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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

You weren't meant to have a boss. You also weren't meant to read, work on computers, drive cars, fly, or even practice agriculture. Its very easy to criticize any modern institution on the grounds of, "Our H. Erectus ancestors didn't do it, so it must be unnatural." Rather than snark about how the phenomenon is bosses is somehow unnatural and antithetical to human existence, why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?

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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.

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.

Big organizations are needed for big problems.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

And presumably the companies that acquired them had bosses.

Ah, but you use your computer, your books, the plane, and the plow...but I'm afraid that it is the boss that uses you most of the time.

Maybe I'm just the odd one out (ok, I KNOW I'm just the odd one out in general, but still), but I find that I use my boss too.

First off, it's hard to play good cop, bad cop to get someone to change their mind if someone isn't willing to play the bad cop.

Second, my boss has been at the company a number of years, and so can tell me what my sponsor is going to be looking for, and any political landmines I might run into.

Lastly, my boss is the one who goes toe to toe with upper management to get the raise that he thinks I deserve, not just the default raise.

I like to use my boss as my politics filter as well.

It really sounds like the roles of your boss sound more like an assistant than a boss.

And I don't think anyone would question the usefulness of "general politics person" and "general team sanity person". The problem is, the roles are convoluted with "the ruler," and the question is, is "the ruler" really necessary, and even if the ruler is necessary, is this really the same person as the "sanity" and "politics" people.

It sounds like having a boss helps you navigate the perils of a large organization. It feels like a problem posing as its own solution.

why don't we work on creating institutions that preserve the advantages of having a boss while ameliorating the disadvantages?

What are the unique advantages of having a boss?

Sometimes a good boss can shield you from office politics and bureaucracy, that hamper the productivity of developers. I have a boss who lets me focus on coding and creating things we need, rather than paperwork and politics which I hate. He's also good and blocking "Drive by Requirements" that sometimes come from out of the blue.

Actually, from what I've read, your brain actually is specialized to benefit reading, and humans have adapted a lot for agriculture.

Its not that clear cut. Did our brains specialize for reading, or did reading result from the fact that our brains are specialized to handle visual data better than many other animals?

Why don't we address the fact that institutional oppression is unatural?

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