You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

[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
weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.

I began to suspect this after spending several years working
with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've
noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their
own startups and those working for large organizations.
I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily;
starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put
it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is
happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating
doughnuts.

Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be
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
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. I suspect that working
for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living
in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.
Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed
for.

Trees

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.

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. 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's worth of freedom between them.

In practice a group of people are never able 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.

Corn Syrup

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 much 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. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,
but is disastrously lacking in others.

Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with
the usual sort of job.

For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows
that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if
you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
"Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat
what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
weirdos in Berkeley.

If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are
two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You
may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first
couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale.
Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't.
Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth
spending a lot to market it.

If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
think most will choose?

It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
malaise.

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.

Programmers

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.

[...]

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