http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Comments & Reviews of http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html on StumbleUpon en-us Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:01:51 -0800 Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:01:56 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/logo_su_36x36.png Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:07:20 -0700 http://kakk.stumbleupon.com/review/36052406/ kakk - Yay don't work in groups on projects get nothing done woooooo]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:16:45 -0700 http://tsjhkjthksjhsdfs.stumbleupon.com/review/36023903/ tsjhkjthksjhsdfs - From the page: "And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally." Fantastic article. I tend to agree with it quite a bit.]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:29:12 -0700 http://edonn.stumbleupon.com/review/35797146/ edonn - This para is so true: "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." I'm currently working as a business analyst, but the things we do here are often more routine than not. I've always had a natural inclination toward programming, picking up VBA during my first few months at this job thinking that it'd help me churn our reports faster and automate processes, and it has. The only thing is I've more or less run out of things to automate and make more efficient (at least, I've run out of the more easily approved-by-the-boss) kind. Right now I'm thinking of starting new projects, but of which I'm quite skeptical the boss would approve as it's not directly related to our job scope (but it will, generally, help the company if implemented successfully). I'm still going to try, but I can well imagine how much easier it would be to just let loose my programming in a start up.]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:25:23 -0700 http://onreact-com.stumbleupon.com/review/19291639/ onreact-com - Humans are not born to have bosses.]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:37:58 -0700 http://wizzledizzle.stumbleupon.com/review/19070716/ wizzledizzle - "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."]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:11:42 -0700 http://mamajs.stumbleupon.com/review/19030712/ MamaJS - 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?...]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:54:49 -0700 http://warby.stumbleupon.com/review/19028938/ warby - 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."]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:09:21 -0700 http://koger.stumbleupon.com/review/19015876/ Koger - "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."]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Fri, 21 Mar 2008 06:33:18 -0700 http://ljvb0203.stumbleupon.com/review/19006645/ ljvb0203 - Paul Graham is always astonishing. As an entrepreneur, he gets right into my soul.]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:46:20 -0700 http://daves84.stumbleupon.com/review/19004539/ daves84 - More reasons not to work for the man.]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.paulgraham.com/boss.html