Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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> you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food.

I've grown attached to projects in small companies and large ones, sure. What you've written can be read as an explanation for why people continue to work at companies even as they grow larger and get worse, rather than any contradiction of what Graham said.

> And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding.

Really? I don't think I've experienced anything rewarding/inspiring being made by more than ten people; even in large companies, the most rewarding/inspiring projects I've worked on have been those that were worked on by a small, relatively isolated team. Scaling up may be necessary and/or lucrative, but I doubt it could ever be as rewarding as making the thing, and AIUI the economics research backs that up - productivity is concentrated in small companies, successful companies grow until they get too bloated to be successful rather than stable (because if you're successful, growing is the default path) rather than improving through growth.

A group of 100 is 10 groups of 10. Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team.

Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it? (Of course lots of them get paid to do this, but many are not.) It's not exactly easy calories for a caged lion, the way Graham describes a corporate job taken by recent college grads. Instead, people choose to work in these large groups because they want to make an impact. You can instead contribute to TinyCC or MenuetOS - smaller team, less impact. Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses?

If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? I think that market realities point in the direction of there being economies of scale and diseconomies of scale, without a single one-size-fits-all procedure for determining the optimal firm size for any particular endeavor.

> Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team.

A 10-person company inherently has a fairly high level of autonomy; the outside world can impose broad constraints but there's a pretty low limit on how much you can interfere in day-to-day activity when you're not in the building. It's conceivable that a 10-person team in a group of 100 could have that much autonomy, but it's extremely rare IME - e.g. I've never known a 10-person team within a 100-person company to have the authority to hire at will; it's rare for a team to be allowed to change hosting providers without that decision being made at higher level.

> Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it?

Leaving aside that most contributors are paid by employers to work on those projects, unpaid contributors to those projects won't be in the kind of boss-team relationship Graham is criticising. Open-source contributors inherently have a much higher level of autonomy because there's no "the company pays your salary" dynamic.

> Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses?

Yes, exactly. (Specific subprojects within them might still be inspiring)

> If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business?

They do, all the time; the normal business lifecycle is that an innovative company outcompetes the bloated incumbent, but gradually bloats up itself, until a smaller, more innovative company outcompetes it.

It's interesting that YC's moneymaking model is to take small companies and turn them into big companies (by growth or acquisition) that pg claims are bad. Is YC a knnowing scam to soak dumb money, killing the supposedly wonderful small-team products in the process, or is the post misguided or disingenuous?

The claim is that big companies are uninspiring drudgery for the people who work there, not that scaling up isn't an effective way to make money (though VC as a category is known for poor overall returns). There's no contradiction - indeed in http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html pg argues that a lot of moneymaking opportunities are overlooked because of the drudgery involved.

I would be interested to work in a "10 groups of 10"-shaped company. I've never really encountered one, though, and I think it would be fairly unstable. Example failure mode: someone starts grumbling about "silos", and before you know it there's an effort afoot to standardise some or other technology or practice across the groups. At that point, one of the groups that's gone furthest in terms of formalising/making rules for that area almost always end up winning, and there's a gradual levelling up of process, and thus levelling down of autonomy.

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