)

------
queryly
I am not sure if it is because I am getting old, but have found Paul's old
writing more resonating than ever.

~~~
matfil
Likewise. His more programming-centric writing, in particular, is a breath of
fresh air relative to the current "teams, tests, and tickets" dogma. Personal
favourite: [http://paulgraham.com/head.html](http://paulgraham.com/head.html)

------
noir_lord
The legacy code but resonates, I'm often stuck doing things in an ugly way or
constrained because I have to work around the continual tire fire I inherited.

On the flip side I'm one of those weirdos who likes working on legacy code _as
long as I have the freedom to improve it_.

------
paulie_a
There is a big difference between management and leadership. Regardless of the
size of the team there will be managers. There will be a structure. whether it
is a team of two or megacorp, what consistently lacks is genuine leadership.

------
agumonkey
Brings me memories about stories at PARC, there were often manager-free path
between groups. This led to unleashed creativity: want something ? ask the
dude that know about something, done.

------
fallingfrog
You weren’t, but here’s the reason you do:

In an organization where everyone is equal, adding a new person to the org
doesn’t benefit the people who are already in it. Let’s say you have a coop
bagel shop- is there any particular reason to want to cut your own paychecks
until you have saved up enough to open another one? Or let’s say you live in
an egalitarian, peaceful country. Is there any reason to want to invade your
neighbors and annex territory? No.

But, if you put one person in charge, then suddenly you have a person in a
position of authority with a vested interest in expanding the franchise, since
he gets to skim off the labor of everyone underneath him. In a stroke, you’ve
invented empire, war, and capitalism. Come back in a hundred years and the
organizations that expanded the most are also the most heirarchical.

I don’t think this is a good thing, by the way, just a historical factor to be
aware of.

~~~
neil_s
Huh? If the additional person can bring more value to the cooperative than
they consume (which you would generally hope to be true for most hires), then
it will be to your benefit. Yes, more slices need to be cut, but the cake is
bigger. For example, a marketing expert that can increase customers for the
single bagel shop by 10%, but their salary only costs 1%.

~~~
fallingfrog
Sure- that’s true. But heirarchical organizations seek to expand even when the
benefit to each existing member is zero- or indeed, negative.

------
cow9
"For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always suck to
work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it
will suck."

do you agree?

~~~
FrankyHollywood
Definitly not! Few years ago I worked as developer at a startup. 4 devs, 2
sales, 1 marketing and 1 CEO.

It was a mess, sales made horrible promisses to customers, and letting us
build demo after demo. The CEO was going round every day pushing people to
work harder. And everytime the guy read some tech news we had to drop
everything and switch technology to be 'more innovative'.

Right now I'm working in a large company (> 1000 employees)

I have a steady budget for my team. There are targets offcourse, but overall a
lot of freedom to do with my team we think is best. Management doesn't get
involved in any tech descisions. Wouldn't wanne go back to my startup years...

------
iblaine
TL;DR; Successful guy visits Africa, sees animals in the wild instead of
Zoo's, creates clickbait article to imply capitalism is a zoo and people do
not belong in zoo's. The premise of this argument is that people do not belong
in large groups. Ironically that is what we all try to do. Over time, people
organize so they can accomplish greater things as a whole rather than
individuals. The end of the article goes on to say, "Founders arriving at Y
Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later
they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if
they've grown several inches taller." I can't decide if this article
attempting to be advice or a sales pitch for Y Combinator.

------
gamma-male
Perfect blogpost as I'm joining a large corp soon...

~~~
initself
"In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."

------
yowlingcat
I'm going to agree with other folks saying PG really took the L on this piece.
That "Don't talk to corp dev" piece is a far more quality piece than this one,
which is really a stretch. As it turns out, if you're at the right company,
even if you prefer small firms, you'll probably find a lot to learn and a good
reason to stay at a larger company. And if you're at a small firm, you can
really be gambling on your entire career. PG, of course, never mentions this
in his piece, or the consideration that so many startups fail. How many bush
tailed young engineers have gone to work at a startup somewhere early in their
career and had it go pear shaped? Was this kind of inspiration porn to blame?

Of course, it's 10 years on from this piece, and we're seeing lots of
correction to this. The youth aren't quite so naive these days. They don't buy
this kind of drivel. They want a real job with real benefits, room to grow,
mentorship, a healthy org, userbase growth, an interesting roadmap -- they
want a career. They're not going to settle for a huckster selling them a get
rich quick scheme. PG gets dangerously close to that in several articles.

EDIT: I'm realizing this sounds a little bit more bitter and polemical than
I'd like. Let me submit for reference that this view is very, very much
colored by my own experiences -- right out of college, I had several early
stage startups I worked at and/or co-founded go sideways in manners that I had
zero preparation for or help extricating myself from. I found myself wishing
at that stage that I had worked at either more established companies, whether
they be post series A startups or BigCos. I went on to do just that, but had
already burned through 3 years of a spotty resumé, low salary, emotional
burnout and having to develop an unnecessarily thick hide to weather all that
than I wished. I'm seeing colleagues of mine who took this route out of
college, and they seem so much further ahead and well-balanced than I was at
their age. It makes me think that in hindsight, it all seems so unnecessary --
had I worked at more stable companies in that period, wouldn't I be three
years ahead? Would I have been a more polished and developed professional just
as they are now? It's easy to discount the necessity of good mentorship early
in your career, but it's so crucial. That mentorship is what gives you the
tools to learn how to learn and how to peacefully co-exist with others -- if
you don't get that the right way, there's a lot of painful and wasteful
unlearning and relearning that must be done. I certainly found myself doing
more of that than I would have liked.

For all intents and purposes, there's no guarantee (just a high probability
financially) that I would've been further ahead if I started my career off at
a big co. But life doesn't work like that. I would have certainly been more
risk-averse, and a lot less capable of, erm, smashing through my problems
(when I need to) as I am today. I guess that even so, I would still trade some
of that off for a more stable early career that let me get to a place of
security and learning right out of college.

~~~
tlb
The idea that working for a small company that fails is damaging to one’s
career is a durable bit of propaganda. It probably originated as a way for big
companies to discourage their people from shopping around. You can picture IBM
execs, after the company singalong, telling ghost stories about the Man Who
Joined a Startup, with themes from Icarus or fairy tales where someone strays
from the village and is eaten by wolves.

Being part of a small company that fails sucks while it’s going down, but
quickly turns into a new adventure for people that are open to it.

------
mempko
> to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way
> components of a market economy do.

If you look at truly revolutionary making environments like Xerox Parc, they
are like this, no bosses and small groups.

However, what you didn't see in Xerox Parc is a market economy. Why? Because
competition destroys invention.

Humans are not meant to compete with each other. Markets are another
artificial environment, but of course, Paul doesn't see that because he is the
fish in the fishbowl.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
This post parallels Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial society and its future"

------
33a
So.... Basically the same as
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation)

------
jacquesm
There is a huge contradiction in this essay. If everybody were to follow the
mantra and 'fire their boss' then who will those scrappy starter-uppers hire?

Some people will have a boss, some people won't and that's all dependent on
personal risk evaluation. The 'gig' economy is where really nobody has a boss,
the libertarian wet dream where everybody sells their body as a service to be
discarded on a moments notice. Having a boss translates into access to social
security, welfare, healthcare and other safety nets in many places in the
world, and entrepreneurs usually pay in to such schemes but will not be in a
position to apply for help if it should come to that.

~~~
jannes
I think the essay doesn't make the case for everyone to 'fire their boss'
rather than to limit organisation size to about 8 people and to eliminate
hierarchies.

~~~
jacquesm
How is that working out for Stripe, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Uber
and Apple?

------
sonnyblarney
The ability to organize into large groups is one of the greatest social
innovations in history, and is a fundamental aspect of civil society.

I worked at a company that had an 'individual' service, and a 'business'
service.In Spain, Italy and Greece and S. America - our customers were
'individuals'. In Germany, France and UK, they were 'business' accounts. Those
economies with more 'business' accounts have somewhat more advanced industrial
basis than those with 'individual' accounts.

There are many things that can only be developed at scale, and certain kinds
of specialization that only become available at scale.

Only a company with X people can start to invest in Y kinds of things, which
is a huge part of their competitive advantage.

Yes, big cos are seemingly more inefficient at the individual level, but their
scale actually might imply greater efficiency.

Put another way - someone at only 50% individual efficiency at a big corp, may
be 'creating more value' than otherwise.

------
m0skit0
Except that white flour or sugar are not bad for you physically.

[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-
ag...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/gary-taubes-and-the-case-against-
sugar/)

