You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008)

Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008) by rajacombinator on Friday January 11, 2019 @04:07AM (#18881946)

I think his point more accurately could have been that working at a bigco will always suck - for the kind of people who like working at a startup. (Or “hackers” by his definition.) For many/most people, bigco is fine.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008) by exergy on Friday January 11, 2019 @04:09AM (#18881955)

Yep. Then why the overreach? Why this idiotic claim that ALL humans are like caged lions just desparate to be let free and roam the wild? This article is awful, and awfully myopic in the extreme.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008) by delhanty on Friday January 11, 2019 @05:26AM (#18882381)

Because it's a transparently self-serving article perhaps?

YC combinator is in the startup business, so of course PG is going to oversell the case for startups.

PG's stuff is hit and miss. Here's an example of a much better article by him:

Don't Talk to Corp Dev

http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008) by amyjess on Friday January 11, 2019 @10:42AM (#18884243)

And encouraging the kinds of people who aren't compatible with the startup lifestyle (e.g. myself) to join startups is a recipe for disaster for not only the employee but the startup itself.

Successful startups require people who will do things that people who naturally gravitate towards big companies just aren't interested in doing. If you take someone (like me) who likes structure, regiment, and routine and idolizes people like Raymond Chen and put them in a key role in an early-stage startup, that's a recipe for a) the startup failing miserably, and b) the employee ending up on suicide watch.

It's in the business interests of startups to filter for those who would actually enjoy working at one, not to pressure the rest of the world into thinking they need to work for one.

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