You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss -->
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March 2008, rev. June 2008
Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies<br>weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or<br>to get so little exercise.<br>There may be a similar problem with the way we work:<br>a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour<br>or sugar is for us physically.
I began to suspect this after spending several years working<br>with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've<br>noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their<br>own startups and those working for large organizations.<br>I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily;<br>starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put<br>it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is<br>happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating<br>doughnuts.
Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be<br>working 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<br>I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they<br>seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times<br>more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working<br>for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living<br>in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.<br>Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed<br>for.
Trees
What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of<br>the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large<br>groups.
Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that<br>each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas<br>might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans<br>also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about<br>hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own<br>experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8<br>work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50<br>is really unwieldy.<br>[1]
Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in<br>groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more<br>to do with technology than human nature—a great many people<br>work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide<br>themselves into units small enough to work together. But to<br>coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.
These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your<br>boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when<br>you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,<br>something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention<br>explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss<br>represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely<br>a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really<br>a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work<br>together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group<br>working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single<br>person—the workers and manager would each share only one<br>person's worth of freedom between them.
In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were<br>one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in<br>this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group<br>tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals<br>that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating<br>it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that<br>each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the<br>size of the entire tree.<br>[2]
Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You<br>can feel the difference between working for a company with 100<br>employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corn Syrup
A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake<br>tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But<br>something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers<br>have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other<br>members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to<br>do and when the way a boss can.
It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group<br>above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.<br>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<br>both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels<br>like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major<br>is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn<br>syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,<br>but is disastrously lacking in others.
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