Comments on: The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant; a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one

The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant; a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:25:52 -0800

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. Or: You weren't meant to have a boss. On the other hand, maybe you are.

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:45:32 -0800

And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses. so egyptians built the pyramids as anarchist collectives? i think that first article lacks historical perspective

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:50:44 -0800

Trembling feeling that this will devolve into a long man vs metafilter survivalist thread...

By: aspo

aspo — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:53:18 -0800

Dear Paul Graham. You are a smart guy who made a lot of money. That doesn't mean your "insights" into human nature are any more than the dilettantish ramblings of a man convinced of his own genius. Please go away.

By: gurple

gurple — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:55:21 -0800

I think that what this guy is describing isn't associated with large companies in general, but with certain types of large companies. I work at a multiple-thousand-person company, and I have more autonomy and space for creativity than my wife did when she worked for a 25-person company. Giant corporate behemoths are not all created equal, and neither are small organizations.

By: gurple

gurple — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:01:27 -0800

And, wow: Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. I'm thinking of the number of times I've written something to parse some XML, or to store stuff in a tree and search it, or any number of the tasks that programmers end up doing over and over. It's a pretty strange idea of the world in which the code you wrote five years ago to do a certain thing is still appropriate.

By: sjjh

sjjh — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:01:36 -0800

Paul Graham is nothing like a lion - amazing that he thinks he is.

By: DU

DU — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:06:28 -0800

Some programmers don't write the same code twice, but most programmer churn out reports for banks or "code" login screens for web pages.

By: breaks the guidelines?

breaks the guidelines? — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:26:15 -0800

Paul Graham could be more out-of-touch with reality, but we probably wouldn't notice.

By: zabuni

zabuni — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:26:27 -0800

DU: indeed, most programming isn't spending years to come up with some half assed version of Lisp. CRUD Screens are the general worktask of the modern programmer. Oh to be Paul Graham, the Howard Roark of programming.

By: Mblue

Mblue — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:27:40 -0800

This is a spot on observance of government. Example: The tools to extract a single failed tube from from a boiler exists, yet a government agency will require all tubes above the failure be removed. An eight hour job with minimal breeching of structural integrity turns into a month long escapade with four mechanical engineers walking around "hmm"ing and "ahh"ing.

By: breaks the guidelines?

breaks the guidelines? — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:28:35 -0800

Jeez, that sounded like a Chuck Norris joke... perhaps I could start a new meme.

By: es_de_bah

es_de_bah — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:29:41 -0800

kinda interesting, but trying to relate any career path in the present to "what humans were meant to do" in the jungle is kinda useless. I like his message, and the food analogy was interesting. But it was also kinda bullshit.

By: es_de_bah

es_de_bah — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:30:13 -0800

thus, I give this an over all rating of "kinda"

By: solipsophistocracy

solipsophistocracy — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:42:33 -0800

What?! A convoluted understanding of evolutionary psychology yielding a poorly thought out essay? Somebody better call Psychology Today and inform them of this glaring omission.

By: anazgnos

anazgnos — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:43:05 -0800

...They looked familiar. I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties. But something seemed wrong about these. There was something missing. ...why did it seem there was something odd about them? ...The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed. ...the difference between the programmers I saw in the cafe and the ones I was used to wasn't just a difference of degree. Something seemed wrong. ...I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees. Something, you say? Something different, in fact? That's really something.

By: solipsophistocracy

solipsophistocracy — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:49:00 -0800

The Wired article is solid, on the other hand.

By: breaks the guidelines?

breaks the guidelines? — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:52:09 -0800

Here's John Gruber's takedown of the Wired article.

By: MythMaker

MythMaker — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:03:07 -0800

I think his point is more like an alpha male/beta male thing (although it certainly applies to women as well). When you're in charge of your own destiny, you are that much more alive and powerful than when you are not. I would think that being an office worker-drone would inherently suck some of the life out of you in a way that being your own boss doesn't. Maybe his evolutionary stuff is questionable, but this underlying point seems to be true to me, based on my own observations.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:19:58 -0800

As much as Paul Graham tends to piss me off, I thought there was a decent point or two in here. In particular, I liked the observation that, to your boss's boss, your team/group/division looks like a single person and is expected to act like one. You could get decent mileage out of that in trying to understand how a big organization behaves. (Sadly, from there it turns into "I made a million bucks doing X, so X is the only thing worth doing." Yeah, we've heard it before, in many different eras, for many contradictory values of X. Enough.)

By: jhc

jhc — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:20:59 -0800

Malcolm Gladwell (who I'm also skeptical of, but he has citations at least) has a chapter in The Tipping Point arguing that effective human groups top out at about 150 -- that's where our brains stop being able to track all of the relationships, and we have to start treating some members as cogs in the machine. He cites Goretex as a company doing what Graham suggests -- every time they go over 150 employees in a unit, they split it up into what are effectively two self-sufficient companies. I'd love to know if anyone who's more of a scientist than a journalist has evaluated that chapter.

By: public

public — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:30:45 -0800

When you're in charge of your own destiny, you are that much more alive and powerful than when you are not. It's the whole attitude that you aren't in charge of your own destiny just because you are employed by someone that makes people so frustrated and pissed off. The employee and the entrepreneur are equally in control of their own lives, just the entrepreneur is trading greater personal risk for higher rewards.

By: public

public — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:34:48 -0800

Malcolm Gladwell (who I'm also skeptical of, but he has citations at least) has a chapter in The Tipping Point arguing that effective human groups top out at about 150 Christopher Allen wrote a bunch of good articles about this. See the related posts bit at the bottom for more links.

By: MythMaker

MythMaker — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:42:48 -0800

Well, the entrepreneur can choose to go play golf if he/she wants to in the middle of the day, and the office-drone employee can't. Not without losing their job. That means that they are more in control of their own lives.

By: StrikeTheViol

StrikeTheViol — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:49:03 -0800

And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. Thus sayeth the Elder of Lisp. So let it be coded, so let it be run.

By: aspo

aspo — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:58:18 -0800

MythMaker: So no employee has ever called in "sick" when they just couldn't bring themselves to go into work that day. And entrepreneurs are all as free as birds and the money just appears because they started a company. Being an employee has different benefits and freedoms from running your own company.

By: public

public — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:58:51 -0800

Well, the entrepreneur can choose to go play golf if he/she wants to in the middle of the day, and the office-drone employee can't. Not without losing their job. Please leave your strawmen at the door.

By: anazgnos

anazgnos — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:10:39 -0800

It's the whole attitude that you aren't in charge of your own destiny just because you are employed by someone that makes people so frustrated and pissed off. Alternatively, the assertion that anyone is ever in charge of their own destiny.

By: LeLiLo

LeLiLo — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:09:30 -0800

A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup... I enjoyed that sentence, being my own boss (but, unfortunately, not doing a very good job with my own destiny).

By: valentinepig

valentinepig — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:16:51 -0800

falsedichotomyfilter: selling my time for a set wage is entrepreneurial. Like the difference between investing in stocks v. bonds. One is a much riskier gamble which...well that's been covered already. Reading pseudophilosophy from someone who tries to teach by looking down is torture. Bite my stable labor-market participating ass, Mr. Graham.

By: AppleSeed

AppleSeed — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:20:17 -0800

It sure would fluff up my self-esteem to be Founder of a Startup on someone else's dime.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:34:38 -0800

That means that they are more in control of their own lives. It means they're more in control of one aspect of their lives. If freedom to golf spontaneously is all you value in life, then yes, being an employee is stupid. If you value other things too, the situation might be a bit more complicated.

By: MythMaker

MythMaker — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:29:50 -0800

It all depends on whom you work for, but I just know from my own recent personal experience, that I feel a lot more alive when I'm my own boss and can call my own shots than when someone else calls them for me. Sure, the economy is a big wheel, and even when you're the boss you answer to the client or the customer, but there really is a difference between being your own boss and working for someone, and there's no strawman involved.

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:01:14 -0800

As a programmer, it speaks to me somewhat. But, he does strike me as a little overinflated sometimes.

By: me & my monkey

me & my monkey — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:51:30 -0800

Well, the entrepreneur can choose to go play golf if he/she wants to in the middle of the day, and the office-drone employee can't. Not without losing their job. The entrepreneur who wants to be successful doesn't choose to play golf in the middle of the day. He works. Seven days a week, in many cases. He sweats over making payroll for his employees every two weeks. "Office drones," on the other hand, can take off, and can put down their work at the end of the day. Some people live to work. Others work to live. Paul Graham bugs the hell out of me, because he's so quick to generalize from his own experiences and beliefs, which are fairly atypical. If he were an "office drone" he'd write about how great that is.

By: freya_lamb

freya_lamb — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:24:12 -0800

I'm hearing (but not really understanding) the hating, I agree he's generalizing a bit and failing to comprehend that the more lateral approach can also be beneficial (e.g. working for an employer can distribute responsibility, freeing up the employee for other mental pursuits etc). But, currently working for a difficult and micro-managing boss, I agree that being stifled in the initiative stakes does make you more passive and therefore less likely to innovate. There's also no accounting of the middle ground. I personally prefer contracting because it means frequent change and challenge, plus some security and more freedom than permanent employment. He has no view on the freelance jungle beastie...

By: mrgrimm

mrgrimm — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:14:39 -0800

Well, the entrepreneur can choose to go play golf if he/she wants to in the middle of the day, and the office-drone employee can't. Not without losing their job. A huge assumption there. I can leave work to play golf almost any day I want, as long as I get my work done at another time ... just like a self-employed person. I would propose that my schedule is (currently) much more flexible than your average entrepreneur. With much less risk. Plus health care for $10/mo. Which path is right for which people is very much dependent on their goals and objectives, I would think. If your goal is to become filthy rich and/or famous, then yeah, entrepreneurship might be the right path. An enjoyable job (is that possible?) with enjoyable colleagues and a comfortable income? Employeeship has a number of positive aspects, is all I'm saying, particularly if you work for a good person/company (is that possible?) ;)