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You weren't meant to have a boss

paulgraham.com

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Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#51

Post by Alex3917 »

ambition wrote: post #36
dfranke wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may not be as bad a mistake as you think. There's some experimental (if unintuitive) evidence that rewarding individual contributions in organizations is harmful, even to that individual's motivation. The extrinsic motivation extinguishes the individual's intrinsic motivation. Many high achievers have an attitude of "achievement for the sake of achievement." Individual rewards crush that spirit. Joel Spolsky wrote…

See also:

A) Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

B) Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory (Two Factor Theory). The idea is that a very low salary can lead to dissatisfaction, but increasing the salary beyond the required minimum isn't one of the things that increases happiness. Link: http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/herzberg/

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#53

Post by pg »

kingkongrevenge wrote: post #38

> producing fresh vegetables doesn't [scale] The reason starchy and hydrogenated foods dominate is agricultural subsidies, not so much natural economies. If you killed corn and soy subsidies a whole lot of junk food would disappear. Fritos are only cheaper than sauerkraut because you paid part of the frito bill when you filed taxes. Healthy fresh vegetables are most definitely mass produced. Running with the metaphor…

It's true that farmers of commodities like corn and wheat have the government wrapped around their fingers. But the reason they're big enough to do that is that their market scales. No one has invented a fresh carrot that can sit on a shelf for six months the way a candy bar can.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#55

Post by nostrademons »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #35

Bridgewater Associates is a large (~400 employees, $36 billion assets) hedge fund that tries to avoid hierarchy: http://www.bwater.com/home/philosophy.aspx "Conflict in the pursuit of excellence is a terrific thing and is strongly encouraged, in fact demanded. There should be no (or as little as possible) hierarchy. Certainly there are organizational "superior-subordinate" relationships; however, every "subordinate"…

I've got a friend that works for Bridgewater, and it's amazing the extent they go to foster this independent culture. My friend can be kinda abrasive at times - not really arrogant, but more an "I'm right, damnit, and I'm going to be pedantic about it" personality. His first assignment was copy-editing some client reports. He came back with a long list of grammatical mistakes in the report, along with a lesson on proper grammar, for the fund manager. The fund manager said, "This is excellent - keep up the good work," and made sure my friend got his hands on all the reports going out...

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#56

Post by toffer »

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…

The "monkeysphere" is more commonly known as Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)...though Wong's essay is much funnier than the Wikipedia article.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#57

Post by nostrademons »

Mistone wrote: post #20

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…

One way to think about CC debt: if you fund your startup with credit cards, you need to guarantee that you'll grow earnings by at least 20%/year, just to keep up with interest charges. If you can't do that, you're personally on the hook for any shortfall, and have to make it up yourself out of future job income (after compounding, no less).

There're very few startups where revenues are certain enough to take this risk. Most likely, your startup will never make anything, and then credit card debt for a startup is no different than credit card debt for a spending spree. That's why startup founders are wary of debt financing. If you can guarantee that level of earnings growth (perhaps you have customers already lined up, and just need to deliver on a well-understood technical problem), then it can make sense.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#58

Post by kingkongrevenge »

pg wrote: post #53
kingkongrevenge wrote: post #38

> producing fresh vegetables doesn't [scale] The reason starchy and hydrogenated foods dominate is agricultural subsidies, not so much natural economies. If you killed corn and soy subsidies a whole lot of junk food would disappear. Fritos are only cheaper than sauerkraut because you paid part of the frito bill when you filed taxes. Healthy fresh vegetables are most definitely mass produced. Running with the metaphor…

It's true that farmers of commodities like corn and wheat have the government wrapped around their fingers. But the reason they're big enough to do that is that their market scales. No one has invented a fresh carrot that can sit on a shelf for six months the way a candy bar can.

The subsidies follow the disproportionate voting power and political influence of the relevant mid-west states, not the inherent marketability of corn.

Veggies and nuts are mostly grown at massive industrial operations in California with desert sunshine and irrigation systems. It's definitely a scalable operation not much different from corn and soy.

Not to nit-pick, but carrots keep really well even at room temperature. That was the whole point of root cellars. Veggies store fine. Lots of "fresh" stuff at the store routinely comes out of 9 months in cold storage, and that's without the complex chemical processing and packaging applied to the junk food. Then there's freezing and pickling.

The prevalence of crap in the US diet comes from a deliberate government plan to pump out more cheap calories. It might have made some sense in a Marshall plan world, but we're still stuck with it. That's the story as I understand it.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#59

Post by jeremymooer »

Great article. a) I liked the HFC / food comparisons. b) I've been thinking a ton about the relationship between maslow's hierarchy of needs and the needs of groups (and, potentially, their parallelism and that parallelism's relationship to maturity and intelligence / technological singularity). anyway... i dug (one g, not two) it.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#60

Post by pg »

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…

Dunbar's number is a limit on the size of a society, not on the size of a group that can work together to complete a task.
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