You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

by helwr • 15 years ago

228 83 15 years ago

paulgraham.com

callmeed• 15 years ago

I recall reading about Dunbar's Number in a Gladwell book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

I'm curious if this jives with what pg is saying about group size–or am I comparing apples and pears?

wccrawford• 15 years ago

While I disagree with the title (even in the hunter-gatherer days there was always a leader), I agree with the theory that people work better in smaller groups. I actually thought the number was more like 4-6, but 8 is pretty close to that.

I was actually just remarking about that the other day when enumerating some advantages that startups and other small companies have over large ones.

ececconi• 15 years ago

I think Paul makes some great points in this article. One thing he might overlook, however, is that people can have great mentors even in large organizations. Freedom is great and all, but is it really detrimental to work in a large organization? There is a reason that the organization as a whole is still around. Not everybody has the ability nor drive to run wild, come up with brand new ideas, and be revolutionary straight out of college.

kevingadd• 15 years ago

I think the insidious thing about large organizations is not a lack of freedom or an inability to exercise your creative muscles.

The insidious thing the large organization teaches you is that this is how things operate, and that a successful career means never having freedom and never exercising your creative muscles on a succession of larger and larger projects for a larger salary, so that you can buy a house you can't afford that's just barely close enough to the office but still so far that it takes you two hours to get to work.

If someone decides they want to trade freedom and creativity for job security and a stable paycheck, that's perfectly fine, as long as they're making the decision. If your first job out of college is an entry-level gig at a bigco that you barely managed to get, 8 years of inertia later you'll be coasting along at some mid-level position at a bigco, doing basically the same things. Inertia combined with the peer pressure of seeing everyone else doing what you're doing can be a powerful thing.

alexro2• 15 years ago

The food analogy is ingenious. Like junk food kills my real hunger and makes me a less active hunter/farmer, so the "junk" job makes me want to learn less and keeps me with safe choices.

Both in the not so long term destroy me as a competitive creature.

Sandman2• 15 years ago

Hmm. I don't know, I started some of my own projects precisely because what I did at work was not intellectually satisfying. The boredom of working on mundane things made me want to do something new and innovative (well, at least new and innovative to me) in my spare time. So I'd say it really depends on a person rather than a job. If you want to learn you'll learn.

quanticle2• 15 years ago

You weren't meant to have a boss. You also weren't meant to read, work on computers, drive cars, fly, or even practice agriculture. Its very easy to criticize any modern institution on the grounds of, "Our H. Erectus ancestors didn't do it, so it must be unnatural." Rather than snark about how the phenomenon is bosses is somehow unnatural and antithetical to human existence, why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?

wpietri2• 15 years ago

I think the difference there is that books, computers, cars, and planes are tools that one can choose to work with, rather than a system that one has to work within. More briefly: you use tools, but hierarchical power structures use you.

And it's worth noting that Graham is working on creating alternatives (coughycombinatorcough), so your grumping seems a little out of place.

alf2• 15 years ago

Humans also weren't meant to build pyramids, send men to the moon, or write operating systems. Big organizations are needed for big problems. But I do generally agree with the article that big organizations are not the best place to develop as a programmer.

GavinB• 15 years ago

Is there any successful YC company that doesn't have bosses and employees? There is even a feature on HN designed specifically for bosses to find employees.

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

Ah, but you use your computer, your books, the plane, and the plow...but I'm afraid that it is the boss that uses you most of the time.

EwanG• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm just the odd one out (ok, I KNOW I'm just the odd one out in general, but still), but I find that I use my boss too.

First off, it's hard to play good cop, bad cop to get someone to change their mind if someone isn't willing to play the bad cop.

Second, my boss has been at the company a number of years, and so can tell me what my sponsor is going to be looking for, and any political landmines I might run into.

Lastly, my boss is the one who goes toe to toe with upper management to get the raise that he thinks I deserve, not just the default raise.

chc• 15 years ago

Actually, from what I've read, your brain actually is specialized to benefit reading, and humans have adapted a lot for agriculture.

quanticle2• 15 years ago

Its not that clear cut. Did our brains specialize for reading, or did reading result from the fact that our brains are specialized to handle visual data better than many other animals?

revorad• 15 years ago

why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?

What are the unique advantages of having a boss?

freshrap6• 15 years ago

Sometimes a good boss can shield you from office politics and bureaucracy, that hamper the productivity of developers. I have a boss who lets me focus on coding and creating things we need, rather than paperwork and politics which I hate. He's also good and blocking "Drive by Requirements" that sometimes come from out of the blue.

JeffffreyF• 15 years ago

Why don't we address the fact that institutional oppression is unatural?

dkokelley2• 15 years ago

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%2...

How is it that this article is getting reposted? It's a great article, I know. But couldn't the HN community submit and upvote new and current articles? Wouldn't the community be better served by this? I suppose if enough members haven't seen it then the upvotes and front page placement are a net gain, but please don't let this stuff rise to the top just because pg wrote it. If it must stay up here, let it be because users who have not read the article prior find value in it.

/self-righteous rant

bdhe• 15 years ago

You can see I've posted at least one pg article I found insightful but wasn't voted up, so anecdotal evidence suggests people don't vote it simply because it is written by pg.

And towards your second point, as someone who has been on this site for little over six months, this is the first time I came across this article and found it interesting, insightful, and gave me lots of things to think about. I presume there were enough other people who also thought so.

dkokelley2• 15 years ago

Your article was also an old one (from 7 years ago in this case). You were also not the first to post that article (preempted by 4 years). I mention the author because there's usually a rush to be the first to post new his new essays and they get upvoted highly and quickly (although I believe they are well-deserved votes). Typically reposted articles get translated into upvotes for the original article submission, but this is not always the case (although I believe it is the intended behavior).

As a general rule, if it's from pg, it's either new or it's been posted before. This opens up an entirely new debate over whether reposts are good for an online community or not. Generally, I'm for them, provided they are voted up because of their value to the current user audience, and not any sort of fanaticism.

coderdude• 15 years ago

The weird thing is how selective HN is about duplicate articles. I've submitted things just to find out they were originally posted up to 3 years ago after it redirects me to the submission. A PG essay can be resubmitted, same URL and title, without issue at least several times (as the HN search link shows).

I'd love to know how HN goes about deciding which content is OK to resubmit over and over again.

colonelxc• 15 years ago

It keeps track of the sites in memory. That means if the machine gets kicked, old urls can be submitted again.

It is also just simple URL based limitations, adding some bogus parameters to a url, or a hash, would be enough to get around it.

I don't know the specifics of the algo, but it may also add sites to its cache if someone visits one of the old comments pages, which could make it look more sporadic and picky.

mannicken3• 15 years ago

There's just one thing about this article that makes me feel eerie. It sounds like a piece of propaganda. PG tries evoking an emotional response out of the reader, pulling some random unsupported facts out of nowhere, like a religious preacher who'll do anything to support his point of view. What doesn't help is that since he's an investor, he is directly profiting from people working for rates below market rates and making it big. Nothing wrong with that. But still. Eerie.

" The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups." WHOA! really? I mean, I don't disagree but this is a fairly huge statement. He should back it up or <every intelligent reader> will assume that he's holding them for idiots.

"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 lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. " Oh, no! I'm not an animal! And if I am, I'm certainly the WILD TIGER FROM THE JUNGLE rather than a zoo-domesticated kitten. I SHOULD QUIT RIGHT NOW.

Again, very broad connection. Full-time employees are nothing like zoo animals. They can leave any time they want, for one.

The question is -- did PG ever work at a big company like Microsoft/Google/etc? Hard to tell from the article. Perhaps PG's intense imagination caused him to believe certain things are true while in reality they're illusions.

"It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. " This smells. Smells bad. This would be a lot better and believable:

I worked at <a huge company> and it sucked. I spent most of my time figuring out how to impress my boss and come to the office on time, and how to log my hours properly. When I quit because it got unbearable, I realized that my logging-hours-properly skills and and getting-to-the-office-on-time skills are unmarketable, and quite frankly, a bunch of bullshit.

moondistance• 15 years ago

Rates below market rates? I think most people would disagree. They aren't salaried but the equity often pays well.

mannicken3• 15 years ago

Good question. http://ycombinator.com/apply.html tells us that three founders (common situation) will get $20, 000, or roughly $6,667 per person. For three months. That's around $2200/month for skilled work, and it's not even a full-time job:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

" Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. "

That sounds like 12-14hr/day, including weekends etc.

Now you can see how the rate drops a lot when you divide $2200 by, uhm, what, 70-80hrs a week? It's barely minimum wage.

Of course, you can say 'well, but they're giving you most of the stock if you succeed'. Yeah, but that also means you'll have to pay YC back in hundreds of thousands of dollars if you succeed. (Say YC is getting 5% of your $4 mln startup).

The equity is not guaranteed. YC does not guarantee you'll get huge. They'll just pat on your shoulder and give you some pocket cash in return for a part of your company.

Which is not bad.

gus_massa• 15 years ago

He worked at Yahoo! in 1998-1999.

He told some of his experiences in http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html .(The second part, after "Hackers", is the more relevant to this topic.)

dgallagher2• 15 years ago

I've always felt that PG uses his essays to flesh out ideas, thinking out loud. By putting it out there, others' can question things and draw their own conclusions (plus they provide a feedback loop). It's like overhearing a really intelligent person talking at a bar; you don't have to agree with everything they say, and they might be wrong, but it does get you thinking...

His usage of metaphors paints a more vivid picture of the point he's trying to get across. If you read enough of his essays, you begin to adhere to this tone. Interpreting the metaphors literally would be the equivalent of doing the same towards sarcasm. But like a sarcastic person you just met, it can take some time to figure them out and "really" understand what they're saying.

PG did work for Yahoo after they acquired ViaWeb in the late 90's. He doesn't mention this in most essays, so it's understandable to question that here.

mannicken3• 15 years ago

I have to admit I wanted to spice things a bit, playing devil's advocate on purpose. Make the discussion more interesting by challenging status quo and see if it holds up.

techiferous3• 15 years ago

What if you agree with this article, you do feel constrained in an unhealthy way by your job in a large organization, but you don't feel that leaving for a small company or startup is an option (or at least not an option anytime soon)?

Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context.

In other words, imagine your boss says that the web app must be written in C++ for political reasons, and you cannot convince him to switch to Ruby on Rails, and you just know that the project would die a slow painful death if written in C++. Well, supposing you are correct, you are in a crappy job: constrained to do the wrong thing and with a boss that cannot be convinced otherwise. And for whatever reason you've got to stick it out through this project.

Focus on being the best C++ web developer in the world. Do the absolute best job you can on the tasks that are assigned to you. Throw yourself into your work 110%. But to do this you have to shift your point of view. You cannot think about this as "wasted effort" since you know the project will ultimately fail. You must think about this as training. You are putting your mind through intense training, keeping your skills sharp, so that when the opportunity finally does come to leave your job (or perhaps a new boss comes along), your mind is in top form and ready to go. Sure, you've probably acquired some less than useful skills for web development (managing pointers) but you've probably acquired and maintained some very good transferrable skills.

Whatever you do, don't give up, because then your skills will atrophy.

alexro2• 15 years ago

Or alternatively I'd do this: spend as low energy on this absurd project as you can, read about new stuff at your work if you can and grow your normal skills at home. Have a project on a side, help real people to solve real problems. Have no pity when you leave this boss and the company behind.

parfe• 15 years ago

>spend as low energy on this absurd project as you can, read about new stuff at your work if you can and grow your normal skills at home

If you were any good you'd solve the problem the absurd project was created to solve. Instead you can't solve it so you pretend to be elite by "learning" rather than doing.

techiferous3• 15 years ago

The only thing to be careful of here is that even though it is a sign of intelligence that you choose not to put forth effort toward a fruitless goal, your boss or another outsider may not view it this way. They may think you're lazy, for example.

a3_nm2• 15 years ago

You need a lot of energy (cynicism? doublethink?) to be able to see such a pointless exercise as an opportunity for training. It might be the optimal thing to do, but it is quite hard to ignore that part of your brain which tells you to avoid useless stuff.

Besides, not all crappy tasks can be bent like this. Sometimes, there is just no way to disguise it as an interesting challenge.

techiferous3• 15 years ago

Agreed. This advice is only for when you are trapped. It is not good to put your effort toward a pointless goal.

samyzee• 15 years ago

haha I tried that yesterday....my boss asked me to come up with documentation for some objective C code....in three days I not only documented two classes but also used a tool called appledoc for autogenerating documentation for all the classes....in fact I wrote a script that I added as an xcode target that when run not only autogenerates documentation but also uploads it on a central server.

RESULT...I got severly REBUKED for not creating a word document and emailing it to him...in fact he threatened me about escalating my disobedience to senior management

jleyank• 15 years ago

quanticle says it well, but I wanted to add that some things require a scale that's unavailable to "a small bunch of guys". Say, for example, you'd like to cure a disease. Can't be done on the small, as you need various flavors of lab people, slugs of lab hardware and then a number of suits required to get $COUNTRY approval.

You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.

In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.

This goes with life as well as work.

hxf148• 15 years ago

I am leaving a full time and very good IT job with the federal government at the end of August. I don't have a super solid alternative income lined up but I am going after my dreams and that feels right. Having several layers of management and "bosses" has been so wrong for me in the last decade that it began to affect my health.

mindcrime2• 15 years ago

Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.

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.

This is the most interesting bit in the whole article, to me. I honestly believe firms can be organized like this, and probably should be organized like this. Interestingly, there was a book that I read a few months ago.. I think it was this one (http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Enterprise-Sense-Respond-Orga...) that argued for something similar, and went into a lot of depth about how it could be done.

pg2• 15 years ago

Me too. But the organization doesn't have to be a "firm" in the usual sense...

mindcrime2• 15 years ago

True, and I'll admit to being lazy in my use of language there. I'm using "firm" and "organization" as though they were completely synonymous. That need not be the case, of course, depending on whose definition of "firm" you use.

Anyway, I find it interesting that Coase argued that firms exist to mitigate transaction costs resulting from imperfect information... and then Downes & Mui argued that digital technology would reduce transaction costs to a point of eliminating the need for large firms, creating what they called "The Law of Diminishing Firms."

So far we haven't seen big corporations fading away, but I still come down on the side of an eventual transition to networks of collaborating (smaller) entities displacing some of the bigger firms.

ivankirigin• 15 years ago

Meetup is trying something like this: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_24/b40880886...

I haven't heard an update for how it has gone.

ajju• 15 years ago

Ricardo Semler has done this with his business(es) in Brazil. His book about this, 'Maverick' is a decent read. http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...

ww520• 15 years ago

Whether you meant to have a boss or not, one thing I notice when working for myself is this - absolute creative freedom. There is no boss to tell you to finish a project you don't like. There's no boss to tell you to start a project on someone else's idea. There's no boss to tell you to use a certain technology or tool. If you want to suspend a project to pursue another one, no one would stop you. You have complete control over your creative process.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

Complete control over your creative process often results in the Star Wars prequels (or worse). Overrated!

Cleverly working around limitations on your freedom is where the real art is.

adnanymously• 15 years ago

Humans as small groups have always had a leader. And that leader in earlier times was the guy who was most powerful. When bosses are actually capable of being a boss (in terms of their ability), we're okay with it. It's only the dumb boss that irritates.

derrida• 15 years ago

The suit is back.

EDIT: Reference -> http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

kennystone• 15 years ago

I agree with this article. What I find strange, however, is how he implies silicon valley is the normal way for humans to act, and yet the default way to do business there is to take huge amounts of venture capital. VC results in all sorts of restrictions employees and an impetus for the company to radically grow into the kind of large, unnatural company he's writing about. "Come to y-combinator to act more human so you can build a less human company if you're really successful!" The 37signals style relaxation bootstrapped business, however, well that seems to fit much better.

zipdog• 15 years ago

Small companys have an advantage, but the potential influence of a large organisation suggests that there's a great benefit in size if you can effectively overcome the natural tendency toward stagnation through a tree structure.

I think technology can certainly help an organisation work effectively together with weaker integration, but ultimately a huge portion of it will be culture and personality.

Developing effective technology that assists in the development of the right sort of culture for a fluid, large organisation would be an interesting challenge. I think it might address the same sort of things that 'team building' exercises and retreats usually spectacularly fail at.

justinhj• 15 years ago

There's a really great book written by an anthropologist living with a group of pygmies in the Congo. They literally have no leader. Very interesting and a similar vibe to that of PG's lion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_People

rimmjob• 15 years ago

didn't the prehistoric groups of our ancestors probably have some kind of leader or hierarchy?

Sandman2• 15 years ago

This is article is really not so much against bosses per se as it is against large companies. But it seems to me that even small startups, if they are successful, grow into large companies with strongly defined structure and teams, and team leaders (or bosses, if you prefer that term).. and there's really not much that can be done about it. It's just natural - if you grow, you need to change your organizational structure. If there's 500 people in your company you can't pretend to be a small startup consisting of 5. You need to accept the fact that you've grown large and act accordingly. That means having a structure that's suitable to your current size.

Although this article idealizes the romantic picture of a small creative, innovative startup that disrupts large behemoth-like businesses, the fact is that most game-changing startups these days are, in fact, middle-to-large companies. Facebook has over 2000 employees. LinkedIn, 1000 in 2010. Groupon reportedly has over 3000 people in 29 countries [1]. The exception here is Twitter which only has about 450. If you want to be big, you got to grow big, and once that happens you got your teams, and bosses and so on.

But I disagree with the statement that big companies necessarily stifle your creativity. Google, for example, is a great example of a company that actually fosters creativity. As for not being able to learn as much working in a large company as working in a startup.. Well, I'd say it really depends on the company and people there. I learned a lot from my mentors at my first job working as an intern at a large company, and I would definitely say that, if anything, it made me a better developer.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/3000-people-in-29-countries

jscore• 15 years ago

Really? I know plenty of people that aren't meant to be bosses and need someone else to guide them.

Not everyone is cut out to be a CEO or President, etc.

paulnelligan• 15 years ago

I'm presuming that Lions in the wild have a far greater chance of death and injury as well - a good reason to stay in the zoo perhaps ?

Eitherway, good luck to us all!

masto• 15 years ago

People who are successful by accident sometimes develop a tendency to preach that the only way to be successful is to do what they did. It's almost like a kind of auto-cargo-cultism. "I had a pear tree in my front yard when I made my first million, so if you want to be rich, go out and plant pear trees!" Paul Graham is one of the better examples of this phenomenon. I would say he's gone off the deep end, but from what I can tell he's always been there. Of course there are nuggets of wisdom in his large accumulation of writing, but they're much fewer and further between than, for example, Joel Spolsky.

Also, could people stop spouting nonsense about what "humans weren't designed" to do or eat?

scythe• 15 years ago

>It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph

giaskaylee• 15 years ago

PG offered some intriguing and keen insight with this article.

Think of YC as a company, and all the YC-founded startups as tiny, self-governing units under this big brand, you'll come to realize that despite the company lacks any form of management and a real boss in the traditional sense, it's working well and profitable.

Gormo• 15 years ago

This concept relates to a thought that I've had for a while regarding why large organizations always seem so inefficient and tend toward stagnation.

In a small group, formal rules and processes exist as layers of abstraction built on top of a substantive social context established by the complex interactions among the individual members. All of the cues, feedback mechanisms, and communication channels inherent in human nature are in full effect, and these usually generate appropriate and efficient responses to changing circumstances in real time.

But once you've gone beyond a certain level of scale, those mechanisms no longer function, and the more natural, emergent social context no longer forms a consistent substantive base layer. The rules and processes that originally existed as an abstraction layer instead become the lowest available level of complexity; and since these rules are the product not merely of design, but of design that originally took place within constraints that are no longer present, the formal rules are usually quite insufficient as a substitute.

Even those who recognize this problem at this point can do little about it, because there's no longer a workable context in which to generate and implement a solution. It may only be possible to avoid in advance by being very deliberate in the process of scaling, and building the organization as a 'confederation' of smaller groups divided along natural functional 'seams'.

This phenomenon may actually be more evident in politics than in business.

nfriedly• 15 years ago

> [1] When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.

Do you think that humans will eventually evolve to work better in larger groups if they keep getting pushed that way?

etruong42• 15 years ago

What are we "meant" to do? Some people enjoy the active lifestyle full of exercise and unprocessed foods. Others don't mind eating whatever is convenient and enjoy other pursuits. Some don't even have the choice and would be (presumably) happier with either.

We can talk about what diet leads to greater cardiovascular health or what employment strategy is more productive. But trying to talk about something as amorphous as having more "meaning" is a lost cause.

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

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