I'm presuming that Lions in the wild have a far greater chance of death and injury as well - a good reason to stay in the zoo perhaps ?
Eitherway, good luck to us all!
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
71–80 of 90 posts
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Humans also weren't meant to build pyramids, send men to the moon, or write operating systems. Big organizations are needed for big problems. But I do generally agree with the article that big organizations are not the best place to develop as a programmer.
Big organizations are needed for big problems.
Obviously false. You write via the Internet, which from the beginning has been created collaboratively, not hierarchically. (The big organization of the time, AT&T, refused to participate. See "When Wizards Stay Up Late" for the history.) I read your comment via a Linux box. My OS was started by one guy and has been built up by a lot of individual voluntary contributors.
The pyramids are a great example of what's wrong with bosses. For each pyramid, hundreds of thousands of people worked for years so a rich tyrant could impress people and feel better about dying.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#73People who are successful by accident sometimes develop a tendency to preach that the only way to be successful is to do what they did. It's almost like a kind of auto-cargo-cultism. "I had a pear tree in my front yard when I made my first million, so if you want to be rich, go out and plant pear trees!" Paul Graham is one of the better examples of this phenomenon. I would say he's gone off the deep end, but from what I can tell he's always been there. Of course there are nuggets of wisdom in his large accumulation of writing, but they're much fewer and further between than, for example, Joel Spolsky.
Also, could people stop spouting nonsense about what "humans weren't designed" to do or eat?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#74>It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#75You 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…
why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages? What are the unique advantages of having a boss?
Sometimes a good boss can shield you from office politics and bureaucracy, that hamper the productivity of developers. I have a boss who lets me focus on coding and creating things we need, rather than paperwork and politics which I hate. He's also good and blocking "Drive by Requirements" that sometimes come from out of the blue.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#76PG offered some intriguing and keen insight with this article.
Think of YC as a company, and all the YC-founded startups as tiny, self-governing units under this big brand, you'll come to realize that despite the company lacks any form of management and a real boss in the traditional sense, it's working well and profitable.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, but you use your computer, your books, the plane, and the plow...but I'm afraid that it is the boss that uses you most of the time.
Maybe I'm just the odd one out (ok, I KNOW I'm just the odd one out in general, but still), but I find that I use my boss too. First off, it's hard to play good cop, bad cop to get someone to change their mind if someone isn't willing to play the bad cop. Second, my boss has been at the company a number of years, and so can tell me what my sponsor is going to be looking for, and any political landmines I might run in…
It sounds like having a boss helps you navigate the perils of a large organization. It feels like a problem posing as its own solution.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
We only need that many people because our tools weren't sufficiently advanced at the time. We had to invent a lot of things on the fly there.
So today this could be done by 2 founders without bosses? (the topic of this thread)
Eventually, yes.
For example right now a duo are preparing to do a manned space flight, which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#79You 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…
Actually, from what I've read, your brain actually is specialized to benefit reading, and humans have adapted a lot for agriculture.
Its not that clear cut. Did our brains specialize for reading, or did reading result from the fact that our brains are specialized to handle visual data better than many other animals?
Re: You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
#80This concept relates to a thought that I've had for a while regarding why large organizations always seem so inefficient and tend toward stagnation.
In a small group, formal rules and processes exist as layers of abstraction built on top of a substantive social context established by the complex interactions among the individual members. All of the cues, feedback mechanisms, and communication channels inherent in human nature are in full effect, and these usually generate appropriate and efficient responses to changing circumstances in real time.
But once you've gone beyond a certain level of scale, those mechanisms no longer function, and the more natural, emergent social context no longer forms a consistent substantive base layer. The rules and processes that originally existed as an abstraction layer instead become the lowest available level of complexity; and since these rules are the product not merely of design, but of design that originally took place within constraints that are no longer present, the formal rules are usually quite insufficient as a substitute.
Even those who recognize this problem at this point can do little about it, because there's no longer a workable context in which to generate and implement a solution. It may only be possible to avoid in advance by being very deliberate in the process of scaling, and building the organization as a 'confederation' of smaller groups divided along natural functional 'seams'.
This phenomenon may actually be more evident in politics than in business.