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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
> 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.
What about them? These technologies already existed, the only thing that changed is that economies of scale enabled by the centralized power. Smaller tribes and villages could have gone by implementing more localized solutions.
The moon landing is definitely a fruit of war efforts.
Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.
Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
> 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.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the bosses ever done for us?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 vacuous competed to the hype. Making grandiose claims out of the flimsiest of observations that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.
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?
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
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?”
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.
I think this is fair criticism. It's hard to read this blog cause its premise is based on an "appeal to nature" fallacy.
It's flawed criticism because it's rooted in an all-or-nothing perspective.
I wish i could upvote you seven times
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
People do get that wrong. But the corrected version is “you were supposed to die as a baby”, and…
That doesn’t sound any better.
"It was more common to" is not the same thing as "you were supposed to".
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.
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
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).
> 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.
> 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...
What about them? These technologies already existed, the only thing that changed is that economies of scale enabled by the centralized power. Smaller tribes and villages could have gone by implementing more localized solutions.
Roman aqueducts, modern railroads, the moon landing, the LOTR films, CERN, or Wikipedia...
This seems like an open-and-shut case of failing to look for disconfirming evidence.
The moon landing is definitely a fruit of war efforts.
Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.
Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
You're moving goalposts. You literally said
> 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.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the bosses ever done for us?
But that is only 4000 years ago when we’ve been evolving for millions.
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.
We weren't meant to have windows made of glass. Such items are entirely unnatural. According to pg, we must be wary of them.
I have been tired of this guy since I first saw him speak in 2006
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 vacuous competed to the hype. Making grandiose claims out of the flimsiest of observations that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.
Modern-day sophistry.