181–184 of 184 posts
I read somewhere that David was originally a contractor and then became a partner, but has this occurred for any other significant contributors to the company. I'm thinking 10+ years, has a solid and respected reputation within the company, etc.
I've started companies that grew from 1 to 50 people. I find that business advice from 37signals is often quite naïve and I hope people treat it as a data point, not as a set of guidelines. Managing a company below 25 people is relatively easy. You can still talk to most people every day, you can gather them all in one room, information flow is unrestricted. But staying under 25 people means for most companies that y…
It's distressing how often, especially among technical people, the equality flat == good is taken as a given. Hackers have a healthy skepticism for arbitrary authority, but we often erroneously extend that attitude to hierarchical structures in general. In the limit of large numbers of people, hierarchies are the only structures that scale; moreover, they can do so over many orders of magnitude, from small businesses…
"The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have." This quote really, deeply bothered me. One of the major differences between alpha males and the rest of the population is that they will always assume they'll end up in the top spot. Your prototypical alpha male won't even consider the odds of being on the bottom in that lottery. To push it further, those…
You aren't making a very clear point. Are you saying that : "Alpha males will always assume they'll end up in the top spot, so when they choose rules for a situation regarding two competing agents, their choices will favor the agent in with the most authority"? If so, then you are assuming a context in which the agents of the situation can change the roles in which they are assigned permanently. That is not the case…
While that's true, i think his original point was that the alpha males will choose decisions that favour themselves....Introspective motivational awareness is hardly a profitable trait in our current society* (*-whatever i have seen is constrained to indian IT)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's distressing how often, especially among technical people, the equality flat == good is taken as a given. Hackers have a healthy skepticism for arbitrary authority, but we often erroneously extend that attitude to hierarchical structures in general. In the limit of large numbers of people, hierarchies are the only structures that scale; moreover, they can do so over many orders of magnitude, from small businesses…
That's why small organizations are preferable to most hackers. I don't see how that changes flat == good. GE, IBM, Walmart, or the U.S. military would be places I'd never work, given any choice. Scaling is not necessarily good, it usually means dumbing down to the average.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too.