You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

by downbad_ • 2 months ago

144 168 2 months ago

lordkrandel2• 2 months ago

If I hear the argument of "naturality" and "natural design" I explode. We are "naturally" meant to die at 21, after getting whatever illness, never to move with massive transport, not even speak. 'cause all we naturally are is monkeys, right? AaaaaRGHHHH This argument makes me nuts

jjulius3• 2 months ago

There's a lot more nuance to the "natural" conversation than the assumption that we should go back to stone tools and all die before we hit 25. I've not really seen someone with that general belief, and I'm one of them myself, argue for such an all-or-nothing approach.

It's about balance.

bradrn• 2 months ago

Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant:

“Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”
Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”

wavemode2• 2 months ago

We are "naturally" meant to die at 21

Not really? Historical life expectancies were low because it was so common to die in infancy and childhood (thus dragging down the "average").

For people who made it to 20, it was common to live past 60.

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

Yeah people get that one wrong all the time. They don't realize what a bad argument it is.

I'm guessing they are ignorant of historical facts and are just repeating what they heard from somebody else.

ACCount37• 2 months ago

Yeah, you were just meant to "naturally" have 7 children, of which 2-4 die before they get a name. But the ones who live? They might make it past 60.

stabbles2• 2 months ago

I think this is fair criticism. It's hard to read this blog cause its premise is based on an "appeal to nature" fallacy.

jjulius3• 2 months ago

It's flawed criticism because it's rooted in an all-or-nothing perspective.

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

I think there can be a middle ground here. Yes the appeal to nature fallacy is a thing. However, it's not obviously wrong to say that humans evolved in a specific environment, and to question whether moving them to a completely different environment is going to make their life worse.

We evolved living in smaller cooperative groups, and spending most of our time in nature. The farther we move away from that the more we might want to question whether any individual change is actually going to make our life better. Likely some tradeoffs are absolutely worth it and some probably not.

green_wheel2• 2 months ago

Working 90 hours a week in a 15 person startup is arguably further from what we were supposed to do than cruising at Google

lordkrandel2• 2 months ago

Not counting that we already have been studying our own behaviour for thousands of years, as social individuals and society... sometimes you just cannot go back, throw a bat on everyone's head and convince everyone that since we work better in groups of 7, there shall be no corporation

skrebbel• 2 months ago

I wish i could upvote you seven times

nine_k• 2 months ago

"Natural" is something that happens "by itself", for free, without your having to exert an effort to produce it. If it happens to be something beneficial, it should be incorporated and used to your advantage.

ok_dad• 2 months ago

The opposite end of that spectrum is everyone here who thinks we should just ignore nature and where we came from since we’ve conquered it, or something. I’m not sure what you all are arguing here. We’re still a part of nature, we’ll discover that quickly if society collapses.

debo_• 2 months ago

[flagged]

microsoftedging• 2 months ago

I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).

antfarm2• 2 months ago

I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conv...

http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...

antfarm2• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, the download links on those pages are broken.

samrus3• 2 months ago

I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so

zkmon• 2 months ago

I don't think the analogies of animals in the wild or groups of hunter-gatherer is correct to the modern companies. A better analogy is the teams who built pyramids or armies who empowered Alexander or the medieval peasant settlements who regulated societies.

It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process.

Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.

randallsquared• 2 months ago

That collective effort resulted in something very impressive, but there are lots of achievements in the present day which are, organizationally, at least as impressive, and which do not seem to require hierarchy (though they include various hierarchies). The chain of processes and activities that result in a modern supermarket and all its products, for example, has no overarching boss, and some of the steps along the way are handled by self-employed people (truck owner-operators, for example).

jimbokun14• 2 months ago

But the modern supermarket also has many large hierarchical organizations contributing well, from the supermarket chains to industrial farms to giant processed food brands. For better or worse.

rglullis7• 2 months ago

Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building

For what, a glorified tomb?

I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.

tetromino_• 2 months ago

It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class

Consider Egyptian and Mesopotamian irrigation and flood management, Persian and Roman roads, Chinese canals...

WalterBright5• 2 months ago

See "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...

Also, the Apollo lunar landing. 400,000 people worked on it.

dukeyukey• 2 months ago

NASA? JET? CERN?

xeiotos2• 2 months ago

I concur the analogy misses this reason for teaming up in large groups completely.

All our current advances are the direct result of working in large, communicating groups, which crucially need a way to transfer knowledge across generations. The YouTube channel “How to make everything” comes to mind, where the resources, processes, machinery… required make it tricky for something as mundane as a hairdryer to be built from scratch by a single person.

However, I also agree, to some extent, with the point the author is trying to make, even though the arguments and analogies are shaky.

I don’t believe the author is arguing the pyramids would ever have gotten built if everyone did whatever the hell they want. But I also don’t believe the pyramid builders were terribly happy.

In a world where we have solved (or have made significant progress to solving) big categories of problems, it might be worthwhile to consider what our “pyramids” are. Are you working on something life-altering? Some marvel which will stand for hundreds of years? Most people probably aren’t. I know I’m not.

So I find it easy to emphasize with the feeling that it’s more “healthy” to just make whatever the hell you want (be it as a programmer, or just as a human being). After all, a lot of innovation has been a direct result of people fucking around on their own. I’d enjoy a planet where potential Einsteins would not have to work two jobs to survive, in lieu of which they would have time to think, experiment, write, …

Maybe it comes down to: - Individual freedom is ideal to invent things (someone had to be Alexander) - Some pooling of humans is necessary to actually build said things

jimbokun14• 2 months ago

Well that’s simply a question of whether we are at a point yet where we can implement UBI and provide for everyone’s needs and wants without requiring anyone to work.

I don’t think the robots are at that point yet.

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

But that is only 4000 years ago when we’ve been evolving for millions.

interludead4• 2 months ago

I think the pyramid/army analogy works for some kinds of work, but maybe not for the kind of work the essay is mostly talking about.

wavemode2• 2 months ago

None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC).

Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.

Arodex• 2 months ago

In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.

Modern-day sophistry.

Nasrudith2• 2 months ago

That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.

rramadass• 2 months ago

Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful.

A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively.

One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly.

For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...

hnhg• 2 months ago

We weren't meant to have windows made of glass. Such items are entirely unnatural. According to pg, we must be wary of them.

tryauuum• 2 months ago

sounds still more natural than windows made of brick or other non-transparent material!

jleyank2• 2 months ago

Beholding to a boss or to owners. Not a whole lotta difference unless everybody is a sole proprietorship. And that would be way too hand to mouth for most people.

Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

Working for a large corporation feels like being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions make as much of an impact as a tiny leaf rustling in the Amazon forest. I've worked at, both, startups and large mega corporations and I can tell you the difference is night and day.

I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency.

I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes.

I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing.

I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer.

Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire.

But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.

germinalphrase• 2 months ago

Someone created that environment within which you thrived. What is preventing you from doing the same for some other small group, early in their careers?

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

I'm a few million dollars short lol

dangus2• 2 months ago

This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type.

If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc.

If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams.

I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.

rhines• 2 months ago

The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.

dangus2• 2 months ago

Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE.

[1] or maybe that’s not the right term

k_plankenhorn• 2 months ago

Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.

smithcoin• 2 months ago

Good luck! You might not find anything out tomorrow, but it still might work in the long run.

mizzao• 2 months ago

Good luck, and please don't be discouraged if it takes 20 launches to figure out what works! That's completely normal.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

Re-reading old Paul Graham essays is revealing for how much my startup experience has changed my views. I remember this essay resonating with younger me.

Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me.

Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others.

My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people.

Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years.

I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.

cloche• 2 months ago

I couldn't agree more. At this stage of my career, if I were to go back to an early stage startup, I would only consider a startup where the founder(s) had successful experience as at least a frontline manager. That provides a high chance that they will understand what it takes to successfully manage a team and, hopefully, a larger organization.

dentemple3• 2 months ago

Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?

I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead.

Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?

antipurist• 2 months ago

I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.

I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.

Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.

This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.

Can this work? No idea.

voakbasda• 2 months ago

Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.

Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies

How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.

Nasrudith2• 2 months ago

That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.

We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.

rexpop3• 2 months ago

"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.

YZF• 2 months ago

Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.

jimbokun14• 2 months ago

Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.

Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.

aleqs• 2 months ago

I believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.

wahern• 2 months ago

That's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.

NewEntryHN• 2 months ago

Maybe shadow hierarchy are still more productive than official ones? Looks like something that wouldn't have that many meetings.

ornornor• 2 months ago

I worked briefly in a “holacracy” type of company. Absolutely hated it. There was a hierarchy, you just didn’t know about it unless you’d been there a while.

The company acted high and mighty like they have principles, the most successful project that was bringing most of the revenue in got a lot of leeway to bypass all ethical review processes so that it could keep feeding the rest of the company’s more ethical but not very profitable projects.

I hated working there and left after a couple months only. Incidentally, that was my last job ever and the straw that broke the camel’s back: I’ve worked freelance ever since.

foobarian2• 2 months ago

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?

I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.

faidit• 2 months ago

USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.

Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.

Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.

rexpop3• 2 months ago

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?

Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."

Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."

Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm

vhantz• 2 months ago

Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.

But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.

Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).

Explained here better than can be done in a HN comment: https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-plan...

marssaxman• 2 months ago

So what can we do about it?

For starters, you can understand that working for a large corporation will make you miserable, and choose to work in a small organization instead.

xboxnolifes• 2 months ago

Individually, one can try to choose for a small org. Collectively, there isn't enough small org work to go around.

rainsford2• 2 months ago

That might be a valid solution on the individual level, but it seems problematic if we want the kinds of things only a large organization can realistically produce. In addition to small organizations that can act as a source of employment for people who absolutely can't stand a corporate hierarchy, we also need large corporations that don't suck, or at least suck the minimum necessary amount to attract people less averse to having a boss. At least if we want things like airliners and what not.

interludead4• 2 months ago

I think the middle ground probably isn't "no hierarchy" but "less fake hierarchy"

rexpop3• 2 months ago

Instead of massive, centralized corporations, consider the highly successful family firms in Emilia-Romagna[0], as a model. These businesses have thrived for generations in a highly competitive global market not through rigid corporate chains of command, but through decentralized networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and committed workforce.

Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.

0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...

nisegami• 2 months ago

The people doing the actual work should have secretaries, not managers.

dentemple3• 2 months ago

I'll be sure to bring that up at my next team meeting.

mempko2• 2 months ago

There are firm proposals. Read the Democracy and Work effort lead by Richard Wolff.

MithrilTuxedo• 2 months ago

Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?

Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.

rainsford2• 2 months ago

I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.

No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.

I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.

perilunar4• 2 months ago

it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example.

Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.

BrenBarn• 2 months ago

We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?

Well one thing is to break up large corporations into small pieces.

theknarf• 2 months ago

Yes, its called Team Topologies.

forshaper• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

Disasters and the initial push of any war show what is possible. Like the playbook is already know. Strict hierarchy with decision making power at the bottom. This may sound contradictory, sure.

However, it works like this: the top sets a goal, the bottom decides how to get it done. Person closest to the problem then leads.

We know it works. It happens every time a large group -needs- to use it.

However, as soon as things get stable, large orgs go right back to rigid central control.

dentemple3• 2 months ago

Thank you for the resource!

lazy_afternoons• 2 months ago

I once worked for a unicorn (1B valuation) company where there were there were <35 engineers and all of them reported to the technical founder.

No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out)

The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one"

Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges.

But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers.

May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.

samrus3• 2 months ago

Man its amazing when you have that high trust environment. You get treated like an equal, your opinion gets respected, and you can really make a difference in the company's prospect. Its addictive

rco8786• 2 months ago

It's a coordination problem. 70 amazingly responsible adults still need to coordinate amongst one another. Ad hoc coordination and communication always breaks down eventually.

jimbokun14• 2 months ago

Maybe a Dunbar’s number thing?

stephbook• 2 months ago

The naturalistic fallacy needs to die. Then a metaphor about food without any expertise and "programmers are special" sprinkled in. Holy lord, what a wild ride of an article.

Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.

Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?

Asraelite• 2 months ago

It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".

smsm423• 2 months ago

that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.

Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.

WalterBright5• 2 months ago

I don't know why this should be surprising. Large corporations tend to prioritize process over results. In other words, they strangle themselves with bureaucracy.

This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.

interludead4• 2 months ago

Plenty of startups recreate the same dysfunction at a smaller scale, just with less process and worse boundaries (I think...)

musicale2• 2 months ago

I've seen flat structures (with a "boss" who is almost entirely hands-off) work very well for teams with several dozen people.

Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well.

I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.

WhrRTheBaboons• 2 months ago

I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.

Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.

musicale2• 2 months ago

Would be interesting to hear how (well) it worked, why they abandoned it, what they replaced it with (and why), and whether the replacement actually helped to expedite Half-Life 3.

tolerance• 2 months ago

The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same.

Also:

pg's "cliff notes"

https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html

And a standout comment from the original submission

I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210

The parent comment is an interesting read as well

It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.

lasky• 2 months ago

I think it's about how much agency you need/want your job to give you in that specific moment/season of your life.

starting a business is agency-maxxing.

you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.

shoman3003• 2 months ago

why it feels like charismas when a new essay drops out

khanmaria• 2 months ago

by boss if you mean engineering managers? yes, in some cases you might not need them. Startups with flat structures expect ICs to manage their work and team, this role feels redundant. More than that, we need a PM.

mempko2• 2 months ago

As someone who has been a startup founder across several and who has basically been under-paid for the last decade as a result I am constantly thinking if I should have went to work at big tech again as many of my peers are much richer for doing it.

But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss.

I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.

ziptron• 2 months ago

What PG wrote here truly resonates. I worked for a large Co and then 7 years ago started my own thing.

At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision.

My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill).

Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back.

It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time.

Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.

green_wheel2• 2 months ago

I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.

silexia• 2 months ago

Keep in mind that if you take angel or VC money, you WILL have a boss. Bootstrap your business for true freedom.

You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

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