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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

#11

Post by bdhe »

dkokelley wrote: post #9

http://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 bec…

You can see I've posted at least one pg article I found insightful but wasn't voted up, so anecdotal evidence suggests people don't vote it simply because it is written by pg.

And towards your second point, as someone who has been on this site for little over six months, this is the first time I came across this article and found it interesting, insightful, and gave me lots of things to think about. I presume there were enough other people who also thought so.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#12

Post by techiferous »

What if you agree with this article, you do feel constrained in an unhealthy way by your job in a large organization, but you don't feel that leaving for a small company or startup is an option (or at least not an option anytime soon)?

Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context.

In other words, imagine your boss says that the web app must be written in C++ for political reasons, and you cannot convince him to switch to Ruby on Rails, and you just know that the project would die a slow painful death if written in C++. Well, supposing you are correct, you are in a crappy job: constrained to do the wrong thing and with a boss that cannot be convinced otherwise. And for whatever reason you've got to stick it out through this project.

Focus on being the best C++ web developer in the world. Do the absolute best job you can on the tasks that are assigned to you. Throw yourself into your work 110%. But to do this you have to shift your point of view. You cannot think about this as "wasted effort" since you know the project will ultimately fail. You must think about this as training. You are putting your mind through intense training, keeping your skills sharp, so that when the opportunity finally does come to leave your job (or perhaps a new boss comes along), your mind is in top form and ready to go. Sure, you've probably acquired some less than useful skills for web development (managing pointers) but you've probably acquired and maintained some very good transferrable skills.

Whatever you do, don't give up, because then your skills will atrophy.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#13

Post by moondistance »

mannicken wrote: post #10

There'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…

Rates below market rates? I think most people would disagree. They aren't salaried but the equity often pays well.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#14

Post by coderdude »

dkokelley wrote: post #9

http://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 bec…

The weird thing is how selective HN is about duplicate articles. I've submitted things just to find out they were originally posted up to 3 years ago after it redirects me to the submission. A PG essay can be resubmitted, same URL and title, without issue at least several times (as the HN search link shows).

I'd love to know how HN goes about deciding which content is OK to resubmit over and over again.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#15

Post by mannicken »

moondistance wrote: post #13
mannicken wrote: post #10

There'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…

Rates below market rates? I think most people would disagree. They aren't salaried but the equity often pays well.

Good question. http://ycombinator.com/apply.html tells us that three founders (common situation) will get $20, 000, or roughly $6,667 per person. For three months. That's around $2200/month for skilled work, and it's not even a full-time job:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

" Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. "

That sounds like 12-14hr/day, including weekends etc.

Now you can see how the rate drops a lot when you divide $2200 by, uhm, what, 70-80hrs a week? It's barely minimum wage.

Of course, you can say 'well, but they're giving you most of the stock if you succeed'. Yeah, but that also means you'll have to pay YC back in hundreds of thousands of dollars if you succeed. (Say YC is getting 5% of your $4 mln startup).

The equity is not guaranteed. YC does not guarantee you'll get huge. They'll just pat on your shoulder and give you some pocket cash in return for a part of your company.

Which is not bad.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#16

Post by wpietri »

quanticle wrote: post #7

You 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…

I think the difference there is that books, computers, cars, and planes are tools that one can choose to work with, rather than a system that one has to work within. More briefly: you use tools, but hierarchical power structures use you.

And it's worth noting that Graham is working on creating alternatives (coughycombinatorcough), so your grumping seems a little out of place.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#17

Post by gus_massa »

mannicken wrote: post #10

There'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…

He worked at Yahoo! in 1998-1999.

He told some of his experiences in http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html .(The second part, after "Hackers", is the more relevant to this topic.)

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#18

Post by jleyank »

quanticle says it well, but I wanted to add that some things require a scale that's unavailable to "a small bunch of guys". Say, for example, you'd like to cure a disease. Can't be done on the small, as you need various flavors of lab people, slugs of lab hardware and then a number of suits required to get $COUNTRY approval.

You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.

In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.

This goes with life as well as work.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#19

Post by hxf148 »

I am leaving a full time and very good IT job with the federal government at the end of August. I don't have a super solid alternative income lined up but I am going after my dreams and that feels right. Having several layers of management and "bosses" has been so wrong for me in the last decade that it began to affect my health.

Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

#20

Post by alexro »

techiferous wrote: post #12

What if you agree with this article, you do feel constrained in an unhealthy way by your job in a large organization, but you don't feel that leaving for a small company or startup is an option (or at least not an option anytime soon)? Well, here's a coping skill that can help you. Focus on doing your duty as well as you can, regardless of the context. In other words, imagine your boss says that the web app must be w…

Or alternatively I'd do this: spend as low energy on this absurd project as you can, read about new stuff at your work if you can and grow your normal skills at home. Have a project on a side, help real people to solve real problems. Have no pity when you leave this boss and the company behind.
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