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
#2[deleted]
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#3I recall reading about Dunbar's Number in a Gladwell book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number
I'm curious if this jives with what pg is saying about group size–or am I comparing apples and pears?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#4While I disagree with the title (even in the hunter-gatherer days there was always a leader), I agree with the theory that people work better in smaller groups. I actually thought the number was more like 4-6, but 8 is pretty close to that.
I was actually just remarking about that the other day when enumerating some advantages that startups and other small companies have over large ones.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#5I think Paul makes some great points in this article. One thing he might overlook, however, is that people can have great mentors even in large organizations. Freedom is great and all, but is it really detrimental to work in a large organization? There is a reason that the organization as a whole is still around. Not everybody has the ability nor drive to run wild, come up with brand new ideas, and be revolutionary straight out of college.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#6The food analogy is ingenious. Like junk food kills my real hunger and makes me a less active hunter/farmer, so the "junk" job makes me want to learn less and keeps me with safe choices.
Both in the not so long term destroy me as a competitive creature.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#7You weren't meant to have a boss. You also weren't meant to read, work on computers, drive cars, fly, or even practice agriculture. Its very easy to criticize any modern institution on the grounds of, "Our H. Erectus ancestors didn't do it, so it must be unnatural." Rather than snark about how the phenomenon is bosses is somehow unnatural and antithetical to human existence, why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#8I think Paul makes some great points in this article. One thing he might overlook, however, is that people can have great mentors even in large organizations. Freedom is great and all, but is it really detrimental to work in a large organization? There is a reason that the organization as a whole is still around. Not everybody has the ability nor drive to run wild, come up with brand new ideas, and be revolutionary s…
I think the insidious thing about large organizations is not a lack of freedom or an inability to exercise your creative muscles.
The insidious thing the large organization teaches you is that this is how things operate, and that a successful career means never having freedom and never exercising your creative muscles on a succession of larger and larger projects for a larger salary, so that you can buy a house you can't afford that's just barely close enough to the office but still so far that it takes you two hours to get to work.
If someone decides they want to trade freedom and creativity for job security and a stable paycheck, that's perfectly fine, as long as they're making the decision. If your first job out of college is an entry-level gig at a bigco that you barely managed to get, 8 years of inertia later you'll be coasting along at some mid-level position at a bigco, doing basically the same things. Inertia combined with the peer pressure of seeing everyone else doing what you're doing can be a powerful thing.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#9http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=you+weren%2...
How is it that this article is getting reposted? It's a great article, I know. But couldn't the HN community submit and upvote new and current articles? Wouldn't the community be better served by this? I suppose if enough members haven't seen it then the upvotes and front page placement are a net gain, but please don't let this stuff rise to the top just because pg wrote it. If it must stay up here, let it be because users who have not read the article prior find value in it.
/self-righteous rant
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#10There's just one thing about this article that makes me feel eerie. It sounds like a piece of propaganda. PG tries evoking an emotional response out of the reader, pulling some random unsupported facts out of nowhere, like a religious preacher who'll do anything to support his point of view. What doesn't help is that since he's an investor, he is directly profiting from people working for rates below market rates and making it big. Nothing wrong with that. But still. Eerie.
" The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups." WHOA! really? I mean, I don't disagree but this is a fairly huge statement. He should back it up or will assume that he's holding them for idiots.
"I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. " Oh, no! I'm not an animal! And if I am, I'm certainly the WILD TIGER FROM THE JUNGLE rather than a zoo-domesticated kitten. I SHOULD QUIT RIGHT NOW.
Again, very broad connection. Full-time employees are nothing like zoo animals. They can leave any time they want, for one.
The question is -- did PG ever work at a big company like Microsoft/Google/etc? Hard to tell from the article. Perhaps PG's intense imagination caused him to believe certain things are true while in reality they're illusions.
"It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. " This smells. Smells bad. This would be a lot better and believable: