You weren't meant to have a boss
paulgraham.com
You weren't meant to have a boss
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Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#2I am a 27 year old programmer and have worked for two small companies ( < 20 employees ) and for one company of 200+ employees. The only thing I can say about working for the large company is that it felt like breathing through a straw. Go work for a small company or as Paul Graham suggests, go start up your own. Leave the big companies for the burnt-out folk with kids and debt.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#3If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it: rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired are basically unsupervised and work for commission. The rest of the company is a bunch of small engineering teams of up to 10. All functions other than sales and engineering are outsourced. The most senior member of each team has hiring/firing authority for that team. He gets to decide the size but 10 is the max. These generate their own ideas and speak to the controlling committee only for budget requests. Salary is not part of the budget request: everybody in the company gets the same salary. Bonuses are awarded to teams that implement profitable ideas. More money goes to bonuses than to salary. If a team shows a pattern of underperformance, the committee fires the entire team. If this happens, they get 30 days notice that they're going to be fired, and they can use that time to find jobs on other teams within the company.
If I then had to scale this to 10,000, I still wouldn't add another layer of management. Instead I'd just add more teams, and expand the controlling committee to a confederation of committees, which all draw money from the same pool but have specialized expertise. When teams request budget, they approach the committee with the best understanding of their proposal.
The 1,000 person model looks a lot like a bunch of founding teams and one VC firm. The 10,000 person model bears some resemblance to the federal government, which is perhaps why an organization the size of the government manages to function at all, however poorly.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#4I am a 27 year old programmer and have worked for two small companies ( < 20 employees ) and for one company of 200+ employees. The only thing I can say about working for the large company is that it felt like breathing through a straw. Go work for a small company or as Paul Graham suggests, go start up your own. Leave the big companies for the burnt-out folk with kids and debt.
As another 27 year old programmer, I 100% agree. The only real benefit I think I derived from working at a company (both large and small) is getting a good idea of what works and what doesn't work for large scale projects (which I wasn't exposed to in school). And even that lesson was learned pretty quickly, within 3-6 months. All returns were diminishing exponentially from that point on.
That same lesson could be learned in the same time frame in a start up - you'd just end up with some throw away code after a pretty short period of time, which isn't a big deal at all when it comes down to it.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#5If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it: rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired…
If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people
You might also want to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Ricardo-Semler/dp/0712678867
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#6If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it: rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired…
If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people You might also want to read this: http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Ricardo-Semler/dp/0712678867
Just based on the summary, it sounds like he has a lot of good ideas and one bad mistake: profit-sharing is socialized. So if the company does well then the employees do well, but individual contributors would have trouble getting rewarded.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#7"Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem."
I would say Mediocre hires hurt you THRICE. Twice for the reasons you mention, and the third one is all the good folks leaving since they can't stand mediocre people.
One big company that seems to do well, at least from the outside is Semco in Brazil. Watch Ricardo Semler's "Leading by Omission": http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/ and read his book "Maverick": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553. This is of course an anomaly since most companies don't work this way.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#8I agree with the sentiment of the article, although the title is a bit misleading. It's not like you were meant to be a boss either, which is running a company is about once you get past the startup stage. I'd say the message is that if you can't be a boss yourself, try to make sure that your boss doesn't have a boss (i.e. join an early-stage startup).
Large companies have many other drawbacks besides the hierarchical structure. I've worked for companies of all sizes, and these are the things I particularly disliked about large ones:
- Information travels slowly up and back down. Decisions take time. For this reason many projects, especially those having to do with rapidly changing technologies, just cannot be done at large companies.
- Sometimes your work gets lost in the noise. Your entire project may be canceled and most of the company won't notice it. One of the perks of working for a startup is the feeling of being in charge of things and knowing that your work is immediately visible.
- Human relationships do not respect the hierarchy, so there may be conflicts between random pairs or groups of people. The larger the group, the higher the complexity of politics. This non-linearity is perhaps the worst obstacle when it comes to getting things done.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#9If I had to structure an organization of 1,000 people, here's how I'd do it: rather than tiers of management on the order of 1, 10, 100, and 1000, I'd just have two levels. At the top would be a small committee that controls allocation of money and from time to time publishes non-specific guidelines about where they'd like the company to go. One person on the committee is in charge of hiring salesmen, who once hired…
I was thinking your 10k person model sounds like how research funding works... which seems to be a moderately functional model.
With your 1000 person model, I'd do away with the boss (in the sense of hiring and firing). With that few people, you can all just work together fairly easily, with natural leaders emerging for different projects (and hiring/firing decisions can be made by the team as a whole). There is a factory in NC that makes aircraft engines that works this way, and it is quite successful. The teams are self organizing internally, and send representatives to deal with other teams and plant management.
Re: You weren't meant to have a boss
#10W.L. Gore and Associates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates) is a big company that appears to try hard to avoid hierarchical structures. From a 2004 FastCompany article (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html):
"So Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams -- keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most. That's small enough so that people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on, and who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished -- whether it's creating an innovative product or handling the everyday challenges of running a business."
Anyone who works for Gore care to comment on the actual practice?