You weren't meant to have a boss

The point is every good hacker doesn't necessarily want to bother with financial/legal aspects of a business, as they're not interesting to them. I know a top hacker who's not only good at system abstractions but also knows bare metal like the back of his hand, debugging live applications with heavy OS interactions by patching running binary on the fly without needing to lookup a reference. Everyone around him is in awe. However, he's not that interested in money. He thinks he's rich enough with a few millions in options and 300k in annual salary & bonuses. And he's happy with his job and his boss, who, like everyone else, respects and pampers him. The big company can give him resources a startup or smaller companies simply cannot afford. Why would such a person do a startup?

The original article generalized too much, missing the most significant contributions to the progress of technology from people who _like_ to work in academia and large companies.

You weren't meant to program computers either...

... nor, I daresay, were any of us meant for great wealth; which, as Graham may yet demonstrate, is just a much a corruptor of character and insight as poverty (if not more so...) Just as large corporations tend to stifle, indeed put a halt to, the generation of ideas, so to does the imposition of large sums of money. If that were not true, then the startups trajectory wouldn't bend towards acquisition... (or, despite Grahams elisions, shall we call it 'surrender'? )

The whole point of evolution is to adapt and mutate and so there is no such thing as 'normal' or 'meant to.' An interesting aspect of evolution is that we get to thumb our noses at the very idea of 'normal' and that we get to shrug off the very idea of 'meant to'.

Paul Graham has argued eloquently and succinctly this very line of reasoning heretofore. It comes, thus, as a shock to read this essay, coming, as it does, from the programmer who advocates bottom up design in opposition to top down mandates. Of course, the point of evolution often contrasts harshly with the point of cynicism: which is simply to justify any childishly satisfying, but nonetheless, foul mood or thought. Or, as Mencken put it, ``The cynic is the man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.''

So much of this essay strikes me as the worst form of 'sophistry at a distance' that I scarce can credit Graham as the author. Surely some philosophy undergrad, still pink and slightly damp behind the ears, has stolen into Graham's study and slyly substituted his/her unfinished term paper for some valuable slice of Graham wisdom. Perhaps a wily hacker is having sport of Graham, and us, by subtly crafting an HTML parser that cleverly distorts, ever so slightly, essays fed to it... The world waits, with held breath, for the un-masking of the villain.

I've made this mandatory reading for the entire leadership team at my company. Great writing.

Rick Bullotta/CTO/Wonderware

Thanks for the article. It bears out the experiences I have had working for small and large companies. Engineers in startups are closer to the business and (sometimes) to the customer. They are solving real problems and inventing new things. Though it can be stressful, it also gives you a sense of worth. The other thing is does is allow you to "play" in the sense of being creating - making new things and having fun doing it.

Large companies tend to be political. Folks want position, title, etc. As one person put it - "I handle 250 off-shore engineers". My instant reaction was "but what have you, personally, built today."

There is the notion that hierarchies are good. That as you move away from coding you are "rising" in the hierarchy. This substitution of image for ability while gratifying to the ego, kills creativity and promotes mediocrity.

As you state, and experience bears it out: software works best with core (small) teams with creative innovate people working for a common goal.

I don't agree with Paul's argument as to why others won't feel the pinch: "The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. 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. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new." I don't agree with this characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that you never have to write the same code again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe. More at: http://www.bricoleur.org/2008/03/graham-dont-work-for-compan...