Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?
I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead.
Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.
I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.
Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.
This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.
Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.
Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies
How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.
The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around
One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.
Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.
I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives
You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.
In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.
In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).
Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.
It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.
> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...
Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.
I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.
That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.
We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.
Rationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise.
Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.
It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.
Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.
It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.
Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.
So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.
"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.
If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)
TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.
It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.
But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.
I think later systems were at a core an attempt to implement something like high-frequency (which is a misnomer, it's more like low-latency) trading over 1960-70s tech at a scope that we still have no means to do now, in 2020s.
"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.
And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.
So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.
I think people could try social experiments and compare the productivity differences resulting from different management styles on LLMs instead of humans.
China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.
"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?
For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.
The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?
I’m not saying you can’t argue for more cooperative systems. I’m saying you better be prepared to explain why your proposed system will work better than Soviet and Chinese communist systems when asked if you want to be taken seriously.
Right, but my point is that I think that being the baseline requirement is silly. I get why that reaction exists, but I think it's over-fitting. Like I said before, cooperative is so broad.
Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.
Yeah a lot of management isn’t just a desire for power and control over others, but just the unglamorous and boring work of tracking what everyone is working on and how it fits into the bigger picture. In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization.
"In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization."
... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices.
Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.
Maybe, there is an aspect of things being deliberately kept hidden, but also communicating this stuff is just pretty hard. Large organizations often spend huge amounts of effort on it and still get things wrong.
Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.
Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.
I believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.
That's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.
I worked briefly in a “holacracy” type of company. Absolutely hated it. There was a hierarchy, you just didn’t know about it unless you’d been there a while.
The company acted high and mighty like they have principles, the most successful project that was bringing most of the revenue in got a lot of leeway to bypass all ethical review processes so that it could keep feeding the rest of the company’s more ethical but not very profitable projects.
I hated working there and left after a couple months only. Incidentally, that was my last job ever and the straw that broke the camel’s back: I’ve worked freelance ever since.
You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?
I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.
USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.
Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.
Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.
> You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?
Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."
Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."
Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.
TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?
Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.
But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.
Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).
That might be a valid solution on the individual level, but it seems problematic if we want the kinds of things only a large organization can realistically produce. In addition to small organizations that can act as a source of employment for people who absolutely can't stand a corporate hierarchy, we also need large corporations that don't suck, or at least suck the minimum necessary amount to attract people less averse to having a boss. At least if we want things like airliners and what not.
Instead of massive, centralized corporations, consider the highly successful family firms in Emilia-Romagna[0], as a model. These businesses have thrived for generations in a highly competitive global market not through rigid corporate chains of command, but through decentralized networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and committed workforce.
Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.
>Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.
I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.
No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.
I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.
> it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example.
Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.
I don't think the analogies of animals in the wild or groups of hunter-gatherer is correct to the modern companies. A better analogy is the teams who built pyramids or armies who empowered Alexander or the medieval peasant settlements who regulated societies.
It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process.
Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.
That collective effort resulted in something very impressive, but there are lots of achievements in the present day which are, organizationally, at least as impressive, and which do not seem to require hierarchy (though they include various hierarchies). The chain of processes and activities that result in a modern supermarket and all its products, for example, has no overarching boss, and some of the steps along the way are handled by self-employed people (truck owner-operators, for example).
But the modern supermarket also has many large hierarchical organizations contributing well, from the supermarket chains to industrial farms to giant processed food brands. For better or worse.
> Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building
For what, a glorified tomb?
I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
The moon landing is definitely a fruit of war efforts.
Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.
Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
> I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans".
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
No, but without it wouldn't come to existence. You can call it "moving the goal posts" if you want, my point is these efforts are not primarily motivated for the good of society and whatever advances we have are accidental, secondary effects.
> Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort.
I am responding to someone giving the example of the pyramids as something that could only be achieved due to "hierarchy, management and process", do I have to say it?
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the bosses ever done for us?
What about them? These technologies already existed, the only thing that changed is that economies of scale enabled by the centralized power. Smaller tribes and villages could have gone by implementing more localized solutions.
Local conflicts do not get solved by higher levels, they get tapered over. WIth all the power and resources amassed by the Federal Government, one would think this could've been solved already, right?
We covered that below in the thread. The Apollo Program wouldn't exist if it wasn´t for the Cold War. The Manhattan Project also surely classifies as "effort that only get to be done because of War".
The Apollo program wouldn't have happened without Sputnik and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Getting to the moon is cool and all but the subtle hint to the Soviets is "we have ICBMs".
The US had ICBMs in the 1950s. The Saturn V was not an ICBM. Staging was not necessary for ICBMs. None of the lunar landing module and equipment was usable for military purposes. NASA was run by civilians, not the military.
I concur the analogy misses this reason for teaming up in large groups completely.
All our current advances are the direct result of working in large, communicating groups, which crucially need a way to transfer knowledge across generations. The YouTube channel “How to make everything” comes to mind, where the resources, processes, machinery… required make it tricky for something as mundane as a hairdryer to be built from scratch by a single person.
However, I also agree, to some extent, with the point the author is trying to make, even though the arguments and analogies are shaky.
I don’t believe the author is arguing the pyramids would ever have gotten built if everyone did whatever the hell they want. But I also don’t believe the pyramid builders were terribly happy.
In a world where we have solved (or have made significant progress to solving) big categories of problems, it might be worthwhile to consider what our “pyramids” are. Are you working on something life-altering? Some marvel which will stand for hundreds of years? Most people probably aren’t. I know I’m not.
So I find it easy to emphasize with the feeling that it’s more “healthy” to just make whatever the hell you want (be it as a programmer, or just as a human being). After all, a lot of innovation has been a direct result of people fucking around on their own. I’d enjoy a planet where potential Einsteins would not have to work two jobs to survive, in lieu of which they would have time to think, experiment, write, …
Maybe it comes down to:
- Individual freedom is ideal to invent things (someone had to be Alexander)
- Some pooling of humans is necessary to actually build said things
Well that’s simply a question of whether we are at a point yet where we can implement UBI and provide for everyone’s needs and wants without requiring anyone to work.
I’m a big fan of the idea of UBI, but I somewhat doubt we’ll ever get there. But I’m neither convinced we need to get there in the first place, or need robots to achieve it.
Post-scarcity is a different beast than UBI. Still, both might be good “pyramids”.
I’m not an economist nor well-read on the subject, so I’ll have to be hand-wavy on the specifics. But one alternative at least is to “live with less” as is sometimes said. To change consumption and our way of life so radically we just need less of everything (labour, material, …).
I've seen flat structures (with a "boss" who is almost entirely hands-off) work very well for teams with several dozen people.
Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well.
I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
> I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.
Would be interesting to hear how (well) it worked, why they abandoned it, what they replaced it with (and why), and whether the replacement actually helped to expedite Half-Life 3.
Man its amazing when you have that high trust environment. You get treated like an equal, your opinion gets respected, and you can really make a difference in the company's prospect. Its addictive
It's a coordination problem. 70 amazingly responsible adults still need to coordinate amongst one another. Ad hoc coordination and communication always breaks down eventually.
What PG wrote here truly resonates. I worked for a large Co and then 7 years ago started my own thing.
At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision.
My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill).
Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back.
It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time.
Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.
None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC).
Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.
In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.
That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.
Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful.
A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively.
One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly.
For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
Re-reading old Paul Graham essays is revealing for how much my startup experience has changed my views. I remember this essay resonating with younger me.
Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me.
Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others.
My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people.
Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years.
I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.
Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.
The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same.
And a standout comment from the original submission
> I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...]
> It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.
I think it's about how much agency you need/want your job to give you in that specific moment/season of your life.
starting a business is agency-maxxing.
you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.
I don't know why this should be surprising. Large corporations tend to prioritize process over results. In other words, they strangle themselves with bureaucracy.
This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.
I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.
Working for a large corporation feels like being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions make as much of an impact as a tiny leaf rustling in the Amazon forest. I've worked at, both, startups and large mega corporations and I can tell you the difference is night and day.
I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency.
I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes.
I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing.
I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer.
Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire.
But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.
Someone created that environment within which you thrived. What is preventing you from doing the same for some other small group, early in their careers?
Beholding to a boss or to owners. Not a whole lotta difference unless everybody is a sole proprietorship. And that would be way too hand to mouth for most people.
Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.
by boss if you mean engineering managers? yes, in some cases you might not need them. Startups with flat structures expect ICs to manage their work and team, this role feels redundant. More than that, we need a PM.
As someone who has been a startup founder across several and who has basically been under-paid for the last decade as a result I am constantly thinking if I should have went to work at big tech again as many of my peers are much richer for doing it.
But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss.
I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.
If I hear the argument of "naturality" and "natural design" I explode. We are "naturally" meant to die at 21, after getting whatever illness, never to move with massive transport, not even speak. 'cause all we naturally are is monkeys, right? AaaaaRGHHHH This argument makes me nuts
There's a lot more nuance to the "natural" conversation than the assumption that we should go back to stone tools and all die before we hit 25. I've not really seen someone with that general belief, and I'm one of them myself, argue for such an all-or-nothing approach.
It doesn't, because "it was so common to", as OP stated, is not the same thing as "you were supposed to". There's no reason it should be corrected, it's accurate.
I think paul graham is biased to always tell people to make startups, but what hes saying resonates to me in that it is a spectrum. You dont have to. Ake a startup, but you can work for a company of 20 people and feel thats its alot more liberating and feel a much stronger sense of purpose. He even concedes that near the end
No, it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. The flaw in the Graham's argument is that he argues we should prefer "natural" without first proving "natural" means "good". Bubonic plague is very natural, but not so good, right? That doesn't have to be all or nothing, but each time somebody says "do X not Y because X is more natural", we ought to ask "but does natural here mean good?". Sometimes it does - eating an apple is probably better than ingesting a bunch of high-inducing refined sugar - but sometimes it doesn't. Antibiotics are not natural, but preferable to being eaten alive by bacteria. So this needs to be established on case by case basis - is "natural" good in this case? And Graham doesn't seem to bother to do that.
David Hume pointed this out in 1740, and his advise still applies:
A reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers.
I think there can be a middle ground here. Yes the appeal to nature fallacy is a thing. However, it's not obviously wrong to say that humans evolved in a specific environment, and to question whether moving them to a completely different environment is going to make their life worse.
We evolved living in smaller cooperative groups, and spending most of our time in nature. The farther we move away from that the more we might want to question whether any individual change is actually going to make our life better. Likely some tradeoffs are absolutely worth it and some probably not.
Not counting that we already have been studying our own behaviour for thousands of years, as social individuals and society... sometimes you just cannot go back, throw a bat on everyone's head and convince everyone that since we work better in groups of 7, there shall be no corporation
"Natural" is something that happens "by itself", for free, without your having to exert an effort to produce it. If it happens to be something beneficial, it should be incorporated and used to your advantage.
The opposite end of that spectrum is everyone here who thinks we should just ignore nature and where we came from since we’ve conquered it, or something. I’m not sure what you all are arguing here. We’re still a part of nature, we’ll discover that quickly if society collapses.
The naturalistic fallacy needs to die. Then a metaphor about food without any expertise and "programmers are special" sprinkled in. Holy lord, what a wild ride of an article.
Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.
Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?
It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".
> that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.
Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.
This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type.
If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc.
If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams.
I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.
Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE.
I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).
I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer.
I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so
Without a firm proposal of what a company can or should do instead, this just becomes another example of complaints being easier to make than actual solutions. We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?
I've heard of "hierarchy-less" company structures being attempted before. I've also heard that each and every one of those attempts always ended up with hierarchies anyway, only now they became "shadow" hierarchies, unofficial and undocumented. Because that's just how human nature works. Not everyone can stay locked in on what every else is doing while still also keeping up with their own responsibilities, so other people get deferred to instead.
Is there happy middle-ground that can be found here? Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.
I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.
Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.
This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.
Can this work? No idea.
Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.
Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies
How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.
The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
Greek city states and German petty kingdoms suggest conflict and failure to unite vs external threats common.
The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around
Probably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.
One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.
Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.
I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives
You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.
In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.
In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).
Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.
It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.
You could try I suppose, but you will be crushed by the old boy networks.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. It shocked me a few times around a decade ago.
And developers
But local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.
> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...
Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.
I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.
Reminder that Greeks were right and representative democracy is not democracy at all, but another form of oligarchy.
That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.
We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.
Rationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise.
Edit spelling
Also an unwillingness to examine their own irrational biases, seeing them only in other people.
Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.
It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.
Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.
It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.
Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.
So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.
"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.
If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)
TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.
You would need an explanation for how every single culture in human history conditions people in this way, if it’s not connected to human nature.
False statements require no explanation.
Well, the comment you're replying to is patently false, as explained in a separate comment.
I mean... that's just.. wrong?
Indigenous North American cultures, Amish cultures, medieval monastic communities, the list goes on.
Really, you can't just make blanket claims like that over _all of human history_ and expect to be right.
If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.
1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?
My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.
“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.
It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.
But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.
Cybersyn was an experiment and we don't really know if it would have worked or not because the USA arranged for a military coup to destroy it ...
I think later systems were at a core an attempt to implement something like high-frequency (which is a misnomer, it's more like low-latency) trading over 1960-70s tech at a scope that we still have no means to do now, in 2020s.
"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.
And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.
So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.
It's impossible to debate a topic with someone who takes anecdotes, declares it is proof of something and then says smugly "there you have it!"
I think people could try social experiments and compare the productivity differences resulting from different management styles on LLMs instead of humans.
It certainly has to be considered.
China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.
China failed? They seem to be doing well to me.
Their Communist system failed. They experienced increasing prosperity when they adopted capitalism.
"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?
For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.
The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?
I’m not saying you can’t argue for more cooperative systems. I’m saying you better be prepared to explain why your proposed system will work better than Soviet and Chinese communist systems when asked if you want to be taken seriously.
Right, but my point is that I think that being the baseline requirement is silly. I get why that reaction exists, but I think it's over-fitting. Like I said before, cooperative is so broad.
"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.
The only mechanism like that I’m aware of is the market, but a large organization shields smaller teams and individuals from being measured by it.
Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.
Yeah a lot of management isn’t just a desire for power and control over others, but just the unglamorous and boring work of tracking what everyone is working on and how it fits into the bigger picture. In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization.
"In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization."
... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices.
Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.
Maybe, there is an aspect of things being deliberately kept hidden, but also communicating this stuff is just pretty hard. Large organizations often spend huge amounts of effort on it and still get things wrong.
Yes, good management is rare.
I believe companies where ICs understand how their role ties into the overall success of the company will outperform other companies on average.
Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.
Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.
I believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.
That's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.
Maybe shadow hierarchy are still more productive than official ones? Looks like something that wouldn't have that many meetings.
I worked briefly in a “holacracy” type of company. Absolutely hated it. There was a hierarchy, you just didn’t know about it unless you’d been there a while.
The company acted high and mighty like they have principles, the most successful project that was bringing most of the revenue in got a lot of leeway to bypass all ethical review processes so that it could keep feeding the rest of the company’s more ethical but not very profitable projects.
I hated working there and left after a couple months only. Incidentally, that was my last job ever and the straw that broke the camel’s back: I’ve worked freelance ever since.
You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?
I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.
USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.
Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.
Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.
> You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?
Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."
Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."
"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."
Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm
TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?
Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.
But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.
Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).
Explained here better than can be done in a HN comment: https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-plan...
> So what can we do about it?
For starters, you can understand that working for a large corporation will make you miserable, and choose to work in a small organization instead.
Individually, one can try to choose for a small org. Collectively, there isn't enough small org work to go around.
There is if you start one yourself.
And who will you hire if everyone decides to do that?
That might be a valid solution on the individual level, but it seems problematic if we want the kinds of things only a large organization can realistically produce. In addition to small organizations that can act as a source of employment for people who absolutely can't stand a corporate hierarchy, we also need large corporations that don't suck, or at least suck the minimum necessary amount to attract people less averse to having a boss. At least if we want things like airliners and what not.
I think the middle ground probably isn't "no hierarchy" but "less fake hierarchy"
Instead of massive, centralized corporations, consider the highly successful family firms in Emilia-Romagna[0], as a model. These businesses have thrived for generations in a highly competitive global market not through rigid corporate chains of command, but through decentralized networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and committed workforce.
Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.
0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...
The people doing the actual work should have secretaries, not managers.
There are firm proposals. Read the Democracy and Work effort lead by Richard Wolff.
>Is there any research out that offers tree-less company structures that might actually work in the real world?
Elinor Ostrom's design principles for managing common pool resources (2009 econ Nobel) indicate that nested enterprises have been necessary to scale throughout human history.
I'd be curious if there was research in the opposite direction able to prove that hierarchy is necessary in large organizations if you want to do BigCorp scale things. Intuitively it seems like this might be both a reasonable and a provable conclusion.
No matter how smart they are or how well-intentioned, it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example. Even setting aside the thousands of integration points and schedule dependencies such a project requires, some person or small group of persons needs to decide what kind of airplane they're designing and force everyone to stick with that decision.
I think the solution, such as it is, might be in looking for the minimum amount of hierarchy necessary for the scale of what you're doing, and being honest with yourself about that scale. And that goes in both directions. Small startups shouldn't try to organize like big corporations, and big corporations should stop pretending they can behave like small startups while trying to conquer the world.
> it seems improbable that 10,000 individual contributors running around doing whatever they think is best will ever result in engineering a new airplane, for example.
Individuals and small groups build new airplanes all the time. It's only large aeroplanes that require large teams of people.
> We all know that large corps are structured in a way that eliminates individual initiative. So what can we do about it?
Well one thing is to break up large corporations into small pieces.
Yes, its called Team Topologies.
I don't think the analogies of animals in the wild or groups of hunter-gatherer is correct to the modern companies. A better analogy is the teams who built pyramids or armies who empowered Alexander or the medieval peasant settlements who regulated societies.
It's not about acting on your own or achieving something for yourself. It's about building something which is only possible with collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans. The size of such organization needs hierarchy, management and process.
Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building. And what would have happened if the workers worked without a boss and process.
That collective effort resulted in something very impressive, but there are lots of achievements in the present day which are, organizationally, at least as impressive, and which do not seem to require hierarchy (though they include various hierarchies). The chain of processes and activities that result in a modern supermarket and all its products, for example, has no overarching boss, and some of the steps along the way are handled by self-employed people (truck owner-operators, for example).
But the modern supermarket also has many large hierarchical organizations contributing well, from the supermarket chains to industrial farms to giant processed food brands. For better or worse.
> Think of what processes and management was used for pyramid building
For what, a glorified tomb?
I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans". It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class
Consider Egyptian and Mesopotamian irrigation and flood management, Persian and Roman roads, Chinese canals...
Roman aqueducts, modern railroads, the moon landing, the LOTR films, CERN, or Wikipedia...
This seems like an open-and-shut case of failing to look for disconfirming evidence.
The moon landing is definitely a fruit of war efforts.
Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down process.
Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you bring a cultural landmark that it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
You're moving goalposts. You literally said
> I fail to find anything in history that advanced the sciences or the arts through "collective effort of hundreds or thousands of humans".
> It's only for war or to consolidate power in the hands of the ruling class, never for the benefit of society at large.
I'm breaking it up into two statements because sufficient evidence has been provided to contradict the former, and some of your rebuttals did not align with the latter. Let's break those down:
> The moon landing is defintely a fruit of a war effort.
But is it only for war? Or did it "advance the sciences" + "for the benefit of society at large"?
> Wikipedia is the opposite of a top-down effort.
Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort. It's certainly "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> Aqueducts and railroads: responded on a sibling comment.
Scale and precision also matter and don't negate the fact that these are "something in history" + "collective effort" + "not only for war" + "for the benefit of society at large".
> LOTR films: I don't even know how it relates to the point, but it's funny that you cultural landmark that only worked because it's an adaptation of the works of a single individual.
I only picked LOTR films because they are notorious for being large scale and you never said it didn't have to be an adaptation. I could have picked The Simpsons, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, you name it.
> But is it only for war?
No, but without it wouldn't come to existence. You can call it "moving the goal posts" if you want, my point is these efforts are not primarily motivated for the good of society and whatever advances we have are accidental, secondary effects.
> Your original statement didn't say it had to be a top-down effort.
I am responding to someone giving the example of the pyramids as something that could only be achieved due to "hierarchy, management and process", do I have to say it?
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the bosses ever done for us?
What about them? These technologies already existed, the only thing that changed is that economies of scale enabled by the centralized power. Smaller tribes and villages could have gone by implementing more localized solutions.
Until local interests conflict. Consider the perennial angst over water rights in the American West…
Local conflicts do not get solved by higher levels, they get tapered over. WIth all the power and resources amassed by the Federal Government, one would think this could've been solved already, right?
See "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes.
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
Also, the Apollo lunar landing. 400,000 people worked on it.
We covered that below in the thread. The Apollo Program wouldn't exist if it wasn´t for the Cold War. The Manhattan Project also surely classifies as "effort that only get to be done because of War".
The Apollo program was not a weapons development program.
The Manhattan Project resulted in nuclear power plants.
The Apollo program wouldn't have happened without Sputnik and against the backdrop of the Cold War. Getting to the moon is cool and all but the subtle hint to the Soviets is "we have ICBMs".
The US had ICBMs in the 1950s. The Saturn V was not an ICBM. Staging was not necessary for ICBMs. None of the lunar landing module and equipment was usable for military purposes. NASA was run by civilians, not the military.
Run by civilians, but the funding would never come if the government didn't have military interest.
NASA? JET? CERN?
I concur the analogy misses this reason for teaming up in large groups completely.
All our current advances are the direct result of working in large, communicating groups, which crucially need a way to transfer knowledge across generations. The YouTube channel “How to make everything” comes to mind, where the resources, processes, machinery… required make it tricky for something as mundane as a hairdryer to be built from scratch by a single person.
However, I also agree, to some extent, with the point the author is trying to make, even though the arguments and analogies are shaky.
I don’t believe the author is arguing the pyramids would ever have gotten built if everyone did whatever the hell they want. But I also don’t believe the pyramid builders were terribly happy.
In a world where we have solved (or have made significant progress to solving) big categories of problems, it might be worthwhile to consider what our “pyramids” are. Are you working on something life-altering? Some marvel which will stand for hundreds of years? Most people probably aren’t. I know I’m not.
So I find it easy to emphasize with the feeling that it’s more “healthy” to just make whatever the hell you want (be it as a programmer, or just as a human being). After all, a lot of innovation has been a direct result of people fucking around on their own. I’d enjoy a planet where potential Einsteins would not have to work two jobs to survive, in lieu of which they would have time to think, experiment, write, …
Maybe it comes down to: - Individual freedom is ideal to invent things (someone had to be Alexander) - Some pooling of humans is necessary to actually build said things
Well that’s simply a question of whether we are at a point yet where we can implement UBI and provide for everyone’s needs and wants without requiring anyone to work.
I don’t think the robots are at that point yet.
I’m a big fan of the idea of UBI, but I somewhat doubt we’ll ever get there. But I’m neither convinced we need to get there in the first place, or need robots to achieve it. Post-scarcity is a different beast than UBI. Still, both might be good “pyramids”.
I’m not an economist nor well-read on the subject, so I’ll have to be hand-wavy on the specifics. But one alternative at least is to “live with less” as is sometimes said. To change consumption and our way of life so radically we just need less of everything (labour, material, …).
But that is only 4000 years ago when we’ve been evolving for millions.
I think the pyramid/army analogy works for some kinds of work, but maybe not for the kind of work the essay is mostly talking about.
I've seen flat structures (with a "boss" who is almost entirely hands-off) work very well for teams with several dozen people.
Where things seem to break down is at the next level, if the teams (and their "bosses") need to coordinate but can't reach agreement and end up blocking each other. Sometimes the teams lack global information while the bosses (for some reason) are not interfacing well.
I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
> I don't know if Valve still has their "wheeled desk" system for self-organizing teams, but I would like to hear from anyone who has experienced it.
Unable to link a source right now but they have stopped doing that years ago. I remember the original article used to be posted as explanation for why CSGO wasn't getting any updates but it got debunked even then.
Would be interesting to hear how (well) it worked, why they abandoned it, what they replaced it with (and why), and whether the replacement actually helped to expedite Half-Life 3.
I once worked for a unicorn (1B valuation) company where there were there were <35 engineers and all of them reported to the technical founder.
No mangers, no product managers, no appraisal (30% hike or out)
The rule was "I will treat you like an adult and you have to act like one"
Easily the best company I worked for and best Colleuges.
But I have seen this model hiccup once it reached ~70 engineers.
May be because of the structure or may be it's difficult to hire more such engineers India. Might scale better in SF.
Man its amazing when you have that high trust environment. You get treated like an equal, your opinion gets respected, and you can really make a difference in the company's prospect. Its addictive
It's a coordination problem. 70 amazingly responsible adults still need to coordinate amongst one another. Ad hoc coordination and communication always breaks down eventually.
Maybe a Dunbar’s number thing?
What PG wrote here truly resonates. I worked for a large Co and then 7 years ago started my own thing.
At first it felt unnatural. Doing something that most others are not feels wrong. Eventually, once I accepted the daily feeling of ambiguity created through exploring a limitless world, I knew I had made the right decision.
My advice to anyone navigating the transition is to ensure you first setup something for initial survival (e.g., figure out how to freelance, find a flexible job, learn a skill).
Having even a bit of money flowing in (irrespective of the amount really) while not being tied to a large Corp gave me that initial sense of freedom I needed to truly think big. It kept me from "giving up" and going back.
It's a slippery slope though, if you get too used to just doing freelance, you've built around yourself artificial barriers similar to those that exited before for you. You will gravitate to the easier projects because they will have the best ROI for you on your time.
Find the right balance. Just enough freelance to live, but not too much where you're not trying new things and truly learning how to build long term value.
None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC).
Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.
In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.
Modern-day sophistry.
That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.
Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful.
A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively.
One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly.
For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
Re-reading old Paul Graham essays is revealing for how much my startup experience has changed my views. I remember this essay resonating with younger me.
Reading it now, I spot the reader-directed flattery much earlier (it literally starts in the title). I also have years of experience with a couple successful and even more failed startup founders behind me.
Maybe this essay was discussing narrowly the breakout YC company founders like Dropbox, AirBnB, Doordash, and the other top successful CEOs they saw. Most things in venture capital focus on the survivorship bias of the best companies and forget the others.
My experience with startups has been the opposite: The founders who "weren't meant to have a boss" either because they told you so themselves or they failed out of big companies due to being unmanageable or fighting their boss were the people who also had conflicts with cofounders and early employees. They'd get into fights with investors and the one or two board members you get after early funding rounds. Since they'd never successfully let themselves be managed or work as a team, they didn't know how to manage other people.
Some of them saw the founder role as equivalent to being king, with employees as their indentured servants who owed them 16 hour days in exchange for 0.05% of their empire, vesting over 4 years.
I haven't been lucky enough to be an early employee at one of the unicorn startups, but the successful startups I was part of had mature leaders who did well in other companies before founding their own. The "not meant to have a boss" founders I worked for are the periods of my career I wish I could go back and erase.
Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.
Good luck! You might not find anything out tomorrow, but it still might work in the long run.
The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same.
Also:
pg's "cliff notes"
https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html
And a standout comment from the original submission
> I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210
The parent comment is an interesting read as well
> It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.
I think it's about how much agency you need/want your job to give you in that specific moment/season of your life.
starting a business is agency-maxxing.
you trade that in when you're an employee for some amount of perceived economic safety. at least, that's supposed to be the deal. that's harder to come by these days.
I don't know why this should be surprising. Large corporations tend to prioritize process over results. In other words, they strangle themselves with bureaucracy.
This is why large corporations don't stay on top for long. They get out-competed by smaller, more nimble companies. You can see this in changes in lists of the top 10 corporations by market value, every 10 years.
I agree we weren't "meant" to live in nations of 350m people and have incredibly large and complex societies and institutions but we do and it's impossible without hierarchy.
Working for a large corporation feels like being a small fish in a big pond. Your actions make as much of an impact as a tiny leaf rustling in the Amazon forest. I've worked at, both, startups and large mega corporations and I can tell you the difference is night and day.
I'm completely self taught as a software engineer. Since I started I had a passion for writing code every single day. My ideas at first were huge and ambitious but as time passed I noticed they became smaller and more "grounded". But that also correlated with my trajectory in my career. The first few jobs I had were small contracts. Working for myself and hustling against overseas engineers charging 1/100th what I wanted to charge. Then, I went to work for a government agency.
I had big ideas of cool solutions we could build to old problems they were dealing with. I implemented a genetic algorithm that reduced the time it took to estimate how to move water from one location to the next from 15 hours down to 30 seconds. But, we couldn't push the solution to production until several committees could meet and discuss it at length. I left that place after a year and now, 10 years later, they're still struggling with their old technology and slow paced processes.
I then went to work for a startup that wanted to do facial biometrics for fraud prevention. When I arrived they had 7 marketing people, a paying customer, but no actual software developed. Me and a few other engineers wrote the core of the application in a few days and then spent the rest of our time there fleshing it out into a real product. We were working 60 to 80 hours a week, nights, weekends, the whole enchilada. It was exhausting physically and emotionally but it was the best job I ever had. I had complete freedom to design everything from the ground up, got stuff pushed to production seconds after I committed my code, and got to develop some pretty innovative solutions for liveness detection and geo-fencing.
I then roamed around for a few years, salary hopping, from corporation to corporation until I landed at a big company. The work was easy and the pay was good. But year after year my love of software engineering started to die. There were no challenging problems to work on, the solutions were cookie-cutter implementations for every project, and the politics were exhausting. What should have taken 2 weeks of work would stretch to 2 months due to unnecessary meetings, and status updates, and leadership constantly changing their mind. And worst of all, I wasn't learning anything new or growing as an engineer.
Toward the end, every single team became a "modernization" team where all they would work on was updating legacy software to "modern" tech stacks. This was obvious busy work because leadership had nothing better to do with the hundreds of engineers they had hired. Eventually, when I had enough money saved up, I decided to retire.
But I always missed working at that startup. The rush, the challenge, the real world solutions we were building that were used by real people and making an impact on their lives was amazing. Now that I'm retired and get to choose what I want to work on I think fondly of those times and wish I could recreate that experience.
Someone created that environment within which you thrived. What is preventing you from doing the same for some other small group, early in their careers?
I'm a few million dollars short lol
Beholding to a boss or to owners. Not a whole lotta difference unless everybody is a sole proprietorship. And that would be way too hand to mouth for most people.
Some people want to try to die rich and unloved by 40. Some people work to be able to afford what they want to do. Different strokes, eh.
by boss if you mean engineering managers? yes, in some cases you might not need them. Startups with flat structures expect ICs to manage their work and team, this role feels redundant. More than that, we need a PM.
why it feels like charismas when a new essay drops out
As someone who has been a startup founder across several and who has basically been under-paid for the last decade as a result I am constantly thinking if I should have went to work at big tech again as many of my peers are much richer for doing it.
But Paul Graham is right, you weren't meant to have a boss. In fact this is not unique to programmers either. Nobody is meant to have a boss.
I encourage everyone to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Wengrow and David Graeber to understand the kinds of human organizational structures that are possible and have existed in the past.
Plenty of startups recreate the same dysfunction at a smaller scale, just with less process and worse boundaries (I think...)
If I hear the argument of "naturality" and "natural design" I explode. We are "naturally" meant to die at 21, after getting whatever illness, never to move with massive transport, not even speak. 'cause all we naturally are is monkeys, right? AaaaaRGHHHH This argument makes me nuts
There's a lot more nuance to the "natural" conversation than the assumption that we should go back to stone tools and all die before we hit 25. I've not really seen someone with that general belief, and I'm one of them myself, argue for such an all-or-nothing approach.
It's about balance.
Or, as Terry Pratchett so eloquently put it in The Fifth Elephant:
> “Not natural, in my view, sah. Not in favor of unnatural things.”
> Vetinari looked perplexed. “You mean, you eat your meat raw and sleep in a tree?”
> We are "naturally" meant to die at 21
Not really? Historical life expectancies were low because it was so common to die in infancy and childhood (thus dragging down the "average").
For people who made it to 20, it was common to live past 60.
Yeah people get that one wrong all the time. They don't realize what a bad argument it is.
I'm guessing they are ignorant of historical facts and are just repeating what they heard from somebody else.
People do get that wrong. But the corrected version is “you were supposed to die as a baby”, and…
That doesn’t sound any better.
>That doesn't sound any better.
It doesn't, because "it was so common to", as OP stated, is not the same thing as "you were supposed to". There's no reason it should be corrected, it's accurate.
Yeah, you were just meant to "naturally" have 7 children, of which 2-4 die before they get a name. But the ones who live? They might make it past 60.
Or die from an infection coming from a random splinter. Also a very natural thing.
I think this is fair criticism. It's hard to read this blog cause its premise is based on an "appeal to nature" fallacy.
It's flawed criticism because it's rooted in an all-or-nothing perspective.
I think paul graham is biased to always tell people to make startups, but what hes saying resonates to me in that it is a spectrum. You dont have to. Ake a startup, but you can work for a company of 20 people and feel thats its alot more liberating and feel a much stronger sense of purpose. He even concedes that near the end
No, it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. The flaw in the Graham's argument is that he argues we should prefer "natural" without first proving "natural" means "good". Bubonic plague is very natural, but not so good, right? That doesn't have to be all or nothing, but each time somebody says "do X not Y because X is more natural", we ought to ask "but does natural here mean good?". Sometimes it does - eating an apple is probably better than ingesting a bunch of high-inducing refined sugar - but sometimes it doesn't. Antibiotics are not natural, but preferable to being eaten alive by bacteria. So this needs to be established on case by case basis - is "natural" good in this case? And Graham doesn't seem to bother to do that.
David Hume pointed this out in 1740, and his advise still applies:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treatise_of_Human_Nature/Book...
I think there can be a middle ground here. Yes the appeal to nature fallacy is a thing. However, it's not obviously wrong to say that humans evolved in a specific environment, and to question whether moving them to a completely different environment is going to make their life worse.
We evolved living in smaller cooperative groups, and spending most of our time in nature. The farther we move away from that the more we might want to question whether any individual change is actually going to make our life better. Likely some tradeoffs are absolutely worth it and some probably not.
Working 90 hours a week in a 15 person startup is arguably further from what we were supposed to do than cruising at Google
Not counting that we already have been studying our own behaviour for thousands of years, as social individuals and society... sometimes you just cannot go back, throw a bat on everyone's head and convince everyone that since we work better in groups of 7, there shall be no corporation
I wish i could upvote you seven times
"Natural" is something that happens "by itself", for free, without your having to exert an effort to produce it. If it happens to be something beneficial, it should be incorporated and used to your advantage.
The opposite end of that spectrum is everyone here who thinks we should just ignore nature and where we came from since we’ve conquered it, or something. I’m not sure what you all are arguing here. We’re still a part of nature, we’ll discover that quickly if society collapses.
The naturalistic fallacy needs to die. Then a metaphor about food without any expertise and "programmers are special" sprinkled in. Holy lord, what a wild ride of an article.
Guess what? People weren't meant to live in stone houses and get cancer treatment either. Gathering berries all day sucks, that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.
Life in a big company is very well-paid for very little work. You're pretty safe and can work part-time, raise kids, work-from-home.. and when you're on the office, are you really doing more than doodling during meetings and drinking coffee?
It's not "we should live in the same environment we evolved in to be happy", it's "the things that make us happy are a product of the environment we evolved in, and we should take that into consideration".
> that's why everyone abandons that lifestyle as soon as possible.
Not everyone, there are still societies doing that. The thing is, it doesn't scale. And the other ways of having a society do. Which, naturally, leads to a situation where the most of the population is not doing that, and keeps those who do that around just out of benevolent tolerance. It may even be a more pleasurable way of life, for all we know, than many others (such as one of a medieval peasant) but it can't ever be anything but a tiny minority.
We weren't meant to have windows made of glass. Such items are entirely unnatural. According to pg, we must be wary of them.
sounds still more natural than windows made of brick or other non-transparent material!
This whole subject is very annoying coming from a wealthy capitalist of this type.
If PG thinks we weren’t meant to live this way, I’d like to see him out there fighting for universal housing, universal healthcare, universal education including no-tuition college, higher tax rates for billionaires and upcoming trillionaires, abolishing excessive wealth (e.g., we should tax all wealth and assets over $999 million 100% and/or force employee/community ownership of company shares of excessively wealthy individuals), abolishing for-profit prison labor, etc.
If you think this is extreme I would like you to explain how one person being a millionaire 300 times like Paul Graham is isn’t extreme. And then you realize that Elon Musk is as wealthy as 1000+ Paul Grahams.
I don't need to hear another VC giving a management seminar about how unnatural modern work is. I’d like to see them start changing people’s lives for the better, maybe they could start by advocating for the basic needs of the poorest people in our society or something like that.
The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.
Ironically [1], a lot of ycombinator founders would set themselves up for a lot more financial independence, work life balance, and personal freedom if they skipped the low success rate founder’s grind and just joined stable large companies with good stock award plans and focused on FIRE.
[1] or maybe that’s not the right term
[flagged]
I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).
I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130729210111id_/http://itc.conv...
http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...
Unfortunately, the download links on those pages are broken.
I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so