You weren't meant to have a boss

> Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley

Did anyone else find this as funny as i did?

Could you pick a more mainstream brand of shoe Paul?

If you are interested in this subject, then a much more interesting reading about this subject can be read in John Viney's book Drive. I wish I had completed reading that book many years ago, yet I stalled and failed to read the final chapters that mention all that Paul has written but with a lot more explanation as to why things are the way they are. Groups are 7, 7x7 are tribes and beyond that you have hierarchies. Anyone who has worked for or come into contact with these different types of companies, eg. accenture will immediately spot the difference. All software companies function well up to tribe level, beyond that it gets very complicated and unattractive. A succesfull company should always strive to build well functioning tribes and keep hierarcial aspects of a company as transparent and non-intrusive as possible. IT shops that try to reorganise into hierarchies are destined to destroy themselves and if your's is, leave now.

I'm in St. Louis and still don't see any ads on that page. I checked and NoScript and AdBlock are both whitelisting you, too.

(What a curious thing! I'm trying to get more ads in my browsing experience! Who'da thunkit.)

A thoughtful essay, I agree with its spirit. Nicely written.

The arm-waving stuff about evolution disappointed me, tho. Supposedly, the genes humans have are in aggregate woefully ill-suited for success in modernity, at least this is what I hear from people who make similar arguments relating to evolutionary psychology. Programming computers post dates by at least 100K years the environment in which our genes were supposedly selected for reproductive success. On theory, everyone of us ought to be clumsy at best around computers, tho the evidence is all to the contrary.

Even granting your evolutionary premise tho, it has some problems. For one, I think you overlook a number of notably spectacular successes in eusocial species where size matters. Instead of lions in Africa, for instance, spend some time observing an ant mound. I also wouldn't expect that reproductive success and professional success would necessarily track each other. Or maybe I misunderstood you.

My $0.02: I think fulfillment of the individual and the success of the organization is more the result of the nature and motivations of the actual individuals involved with it than, per se, the size of the organization. Personally, I've worked as a programmer for big and small, but my best experience was as a private contractor. The evolutionary equivalent of the lone hawk if you'd like. (I'm now doing something ENTIRELY different).

I think most young programmers are well advised to spend some time in the box before they can learn and appreciate thinking and working outside it.

The essay reminds me that autonomy is a glorious thing - we are ends in ourselves, not someone else's means to an end. It takes courage to be autonomous, both from the individual and from the group around that individual. Teddy Roosevelt said it:

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Life itself requires audacity to be truly alive. Audacity, as you pointed out needs no boss - no coach, no manager. It needs more than anything, freedom and respect from others. This essay is one of enormous hope to me - young people I work with are timid and aspire to the imprisoned safety of the cage not the free ferocity of the wilderness. Too many aspire to be either the sheep or the shepherd - to few aspire to be neither.