You Werent Meant to Have a Boss
Rated • 10 reviews • groups, programmers, career, boss, startups • paulgraham.com
"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 ... when you see animals in the wild ... each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of ... baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read ... 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 ... 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 ... In practice a group of people never manage to act as if they were one person."
