Re:Paul Graham on Conversations with Tyler
by cturner on Thursday August 10, 2023 @05:28AM
(#37073871)
"Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery."
Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on your definition of great, but I am going to take the counter-argument.
This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back.
In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If teams of minds was the gateway to greatness, those big firms would have it.
Popular opinion is that corporations track the interests of shareholders. But what I have seen is corporations driven by the interests of executives who want affluence and convenience more than a chance at greatness. [1] From this we get the tall orgcharts, and relentless emphasis on team over individual.
In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals. He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.
"what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back"
Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being a false assumption, and consider how you would organise if it was? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to.
:1 The Gervais Principle papers are good reading about these dynamics.
Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on your definition of great, but I am going to take the counter-argument.
This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back.
In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If teams of minds was the gateway to greatness, those big firms would have it.
Popular opinion is that corporations track the interests of shareholders. But what I have seen is corporations driven by the interests of executives who want affluence and convenience more than a chance at greatness. [1] From this we get the tall orgcharts, and relentless emphasis on team over individual.
In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals. He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.
"what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back"
Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being a false assumption, and consider how you would organise if it was? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to.
:1 The Gervais Principle papers are good reading about these dynamics.