(Paul Graham)
vo: You Were not Meant to Have a Boss
March 2008, revised in June 2008
technology tends to separate the normal from the natural. Our bodies were not designed to eat the foods eaten by people in rich countries, or do so little physical activity. There are probably a similar problem in the way we work: a normal job probably makes us much harm mentally, than white flour or sugar we are physically.
I began to suspect that, after several years working with founders of start-ups. I have now worked with over 200 of them, and I noticed a clear difference between the programmers working on their own start-up and those who work for large organizations. I would not say that the founders seemed happier, necessarily; launch a start-up is sometimes very stressful. The best way to present this may be to say they are happier, as a body is happier for a long race, instead of sitting in a couch eating donuts.
Even if they are statistically abnormal, the founders start-ups seem to work in a more natural way for humans.
I was in Africa last year and I've seen in the wild many animals that I had then seen only in zoos. The difference in appearance was striking. Especially the lions. The lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that humans feel better by working for themselves in the same manner as a large predator like a lion should feel better by living in the wild. Life in a zoo is easier, but this is not the life for which they were designed.
Pyramids
What is even against nature to work for a large company? The root of the problem is that humans are not made to work in groups so large.
Another thing you notice when you see animals in nature is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adult baboons, maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I read on the hunter-gatherer coincides with searching organizations and my own experience, to suggest roughly what the ideal size: 8 groups work well, from 20, they become difficult to manage, and a group of 50 is really too heavy. [1]
Whatever the upper limit, we are clearly not supposed to work in groups of several hundred. And yet - for reasons that have more to do with technology than human nature - a bunch of people work for companies employing hundreds or thousands of people.
Companies know that groups as large would not work, then they divide in units small enough that we can work together. But to coordinate them, they should introduce something new: bosses.
These small groups are still organized in pyramidal structure. A group linked to the pyramid by his boss. But when using this hocus-pocus to divide a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens, something I've never heard mention explicitly. In the group level, a pattern represents the entire group he leads. A group of 10 managers is not only a group of 10 people who work together as usual. In reality, is a group of groups. This means that for 10 managers work together as if they were a group of 10 individuals, each group working for a manager must work as if it was only one person - the operational and managers would not share them the freedom of one person.
In practice, a group of people is never able to act as if it were a single person. But when a large organization is divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group does its best to work as if the small group of individuals in which humans are designed to work. That's why we created it. And when we propagate this constraint, the result is that each person receives a leeway inversely proportional to the size of the whole pyramid. [2]
Anyone who has worked for a large organization has felt that way. You can feel the difference between working for a company of 100 employees and a company of 10,000 employees, even if only in a group of 10 people.
Glucose syrup
A group of 10 people in a large organization is a kind of false tribe. The number of people with whom we interact is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. The tribes of hunter-gatherers have much more freedom. The Chiefs have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but in general they do not tell them what to do, or when, unlike a boss.
This is not the fault of the boss. The real problem is that in the group above in the hierarchy, a complete group is one virtual person. The boss is just how this constraint is imposed.
Thus, working in a group of 10 people within a large organization appears to be correct and incorrect at the same time. On the surface it seems a group in which we are made to work, but it misses something essential. A job in a large company is like a corn syrup high fructose: it has certain qualities of the things you're supposed to love, but it lacks other of these qualities, so much disastrous.
In fact, the food is excellent metaphor to explain what is wrong with a job lambda.
For example, working for a large company is what we do by default, at least for programmers. What's wrong with that? Well, it shows quite clearly with the food. If it was released today at any point in America, almost all the food around is bad for health. Humans are not made to eat white flour, refined sugar, corn syrup high in fructose, hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet, if you were to analyze the content of basic groceries, it would likely that these would total four ingredients most calories. Food "normal" is terribly bad for health. The only people who eat what humans are designed to eat are few original Birkenstocks at Berkeley.
If food "normal" is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. The first is that it has a more immediate appeal. Certainly, one hour after eating this pizza, you do not feel well, but the first bite was very good. The second reason is economies of scale. We can produce large-scale junk food, no fresh vegetables. Which means (a) that junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it is worth spends a lot to promote it.
If people have a choice between something cheap, widely promoted and attractive short term, and one thing dear, dark and attractive long term, which do you think they will choose for most?
is the same at work. The basic graduate work at MIT want Google or Microsoft, because it is a recognized brand, it is prudent, and he immediately pay a good salary. This is the equivalent, in employment, he ate pizza for lunch. The disadvantages appear only later, and only as a vague discomfort.
And during that time, founders and early employees of startups will be like the originals and their Birkenstocks at Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, are the ones who are supposed to live as humans. In an artificial world, it must be extreme to live naturally.
Programmers
restrictions imposed by jobs in big business weighs particularly heavily on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. The trade show essentially the same arguments every day, people meet customer service roughly the same questions, but once we wrote some code, there is no need to rewrite it. So a programmer working as programmers are supposed to work, is always doing something new. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person a leeway inversely proportional to the size of the pyramid, you will meet resistance when you do something new.
It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the size. This is true even in the smartest companies. I spoke recently to a founder who had considered to launch a start-up just out of college, but went to work for Google instead, because he thought he would learn more there. He did not learn as much as he hoped. Programmers learn by doing, and he could not do most things he wanted to do - sometimes because the company did not allow it, but often because the company code does not allow it. Between the legacy code that must be dragged, it represents the cost of doing development in an organization so large and the restrictions imposed by the interfaces that belong to other groups, he could try a small fraction of the things he wanted to try. He said he learned much in his own start-up, despite the fact that he must do all the small tasks of the company in addition to the lineup, because at least when the program, it can do whatever he wants.
An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you are not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having ideas. And vice versa: when you can do whatever we want, we have more ideas on what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful, and a bit restrictive exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.
Working for yourself does not necessarily mean starting a startup, of course. But a programmer who chooses between a standard work in a large company and his own start-up, probably learn more by doing a start-up.
can adjust the degree of freedom obtained by changing the scale of the enterprise for which one works. If you go up the business, we have the maximum freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees, it will almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company of 100 people give a different impression of a company with 1000 people.
Working for a small business does not guarantee freedom. The pyramid structure of large organizations imposes an upper limit to freedom, not a lower limit. The leader of a small company can still choose to be a tyrant. The idea is that a large organization is forced, because of its structure, to be one.
Consequences
This has consequences, both for organizations and individuals. One downside is that companies will slow inevitable as they grow, what they try to keep their minds start-ups. This is a consequence of the pyramid structure that any large organization is forced to adopt.
Or rather, a large organization could avoid slowing down, if only she avoided the pyramidal structure. And since human nature limits the size of the groups can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid the pyramid structure, would have no structure: each group is truly independent, and they all work together the way a market economy.
Perhaps it would it instantly to be explored. I suspect that there are already highly divisible areas that lean in that direction. But I do not know of any technology company that did.
One thing companies can do, failing to structure itself like sponges: they can remain small. If I'm right, then it really pays to keep a company as small as it can be at each step. In particular, a technology company. Which means it is doubly important to hire the best people. Hurt the poor twice: not only do they produce less, but also they make you fat, because we need more of them to solve a given problem.
For individuals, the corollary is the same: we must aim small. It will always be boring to work for large organizations, and the organization will be larger, it will be shit.
In a test I wrote a few years ago, I advised the graduates of the second degree to work a few years in another company before founding their own. I would say more things today. Working for another company if you want, but only a small business, and if you want to mount your start-up, please. This
why I suggested to the graduates not to get startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. And they will fail. But ambitious programmers are advised to do their own thing and miss rather than going to work in a large company. They certainly learn more. It may even be that they are better off financially. Many people in their twenties get into debt because their expenses increase faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if they go up a start-up and they fail, they will be zero rather than in the red. [3]
We (translator's note: Y Combinator, a venture capital firm founded by the author) 've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and seems it is not profitable to work for a large company. People who have worked for several years seem better than those who come fresh from college, but only because they are all older.
People who come to us for many large companies still seem a bit conservative. It is unclear to what extent this is because large companies have made as well, and to what extent this natural conservatism made them work for large corporations first. But much is definitely learned. I know because I saw conservatism flake.
Having seen it happen so often is the one thing that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least to a small group, is the natural lifestyle of programmers. The founders arriving at Y Combinator often oppressed pace refugees. Three months later they are transformed: they have so much more confidence as they seem to have grown a few inches. [4] As strange as it sounds, they seem both more worried and happier. Which is exactly how I would describe the lions in the wild. Looking
employees become founders, it is clear that the difference between the two is mainly due to the environment - especially as the environment of large companies is toxic to programmers. In the first few weeks to work in their own start-up, they seem to come back to life, because finally they work as people are supposed to work.
Notes [1] When I speak of human beings meant to live a certain way, or designed for that, I mean by evolution.
[2] Not only the base that suffers. Constraints are propagated both upward than downward. So the managers are forced, too, instead of just doing things they should act by their subordinates.
[3] It is better not to fund a startup with credit cards. Finance a start-up through debt is usually a stupid gesture, and credit card debt is the dumbest of all. The credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by companies desperate for evil and stupid.
[4] The founders we fund was once the youngest (at the beginning, we encourage non-graduates to apply), and the first time I saw it, I wondered if, physically, they grew really.
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