You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by wpietri on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @08:24PM (#2761228)

I think the difference there is that books, computers, cars, and planes are tools that one can choose to work with, rather than a system that one has to work within. More briefly: you use tools, but hierarchical power structures use you.

And it's worth noting that Graham is working on creating alternatives (coughycombinatorcough), so your grumping seems a little out of place.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by GavinB on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @10:36PM (#2761532)

Is there any successful YC company that doesn't have bosses and employees? There is even a feature on HN designed specifically for bosses to find employees.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by nostrademons on Thursday July 14, 2011 @12:16AM (#2761728)

There are several that were acqhired when they were just the founders.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by burgerbrain on Thursday July 14, 2011 @12:39AM (#2761777)

And presumably the companies that acquired them had bosses.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by alf on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @08:58PM (#2761298)

Humans also weren't meant to build pyramids, send men to the moon, or write operating systems. Big organizations are needed for big problems. But I do generally agree with the article that big organizations are not the best place to develop as a programmer.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by pg on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @09:54PM (#2761437)

Big organizations are needed for big problems.

The jury is still out on that one. The trend lately has been in the other direction.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by alf on Thursday July 14, 2011 @12:32AM (#2761762)

By "big" I mean problems that require many distinct, intelligent decisions. These problems always has and always will require very large groups of people working cooperatively. For example, the Apollo program at it's peak employed 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 contractors [1]. This is really a point of semantics though, not really worth debating.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by iamwil on Thursday July 14, 2011 @04:27AM (#2762185)

We only need that many people because our tools weren't sufficiently advanced at the time. We had to invent a lot of things on the fly there.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by Uchikoma on Thursday July 14, 2011 @06:21AM (#2762416)

So today this could be done by 2 founders without bosses? (the topic of this thread)

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by mattmanser on Thursday July 14, 2011 @10:35AM (#2763202)

Eventually, yes.

For example right now a duo are preparing to do a manned space flight, which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/personel.php

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by Uchikoma on Friday July 15, 2011 @01:22AM (#2766368)

Me: This works with 2 people. You: Yes, look, here they do it with 22 people.

2 of them are described as "Lead" which is contrary to the point you want to make: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."

Additionally the problem of putting someone in space is different from putting someone on the moon and back again.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by iamwil on Thursday July 14, 2011 @11:45AM (#2763535)

like matt said, I think eventually yes. It seems silly to us now, just as it seemed silly back a couple hundred years ago that you can run a farm with just a handful of people and even produce more food.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by ippisl on Thursday July 14, 2011 @02:26PM (#2764317)

But when you have many tools and building blocks , the problem doesn't require many intelligent decisions anymore , and isn't "big" by the definition given by the parent thread.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by sliverstorm on Thursday July 14, 2011 @12:07AM (#2761704)

What to you is a "big problem"?

I find myself thinking of SpaceX, which is tackling a real challenge and "big problem". They have, according to Wikipedia, more than 1250 employees.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by iamwil on Thursday July 14, 2011 @04:26AM (#2762181)

It use to be that you required larger teams to build software as a solution to problems before. As software tools get better and infrastructure tools get cheaper, it's more and more feasible to solve problems with software with a smaller and smaller team.

That, along with the trend of software being used to solve more and more problems (more stuff is being solved by computers), it would seem like that eventually, even something like spending people to space would only take a small team, as infeasible as that seems right now.

To farmers of yore, it would seem laughable that we are able to produce a lot of food with so little farms. To builders of yore (like pyramids), it seems laughable that we're able to build taller buildings with much less people.

Given that technology and pace of innovation keeps accelerating, we should be able to solve larger class of problems with less effort and less man power.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by ippisl on Thursday July 14, 2011 @11:20AM (#2763405)

I think that it's mostly a symptom of machines replacing humans. for example , in the past we needed humans to connect us to each other so we can collaborate. now we have the forums , search , etc...

Taking this trend to it's extreme , when we have human equivalent robots and AI , one man could build anything he wants by commanding machines to do the work.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by chipsy on Thursday July 14, 2011 @12:23AM (#2761740)

I would qualify it like so: that government-scale problems still need government-scale employment. But they need relatively less of it now. As with a lot of things in technology the change is mostly creeping in from the bottom, turning large spaces into cheap/easy one-person problems.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by deepGem on Wednesday July 13, 2011 @11:49PM (#2761671)

"Big organizations are needed for big problems" - Not necessarily true. Most of the big problems till date have either been solved by a small group of people, or in some case just by individuals.

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by kiiski on Thursday July 14, 2011 @03:19AM (#2762057)

Perhaps "big projects" would be better than "big problems" here (since the examples were pyramids and operating systems).

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Re:You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss by wpietri on Thursday July 14, 2011 @08:39AM (#2762734)

Big organizations are needed for big problems.

Obviously false. You write via the Internet, which from the beginning has been created collaboratively, not hierarchically. (The big organization of the time, AT&T, refused to participate. See "When Wizards Stay Up Late" for the history.) I read your comment via a Linux box. My OS was started by one guy and has been built up by a lot of individual voluntary contributors.

The pyramids are a great example of what's wrong with bosses. For each pyramid, hundreds of thousands of people worked for years so a rich tyrant could impress people and feel better about dying.

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