
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss: The Cliffs Notes - brlewis
http://www.paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html
======
mhartl
I think people are reacting not to the (nonexistent) suggestion that MegaCorp
programmers _intrinsically suck_ , but rather to the implicit suggestion that
they suck _for not starting startups_.

To continue with the lion analogy, suppose that lions in the zoo were there by
choice rather than by force. Then, when seeing how pathetic zoo lions are
compared to wild lions, we might conclude that they somehow lack the courage
to live their wild lives of destiny.

The negative spin is that MegaCorp hackers are cowardly lions. This
predictably provokes a defensive response. The positive spin? The cage doors
are open.

~~~
pg
_The negative spin is that MegaCorp hackers are cowardly lions._

There are all kinds of reasons people might work at a big company besides
cowardice. They might need the health insurance, or to pay off their student
loans. They might want to focus on other things besides work.

Sigh. I wish people would stick to arguing about what I actually _said_ in the
essay, instead of what I "implied." If I wanted to imply something, I'd say
it.

~~~
cperciva
_Sigh. I wish people would stick to arguing about what I actually said in the
essay, instead of what I "implied." If I wanted to imply something, I'd say
it._

If you want people to read what you say literally instead of drawing
inferences, don't use metaphors.

 _Seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo
after spending several years watching them in the wild._

Do you mean that these scavenger hunters were pacing around and growling? Of
course not -- you expect us, as readers who understand the nuances of English,
to understand that this is a metaphor; to think about the differences between
caged and uncaged lions; and to project those differences onto humans.

Guess what? Metaphors are imprecise. Different people have different notions
concerning how caged and uncaged lions differ. Different people will project
these properties onto humans in different ways.

I agree entirely with what you're saying in the essay, but I think it might
have been far more effective if one of your proof-readers had said "you know,
this is liable to be misinterpreted, maybe you can reword it?"

~~~
pg
It is not considered unreasonable to expect readers to be able to understand
where a metaphor ends. Metaphors wouldn't work otherwise.

Imagine if I'd written something about tides, and begun with a metaphor about
swinging a condom full of liquid on the end of a string. No doubt some
Christian fundamentalists would be so offended at that point that they'd stop
reading and write angry blog posts about how "distasteful" it was to compare
God's Earth to a condom. Would that be my fault?

You have to draw the line somewhere. If you write about things that are
difficult and/or controversial, some people will misunderstand you. I try hard
to write as clearly as I can, but the things you'd have to do to make an essay
proof against readers who were really stupid or personally oversensitive about
some topic would ruin it for the other readers.

~~~
mixmax
being controversial correlates highly to being successful.

If noone hates what you are writing, it is probably boring.

------
te_platt
I am very surprised at the discussion this essay has touched off. I thought it
was almost obvious what pg was saying. I have been from start up to large
company to starting my own start up to working for a large company again. I've
lived the same changes two times over now and can completely relate to the
caged lion feeling. It's not that I'm a better programmer (or person for that
matter) when I'm working for myself. It's that working for a large company has
certain restrictions on freedom that come with the added security and comfort.

In short, I feel, act, and behave differently based on my environment. There
are a lot of nice things about working for a large company and I work for a
good one right now. Still, if I didn't have my own projects to work on
(another start up coming on!) I would go stir crazy. I thought the analogy to
a lion was quite flattering.

------
tx
PG lives in a different world.

Considr Austin TX, the 3rd largest computer tech startup hub in US (read: the
world). Programmers are NOBODY here, they're disposable code monkeys, and
literally all startups I personally was involved in were started by polished
and sleasy "MBA types" who regularly push engineers aside and have pictures of
M3s and Porsches on their personal blogs. Needless to say, all local startups
are a joke, (I won't point fingers). Local investors are ( _for real_ )
interested in seeing your 10-year financial projections, P&L and all that
other useless crap. When I told that to my SV-based mentor he laughed his
pants off.

If Austin is like that, I can only imagine how pathetic the rest of the world
is, and how hard it is for them to get Paul's points.

If Paul is not exaggerating, SV is truly unique and everybody with a CS degree
should be moving down there. And working for Yahoo/Google/Facebook in SV is
_truly_ a huge waste of your life.

~~~
ardit33
True, but I warn you, there are no girls here. Seriously, Sillicon Valley is a
big sausage fest.

~~~
jimbokun
This is hands down the best rebuttal to pg's arguments for young men to start
a SV startup that I've read.

(Actually, for young women, too, but for the opposite reason.)

------
edw519
3 big reasons why something so simple gets blown out of proportion so often:

1\. "I have a blog. I have to blog everyday. I have nothing to say today. I'll
find something to say anyway."

2\. "You said something on-line and I didn't have an opportunity to see your
body movements or hear your voice tonality. So I misinterpreted it."

3\. "I have to show everyone how much smarter I am than everyone else. So I'll
disagree with something someone smart has said. That'll show'em."

------
mynameishere
More of an apologia than a summarization.

Atwood _et al_ are responding to the more general idea, quite consistently
expressed, that the startup life is better than the corporate life. By itself,
this is neither true nor false, so it's simply not worth fighting over.

 _Everybody_ wants to be rich. _Nobody_ wants to fail. Startups offer both.

~~~
brentr
My grandfather used to say, "If you don't fail every now and then, you are not
doing enough."

Failure is a good thing. It is from failure that new things are learned. I am
willing to fail if that failure ultimately leads to riches. In a startup
failures and riches are not mutually exclusive if the entrepreneurs are
willing to learn from their failures.

~~~
tim2
That depends entirely on whether the failure was worth the risk and amount
that was actually learned. I can see this often not being the case.

------
run4yourlives
Paul, I don't think you get it though.

I've got to say here that I read the essay with the same distaste as Atwood,
particularly because of its opening paragraphs. I loved the message, and agree
with the theory, but I had a tough time with the presentation.

The connotation that it isn't natural to be an employee and as such those that
do are by extension "unnatural" is troubling. I realize that you're not saying
"all corporate programmers suck", but clearly, people who have the courage,
will, and sheer balls to found their own companies have a unique talent that
isn't shared by all.

Of course, the programmers you work with are in perfect harmony with startup
life. For them, having a boss is not the way to go. They need to be
entrepreneurs. It's in their being.

Some people though, are perfectly happy being employees. These people should
not be starting their own companies. They should continue to enjoy life and
have fun on their corporate scavenger hunts. They are innately different than
the startup founder. That much is obvious.

To extend and equate this difference with being "lesser" - whether by choice,
ignorance, or chance - is where you run into trouble with a lot of us. You're
inserting a good/bad comparison into an exercise that should remain strictly
an examination of difference. Hence, Atwood's suggestion of narcissism.

Of course being a founder is "natural" to you. I've learned that it is to me
as well, and no doubt it's natural to everyone on this site.

Sure, a lot of people that work for corporations should look to embrace
startups, especially those that are disgruntled. No, startup founders are not
a select few geniuses; they are those of a given talents. Surely you of all
people realize this. To suggest that everyone shares these talents, or that
those who don't are somehow misguided sounds more like religion than business
though.

Finally, I don't even think this post was needed. This post suggests that a
great many people who read the essay didn't understand it, due to their lack
of intellect. In fact, it is more likely that they understood it perfectly,
and the problem lies more with how the author chose to support the thesis.

------
h34t
"You suck, but not because of who you are intrinsically -- only because of
your environment. You must become a startup founder, or you'll probably
continue to suck."

To me, this retains PG's argument but also shows why it's so easy to be
offended by it.

(personally I agree with his argument -- I've been in the cage and I've been
in the jungle, and I know damn well which one gives me stomach ulcers and
which one helps me become a better human being.)

------
Husafan
I don't think it bodes well for the clarity of your essay that you're using
the beginning of your last paragraph to defend your thesis.

Atwood admits that your, "essay does contain some fair points," but he also
indicates that he, along with others, had trouble getting through it because
of the distasteful metaphor you lead with. In light of this, I am sure you can
understand them not spotting the thesis in your last paragraph.

Finally, perhaps someone with a "conscientiously broadened mind," as you so
describe yourself, could fathom a working environment unlike the one you
describe? I imagine that new-hires at 37signals, or Fog Creek, would not feel
they are missing out because they are not currently heading a start-up. Quite
the opposite, I would think they are grateful for the opportunity, the
environment and the benefits. Not all successful companies treat their
developers like animals. And the ones that don't tend to inspire loyalty. Can
you really not see how you may have offended some of these people?

~~~
pg
The thesis is throughout the essay. Didn't you read it? I just quoted the last
paragraph because it is a direct contradition of what they claim I said.

 _I imagine that new-hires at 37signals, or Fog Creek, would not feel they are
missing out because they are not currently heading a start-up._

Now I'm convinced you didn't read it. There is a paragraph explicitly about
this:

    
    
      You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling
      the size of company you work for. If you start the 
      company, you'll have the most freedom. If you become 
      one of the first 10 employees you'll have almost as much
      freedom as the founders. Even a company with 100 people
      will feel different from one with 1000.

------
girk
Honestly, I'm not sure why everybody is up in arms about either one of these
essays (full-length version and/or Cliffs Notes). Both of them seem right on
target to me.

Reminds me of an essay by Stephanie Tolan titled "Is It a Cheetah?", which
offers cheetahs as an analogy for gifted children who are confined to (and as
a result, crippled by) public school systems.

Excerpt: "The cheetah needs to run! Despite design and need however, certain
conditions are necessary if it is to attain its famous 70 mph top speed. ...
It must have plenty of room to run. Besides that, it is best motivated to run
all out when it is hungry and there are antelope to chase. If a cheetah is
confined to a 10 X 12 foot cage, though it may pace or fling itself against
the bars in restless frustration, it won't run 70 mph."

Full article: <http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm>

~~~
DocSavage
Imagine if Stephanie had started the essay like this:

"A few days ago I was sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto and a group of public
school kids came in on some kind of field trip.

They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with gifted kids, but
something seemed wrong about these kids. There was something missing.

And yet the public school they went to is considered a good one, and from what
I overheard of their conversation, they seemed smart enough.

... I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd
only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed.
Particularly cheetahs. Cheetahs in the wild seem about ten times more alive.
They're like different animals. And seeing those public school kids on their
field trip was like seeing cheetahs in a zoo after spending several years
watching them in the wild."

~~~
pg
This is such a bogus comparison. Few kids get to decide where to go to school;
practically all 25 yo hackers get to decide whether to try starting a startup
or keep working for their current employer.

~~~
tim2
I would like to see a large survey of 25 year old hackers from around the
country who would like to start a startup but decided against it, or just
couldn't. It is nice to believe that it's just lack of inspiration, or
misconceptions about the process, but is there anything else? Maybe.

Or maybe it is because people truly do not want to work hard. Never in my life
have I met someone who prioritizes hacking above all else for more than the
time it would take to defeat a small video game.

One question, by "start a startup," would that refer to getting decent
investment and living a quality of life overall comparable to that of one's
peers, or bootstrapping and every day fighting for survival with a hope that
one day the tides will turn? If the later then those outside the valley are
going to be inspired with a much stronger "yearning for the sea" before they
will make the jump without regret.

~~~
nostrademons
I have lots of 25-year-old friends who would like to start a startup but
decided against it. I'm trying to convince at least one of them to reconsider,
since my cofounder quit yesterday and that leaves me a single founder. Their
reasons are pretty varied, but include:

1.) One has Marfan's syndrome and needs to work at a place with guaranteed
health insurance to cover his medical bills.

2.) Two would like to start a startup in the future, but feel that they don't
currently have enough experience. This was also my reason for not founding a
startup straight out of college.

3.) One was always interested in startups, but his family background has
steered him towards law school, and so he doesn't have the technical skills to
start a tech startup.

4.) One has a wife and two stepkids to support.

5.) One (my former cofounder) wants to start a startup, but got into Harvard
Business School and figures a bird in the hand is worth 10 in the bush.

6.) One likes _working_ for small companies, but enjoys his work-life balance
too much to take the plunge and actually start one himself. He also doesn't
desire the financial rewards that come from a successful startup all that
much.

7.) One couldn't do it because he's on a student visa and it was doubtful that
the visa would let him co-found a company.

They're all good reasons, and you can see that they're a lot more varied than
them all being caged animals.

~~~
DocSavage
Those are great examples. I think the beginning of PG's essay has two issues
that provoked most of the negative comments. He was playing around a metaphor
instead of a clear situational simile, and then he left out the details of how
these programmers looked like caged animals to him. The latter prompted
follow-ups like this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142050>

So instead of readers seeing this:

    
    
      "MegaCorp programmers looked purposeless and embarrassed, 
       like caged lions, while they were doing the scavenger hunt"
    

they saw this:

    
    
      "MegaCorp programmers who I saw at a scavenger hunt are 
       caged lions with something missing in their lives."
    

The first sentence wouldn't draw much outrage. The second implies those
programmers act liked whipped puppies around their girlfriends, look confused
at the gym (if they even go to the gym), etc. [The negatives will vary
depending on how you view caged vs free lions.] The programmers don't just act
like caged lions in a situation, those programmers ARE caged animals.

To be fair, the actual line in the essay is this: "And seeing those guys on
their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several
years watching them in the wild." It's just preceded by lots of prose that
reinforce the IS relationship.

~~~
aston
Your post is one of only two uses on the web of the phrase "situational
simile." However, it actually seems like a useful term. Did you make it up, or
are you just one of the few cool kids to use it on the interwebs?

~~~
DocSavage
"Situational metaphor" is widely used. In this case, because I'm emphasizing
an explicit, limited comparison, I used "simile."

------
tim2
What is so much more fulfilling about startups that is unlikely to be attained
elsewhere?

~~~
foonamefoo
I would say that you have much more creative freedom as a tenured professor
(if getting to that point hasn't completely destroyed your spirit) than as a
startup founder. Look at some of the stuff Noam Chomsky has been able to
devote almost all of his time to--it sure isn't linguistics.

~~~
gruseom
You probably shouldn't use Chomsky as an example. Chomsky is the ultimate
outlier. He's got a superhuman intellect and it's actually exceeded by his
superhuman patience.

I will tell you a Chomsky story. One night in grad school I was wandering the
library stacks looking for anything other than what I was supposed to be
working on. I found myself in front of Emerson's complete works, picked out,
let's say, Volume 18, and stumbled on Emerson's critique of the Mexican-
American war. I noticed that he was saying exactly what Chomsky was to say
about the Vietnam war 120 years later. I thought hey maybe Chomsky hasn't seen
this, so I wrote him a letter: Dear Chomsky, you don't know me and I'm just a
grad student in an unrelated field, but I thought you might enjoy this quote
from Emerson. Love, me.

A couple weeks later, I was surprised to find that Chomsky had written me
back: Dear Daniel, I wasn't aware of that quote and found it very interesting.
Thanks for writing. Love, Chomsky. Well, that was nice of him. End of story.

Not quite. Two _years_ later, I got another letter: Dear Daniel, I was at your
university last week and had been looking forward to giving you a call and
meeting you. Unfortunately, blah blah blah came up and there was just no way.
Hopefully next time. Chomsky.

This one flabbergasted me. By that time I had learned enough about academia to
realize that in the star professor system, star professors never do that. They
talk to students maybe after class or if they sign up for an appointment.
Other than that, they avoid you because they don't want to lose star power.
One guards one's fraternizations very carefully, and there are quite fine and
quite strict lines demarking the various equivalence classes. Probably most
celebrity systems work that way. It's the same reason Hollywood actors date
each other.

Anyway, the fact that Chomsky would write a letter like that to a nobody of a
grad student, the lowliest of the low, really touched me. It also convinced me
that, among star academics at least, the man really is a mutant. A decent
mutant. Who would remember something like that after two years?

~~~
cperciva
_Who would remember something like that after two years?_

I think most academics do.

My own story: When I was an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper which gave
sharp bounds on the round-off errors resulting from computing FFTs using
floating-point arithmetic; and I noticed that my bound was much better than
the bound given by Higham in his Numerical Analysis textbook (which is, by
quite a wide margin, the most widely used textbook in the field). I sent him
an email -- "Dear sir, I noticed that in section X.Y of this book, you prove a
bound of N sqrt(N) log(N) instead of N log(N); if you change foo to bar in
your argument, you'll get the stronger bound which I prove in my paper (see
attachment)" -- and he wrote back to thank me and tell me that he would make
sure the improved bound was in the next edition of the textbook.

A year later, a copy of said textbook arrived in the mail, "compliments of the
author".

Two years after that, when I was a graduate student at a different university,
I went to a talk by Higham; and at the end when we were asked for questions, I
introduced myself (by name, no mention of FFTs) and asked a question. Higham
answered my question, and then went on -- in front of most of the department
-- to announce that I had found an error in the first edition of his textbook,
and that when I wrote to him he had assumed that I was a professor rather than
an undergraduate student.

I think "star professors" are actually _more_ likely to remember things like
this, simply because someone pointing out something they didn't know, or a
mistake they made, is so unusual. It's people like Chomsky, Higham, and Knuth
who remember such contributions and can afford to send out free books -- or
$2.56 cheques -- to those who provide them.

~~~
gruseom
But the thing Higham remembered was orders of magnitude more significant than
thing I was talking about, which was genuinely trivial.

Still, I take your point that among _true_ star professors this kind of
brilliant decency isn't as uncommon as I made out. I was using the term "star
professor" a little more ironically than that.

I definitely disagree with what you said about most academics, though!

~~~
startingup
My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very
arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to
grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't
generalize!

~~~
gruseom
While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is
not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My
fault for not being clearer in the first place.

------
dawie
PG: I read your essay and most of the comments/remarks across the Internet. In
my experience starting at a company, junior hackers learn from senior hackers,
most of the problem solving skills I have learned was from other hackers
(often more senior than myself). Even learning what not too do.

If young hackers starts companies, who do they learn from? Do they just learn
these problem solving skills and people skills by themselves? I am sure
YCombinator has something to do with this process...

~~~
astrec
Young hackers who start companies in cahoots with YC are mentored by old
hackers who start companies.

------
cadalac
My quick comments about the zoo thing:

1)PG compared two same animals, a lion I think, therefore he does NOT think
company workers are inferior to founders. He thinks that they are generally
the same type of people.

2)The founder lion's neck is on the line a lot and he has a lot at stake. He
lives in a dangerous jungle. The company lion on the other hand has little
risk and is a bit like an animal in a cage.

3)One can view the animal inside a cage as either being cruelly mistreated or
being sort of lucky and spoiled.

------
mightybyte
Paul used the caged lion metaphor to illustrate differences in freedom in a
vivid way. That's it. This freedom disparity is a fact. Don't try to say that
"less freedom" implies "sucks" just because the vividness offended your
sensibilities.

