Website review: You Werent Meant to Have a Boss
Someone discovered this in Computer Science
•7 reviews since Mar 20, 2008
computer-science, entrepreneurship, programming
•paulgraham.com/boss.html
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Reviews of this website
onreact-com rated 3 months ago- Humans are not born to have bosses.
- wizzledizzle rated 4 months ago
- "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."
- MamaJS rated 4 months ago
- This is interesting - a unique suggestion that all species work best in a certain group number, and that hunter-gatherers (ie US) work best in groups of 8-20 (maximum). I wonder what the massive Fortune 100 company I work for would think of that?...
- warby rated 4 months ago
- From the page: "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."
- Koger rated 4 months ago
- "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."
- ljvb0203 rated 4 months ago
- Paul Graham is always astonishing. As an entrepreneur, he gets right into my soul.
- daves84 rated 4 months ago
- More reasons not to work for the man.
