You Weren't Meant To Have a Boss

[Demeter]

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


I spend nearly all my time working with programmers in their twenties and early thirties...I have a uniquely warped perspective, because nearly all the programmers I know are startup founders. We've now funded 80 startups with a total of about 200 founders, nearly all of them programmers. I spend a lot of time with them, and not much with other programmers. So my mental image of a young programmer is a startup founder...The guys (I met today) were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed....I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees. I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that's more natural for humans.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing (employees) was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild....Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10.

What's so unnatural about working for a big company?... The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. <1> Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.
These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them. In practice a group of people never manage to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree. <2>

Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can. It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person. Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you. So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major is missing...The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new. This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there. He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.

Notes

<1> When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.

<2> It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

[Skittles]

1. excellent article

K&R

[rosesaylavee]

2. Recommended.

Good way to start the week. Thanks for posting.

[Demeter]

3. Follow Up Remarks From Author:

Some people seem to have interpreted You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss as putting down programmers who work for big companies. Jeff Atwood reproduced one quote summarizing it as saying:
Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck.
In fact the thesis of the essay is exactly the opposite: that although the press treats startup founders as gods, the differences between them and other programmers are due less to their nature than to their work environment. Here is the beginning of the last paragraph:
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment...
Why are people reading an essay that says this, and coming away with the idea that it says exactly the opposite?

My guess is that this is an instance of a fairly common Internet phenomenon. People are reacting to what they imagine I'd say in an essay on this subject. They keep hearing about Y Combinator in the press. (We fund unusually large numbers of startups, and this generates an unusually large amount of press coverage.) They imagine we'd be a bunch of elitists on that account. So they imagine an essay comparing startup founders to corporate employees would say that founders are great and corporate employees suck.

Actually that has not been our experience. Startup founders are not somehow set apart from "ordinary" programmers. Lots more people could start startups if they wanted to. In fact, our business model depends on it. If the pool of founders was limited to a few rare geniuses, Y Combinator wouldn't work.

[skids]

4. Yeah, well, the flip side of that...

...is too many chefs spoil the broth.

I agree with the author that most people don't know how to work effectively in large organizations.

I disagree that it's impossible to teach them to do so. We just lack the managerial talent; our MBAs and management courses are for crap.

[Demeter]

5. IMO, Large Organizations Are So Dysfunctional There's No Working With Them, Period

[Hannah Bell]

6. In large organizations for many people

politics takes precedence over the work. By choice or necessity.

[Hannah Bell]

7. True, and not just in programming.

If you look at any industry, you find the same story; initially, innovation flourishes, then diminishes, lots of go-getters; years later, lots of drones. In the auto industry, thousands of backyard tinkerers, thousands of start-ups, then down to the Big Three, now the Big Two, soon to be the global 4 or something. Look at radio when 12-year-old kids were building crystal sets.

An older man I know never finished the 8th grade, but he told me he learned math, physics, botany, machining, etc. working in the woods. One of the cleverest people I've ever met, he could do almost anything. People learn & grow by doing meaningful things.

Why do lg orgs flourish? Because we live in an environment designed to make them flourish, to weed out the small by financial means. Was Bill Gates the best programmer on the block? Did he have the best product? What he DID have was a Boeing/DC connected corporate lawyer for a father, & a banker for a grandfather.

The purpose of hierachy & large organizations is to make people stupid & teach them that they owe everything to a handful of "geniuses." Baloney.

[DCKit]

8. Intersting observations.

As a manager, I always had tremendous success with small groups and larger groups only once they had been trimmed down to a size that seemed comfortable - when I could actually remember everyone's name.

It says a lot about the cohesiveness of smaller groups too. The concept of team-building stops working when the team gets too large and diverse for easy interaction - people evolved to work together in small groups.