You weren't meant to have a boss • Hacker News Board

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#11

Post by dfranke » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:35 PM UTC

Xichekolas wrote: post #9

dfranke wrote: post #3

If 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 fa…

In practice that's how I'd expect/hope it would work. But while ideally the groups should act by consensus, there has to be some means of making a decision if no consensus can be reached. For groups that small, a benevolent dictatorship tends to work better than a democracy.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#12

Post by jcl » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:43 PM UTC

The idea that there is a certain "natural" size to groups of people reminds me of the Monkeysphere essay:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

The size of a monkeysphere is estimated to be 150 people, which is quite a bit larger than the 10-person group Paul advocates, but I guess you need to know at least a few people outside of work. :)

I wonder if the problem with large corporations is that you don't care about the other people in them or that you feel the other people don't care about you? Certainly the people in the highest positions can't care about everyone under them -- assuming they can only care about 150 people -- so perhaps that is the limiting factor of effective size.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#13

Post by ambition » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:45 PM UTC

Everything written in the article rings true. One effect he didn't mention is that the poisonous confidence-destruction and the lack of learning are self-reinforcing. It creates a cycle which discourages quitting.

I think, though, that the effect only hits ambitious, independent people. Those with less ambition or less independence seem to enjoy themselves, and do well. (There are also a few ambitious, independent folks, who aspire for the top of the corporate ladder and have a good chance of making it. They do well when their skills are matched to the needs of a large organization.)

I used to think that when big company employees "settled", it was a gradual process that snuck up on them. Not always. I've actually had a conversation with someone in which they told me about their conscious decision to settle -- that it was better to accept the circumstances and make the best of evenings and weekends. She became upset when I tried to remind her of the higher aspirations she had just the summer before.

[I work in a big company. I'm getting out in June when I'll have the funds to not use credit cards.]

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#14

Post by arvid » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:48 PM UTC

prakash wrote: post #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 "Leadin…

I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can check out their website: http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#15

Post by dfranke » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:49 PM UTC

jcl wrote: post #12

The idea that there is a certain "natural" size to groups of people reminds me of the Monkeysphere essay: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html The size of a monkeysphere is estimated to be 150 people, which is quite a bit larger than the 10-person group Paul advocates, but I guess you need to know at least a few people outside of work. :) I wonder if the problem with large corporations is that you do…

150 is the maximum, not the optimum. It's just a really big safety margin.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#16

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:49 PM UTC

dfranke wrote: post #3

If 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…

[deleted]

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#17

Post by astine » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:50 PM UTC

I think that this analysis only focuses on one half of the forces that direct survival. Humans may work more efficiently as small groups, but we have also formed into large hierarchical structures for as long as we have had history. Egypt and Summaria were both hierarchically governed. Organizations survive by becoming more efficient, but they also survive by have more labor available. Napoleon would not have won a single battle if his soldiers had fought in groups of 8 to 10.

I think that it depends more on the specifics of the situation and what you are trying to accomplish. Large organizations have advantages that no small organization can match. You gain your freedom at the price of security.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#18

Post by rms » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:51 PM UTC

arvid wrote: post #14

prakash wrote: post #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 "Leadin…

I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can check out their website: http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/

Something about that design and the icons makes me feel vaguely happy. That's a good emotion for an industrial equipment manufacturer to elicit...

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#19

Post by uuilly » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:53 PM UTC

I used to work for a defense company that eventually got bought by a mega defense company. It was ~3000 people in various parts of the country and it was started by a man who deeply believed in the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. It had that free for all structure that PG says he'd never seen in a tech company. It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought. The good news is, the fist fights, duplicate (and sometimes triplicate) efforts were stopped and everyone is one big happy family that hasn't done anything new in 7 years. Their market share is in free fall but they say it's fine b/c they are moving away from products in to large scale integration which is too boring to even type about. All the cowboys have gone to other places and I went to a startup. It was fun while it lasted.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#20

Post by Mistone » Thu, Mar 20, 2008, 9:53 PM UTC

in the notes of this essay there is a strong statement about not funding startups with credit card debt. Just wondering if there is an acceptable limit of cc debt to use to get from concept to prototype? Or if its all the same and just a bad idea. beyong YC and friends & fam, there are limited options for the small pop of cash that gives you the time required to work in your startup. So far at my company we have been very tightly spending on a cc, not incurred a lot of debt but still don't have the small cash cushion to ditch the day job and jump in full time. sorry for the tangent.