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?
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.<p>" 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.<p>"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.<p>Again, very broad connection. Full-time employees are nothing like zoo animals. They can leave any time they want, for one.<p>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.<p>"It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. "
This smells. Smells bad. This would be a lot better and believable:<p>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.
What if you agree with this article, you <i>do</i> 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)?<p>Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context.<p>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 <i>know</i> 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.<p>Focus on being the <i>best</i> 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.<p>Whatever you do, don't give up, because then your skills will atrophy.
<i>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.<p>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.</i><p>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 <i>think</i> it was this one (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Enterprise-Sense-Respond-Organizations/dp/0875848745" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Enterprise-Sense-Respond-Orga...</a>) that argued for something similar, and went into a lot of depth about how it could be done.
<a href="http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%27t+meant+to+have+a+boss" rel="nofollow">http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%2...</a><p>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.<p>/self-righteous rant
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.<p>Also, could people stop spouting nonsense about what "humans weren't designed" to do or eat?
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.<p>In a small group, <i>formal</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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'.<p>This phenomenon may actually be more evident in politics than in business.
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.<p>Both in the not so long term destroy me as a competitive creature.
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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_People" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forest_People</a>
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.
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.<p>I was actually just remarking about that the other day when enumerating some advantages that startups and other small companies have over large ones.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This goes with life as well as work.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/3000-people-in-29-countries" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/3000-people-in-29-countries</a>
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.
I recall reading about Dunbar's Number in a Gladwell book.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number</a><p>I'm curious if this jives with what pg is saying about group size–or am I comparing apples and pears?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
>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.<p><a href="http://orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph" rel="nofollow">http://orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph</a>
PG offered some intriguing and keen insight with this article.<p>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 <i>in the traditional sense</i>, it's working well and profitable.
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.
> [1] When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.<p>Do you think that humans will eventually evolve to work better in larger groups if they keep getting pushed that way?
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 ?<p>Eitherway, good luck to us all!
Really? I know plenty of people that aren't meant to be bosses and need someone else to guide them.<p>Not everyone is cut out to be a CEO or President, etc.