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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

#141

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

Xichekolas wrote: post #129
fleaflicker wrote: post #63

Has anyone checked out the reddit comments for this same article? It's like night and day. http://reddit.com/info/6cu0t/comments/

Oddly the thing that stood out in those comments was the discussion of living expenses, and specifically health insurance. Everyone is quoting things like $700/mo and $1100/mo. Even the guy with the high deductible plan alluded to paying $116/mo for a $5k deductible. Am I the only one that pays $55/mo for a $1k deductible plan? I must be lucky or something. And that aside, seriously, you buy insurance for catastrophe…

My first major job out of school was with CitiBank. I hated the corporate culture there, and the immense inertia. When I left I had health insurance through the federal COBRA plan, but it cost me $400 monthly. I don't recall the deductible offhand. That was a double-whammy because not only did I no longer have the steady income from that job, but I now had an additional $400/mo expense. Fortunately I had some small savings, but I was almost to the point of going into debt for basic necessities before my next full-time job started. Beyond that, even though I had insurance through my next employer, the insurance company had a policy of denying coverage for any pre-existing conditions for three months. I was fortunate that it was only three months; I believe they can have such policies which last for up to a year.

The only thing worse than paying huge amounts of money for health insurance is not having insurance. My out-of-pocket expenses were about $800-$900 monthly the few months I did not have insurance covering things like prescription medications.

I'm living frugally now and saving funds to begin my own startup. But I now know that my true expenses are much greater than I had imagined as a student due to the high cost of health care.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#142

Post by gncdude »

uuilly wrote: post #19

I used to work for a defense company that eventually got bought by a mega defense company. It was ~3000 people in various parts of the country and it was started by a man who deeply believed in the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. It had that free for all structure that PG says he'd never seen in a tech company. It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers an…

Being from the defense sector, I'd love to know what companies you're talking about. Although I bet you don't want to get into that. Anyway, in a week I'll be leaving my 1000+ people company for a 5 people startup! Interesting times ahead...

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#143

Post by KB »

Xichekolas wrote: post #132
KB wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also possible I haven't been looking in the right places either. From what I've noticed, its hard to pinpoint jobs at small companies since they don't seem to advertise as much as the larger ones. However, Jamie from snaptalent was nice enough to email me and pointed me to their job ads page. Unfortunately there's only one company on the east coast listed so far, but I'm hoping once they get rolling with more job…

You can also try: http://jobs.37signals.com/ (usually webapp jobs) http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/ (not always small companies)

I keep my eye on the job boards for most of the major tech blogs and sites, but even there it tends to be larger organizations.

The other issue would be the mass amounts of jobs posted for work in CA. I would really like to stay here in the east (Boston) as oppose to moving halfway across the country for a job that very well may exist where I'm located already.

I think CA would be a great place to live, however it just doesn't fit into my current situation at the moment.

Are there any other resources out there for startup type jobs other than the major players (TechCruch, GigaOm, 37Signals, etc)?

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#144

Post by astine »

neilk wrote: post #96
astine wrote: post #17

I think that this analysis only focuses on one half of the forces that direct survival. Humans may work more efficiently as small groups, but we have also formed into large hierarchical structures for as long as we have had history. Egypt and Summaria were both hierarchically governed. Organizations survive by becoming more efficient, but they also survive by have more labor available. Napoleon would not have won a s…

So what? Egypt and Sumeria were organized like North Korea today, worship of the head of state. And Napoleon was a tyrant trying to impose his will on an entire continent. If freedom is incompatible with Napoleonic dreams, that is not a bug. Freedom fighters have often chosen the guerilla way. A better example for your point would be the Americans in WWII. But even then, soldiers are not robots and the best commander…

You're thoroughly missing my point. PG's argument is that man was designed, via evolution, to live relatively autonomously. My point is that even a casual glance at history disproves that. The German and Swiss states, for all their autonomy, couldn't stand up to Napoleon's hierarchical tyranny. In fact, it took a far more tyrannical society, Russia, to put Napoleon in his place. Hierarchy is sometimes necessary for survival, and is thus favored by evolution.

When we seek freedom, it is not because it is the evolutionarily superior state. It is because their is a conflict between individual advantage and collective advantage. When evaluating life decisions, you have to account for both.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#146

Post by zoltz »

Let's assume humans are indeed "designed" to work in small groups of only 10 people, then at the bottom level of the company tree groups should only consist of 10 people each. So far so good.

But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of 10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10 each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups himself.

The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of the leaves and company size can't be deduced.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#147

Post by sharpshoot »

KB wrote: post #110
pg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One route you could take would be to look for a startup with young founders. They won't insist on experience, because they don't have it themselves. Another would be just to look for a good startup. All a good startup cares about is how good you are, not how many years it took you to get that way.

Its also possible I haven't been looking in the right places either. From what I've noticed, its hard to pinpoint jobs at small companies since they don't seem to advertise as much as the larger ones. However, Jamie from snaptalent was nice enough to email me and pointed me to their job ads page. Unfortunately there's only one company on the east coast listed so far, but I'm hoping once they get rolling with more job…

Hey there, Sumon from Snaptalent here. Expect over the next few weeks for us to rampup the number of companies on here.

Who else on the east coast would love this? Some great startups there that we can help get for you

Email me: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#148

Post by jamiequint »

boucher wrote: post #131
Xichekolas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card debt is foolish... credit cards themselves are great. Definitely prefer to swipe plastic rather than carry around pieces of paper.

Thus the debit card was invented.

credit cards are great for building credit, which is useful for other things, like buying a house

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#149

Post by scottgnet »

I've thought about how we could structure a business in such a way that no team became too large, and all functioned relatively independently across the country or the globe. I called it a "federated" business, which had a Constitution at its core that served the same purpose as the Constitution of the United States: to hold together these "federated" business tribes as one company. Each tribe did whatever work they wanted -- they had to find the work and do it, but could always request assistance from other tribes in the company who had expertise in areas they might need to complete a job. Any individual or tribe would be free to leave at any time without any restrictions. The only purpose of the "federal" part of the business would be to manage office-type things like legal, payroll etc. and possibly maintain a core tool kit that could be used by all of the others in their work. I figured out how to map it to the current corporate structure: each tribe would form as its own LLC; the core federated part would be an LLC as well, but would not own the others. There would be an agreement signed between the "tribe" LLCs and the federal LLC, but as I said, any of the tribal LLCs could "secede" at any time, as long as they fulfilled any open obligations to other tribes' customers. Also, all bylaws would restrict any tribe and the federal part of the organization from going public, even if they seceded. That would be the one restriction. I would only be interested in this kind of business if it were for the long-term, and not with the goal of flipping or cashing out. Not sure it would work as advertised, but it sure would be a cool experiment.

/s.

Re: You weren't meant to have a boss

#150

Post by pg »

meche wrote: post #113

When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution. Evolution is the change of a species over time--it does not have a conciousness in order to "mean" to do things. The related reasoning in the article appears to infer the superiority of the last 10,000+ years of "hunter-gatherers" over the last few thousand years of larger organizations with managers for a specific purpose (b…

For large public works projects to reflect the advancement of actual biological (rather than cultural) evolution, they'd have to affect people's chance of having descendants.

There may have been some of that. Maybe people who could tolerate organization into armies have been exterminating people who couldn't. But the time during which that has been taking place is pretty short by evolutionary standards.

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