Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.
I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts.
Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans.
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
Trees What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.
Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. [
1]
Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.
These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them.
In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree. [
2]
Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corn Syrup A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.
It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person. Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.
So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like, but is disastrously lacking in others.
Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with the usual sort of job.
For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do, at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. "Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley.
If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale. Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't. Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth spending a lot to market it.
If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you think most will choose?
It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe, and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of malaise.
And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
Programmers The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new.
This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there. He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.
An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.
Working for yourself doesn't have to mean starting a startup, of course. But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup.
You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size of company you work for. If you start the company, you'll have the most freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees you'll have almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company with 100 people will feel different from one with 1000.
Working for a small company doesn't ensure freedom. The tree structure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom, not a lower bound. The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant. The point is that a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one.
Consequences That has real consequences for both organizations and individuals. One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. It's a consequence of the tree structure that every large organization is forced to adopt.
Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.
That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don't know any technology companies that have done it.
There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves as sponges: they can stay small. If I'm right, then it really pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage. Particularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem.
For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
In an
essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years for another company before starting their own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead.
The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company. Certainly they'll learn more. They might even be better off financially. A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative. [
3]
We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who've worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they're that much older.
The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companies made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first place. But certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen it burn off.
Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. [
4] Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the wild.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to.
Notes [
1] When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.
[
2] It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.
[
3] Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing a startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt stupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.
[
4] The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged undergrads to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I used to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
译文:
你不一定要有老板
技术进步使得正常和自然两个概念有分化的趋势。发达国家人们吃的食品和很少锻炼的生活方式并不适合人的天然体质。工作方式亦是如此。就像面粉白糖有害身体一样，朝九晚五的正常工作有伤智力。
我曾和创业人士一起工作了几年。之后才慢慢明白这一道理。和我共事的创业者不下200人，我发现他们和大公司职员区别明显。当然他们未必更悠哉，因为创业压力很大。换种更恰当的方式说，他们的工作带来的愉悦感就像人长跑时浑身舒坦，而不是窝在沙发大朵快颐甜面包的感觉。
创业者生活得自在，却不规律，但他们的日子好像更贴近自然规律一些。
我去年曾去非洲，在荒野看到了一些以前只在动物园见过的动物。狮子尤给我印象深。自然中生存的狮子看起来比笼里的活跃十倍，简直不像一个物种。我猜给自己干活感觉也是一样妙吧。野外的猎物可要多得多呢。笼子里倒是安逸，可按我们的天性本不该在笼子里生活的。
树木
给大公司干活，有什么违背天性的呢？问题的根源在于，人本来就不应该在过于庞大的机构里工作。
在野外，动物群只有维持特定规模才能生生不息。一群黑斑羚一般有100只成年羚，狒狒群的个体数目在20左右。而狮子区区10只就成群。人也是团队动物。从有关原始狩猎社会的资料，团体研究，以及我个人的经验来看，结论都一致：可大致推断理想的的团队规模为，8人为佳，20人就很难管理，50人则尾大不掉了。
人数的上限不重要。但人不适合在几百人的团队工作，这点是清楚的。不过，大部分人为在有成百上千职员的公司工作，多半没考虑人的本性，而是由一些其他问题造成。
公司很清楚机构庞大难运作，所以在内部划分部门。可是为了协调彼此分工，得引入个新概念：顶头上司。
大公司对各部门实行树型结构管理。你的顶头上司就是你们组和大树的联结点。不过在人们用这种方法划分大机构时，会发生很奇怪的事，以前还没人明确指出过。经理是你的上司，他代表整组。十名经理又组成新团队，因为他们代表的是整组，他们不能像十个个人那样工作。新团队实际是由若干个由经理代表的小组组成的，而你们组必须像一个人那样工作——本来属于一个人的自由，还要掰开两半，经理一边，整个团队一边，分别享有一部分。
而实际操作中，一组人不可能表现得像一个人。所以在如此这般划分组别的大公司里，就会有压力。每一组都努力工作，看起来好像是在一个自成一体的小组里工作，是顺应人本性的——这也是划分小组的目的所在。
曾在大公司工作过的人都会有同感。在一万人的公司和在一百人的公司上班感觉不同，就算你的小组可能只有十个人。
玉米浓浆
大机构里的十人小组就像假部落。合作人数没问题，可还缺点什么——个人主动性。在狩猎社会，部族里个人的自由更多。部族领导比普通成员权力稍多一些，但不会下令安排工作，这是上司做的事情。
上司本身是没错的。问题在于在上级领导层面前，你们整组实际只是一个人。老板不过把这种固有的约束感传递给你罢了。
没错，要解释惯常工作方式的不妥，拿食物打比方再好不过了。
比如说，人们都默认给大公司卖命这类做法，至少程序员是这样。用食物作比方，来清楚地看看这有什么不好吧。如今，随意走上美国街头，任何一处几乎都卖不健康的食品。人类体质本不适合多吃白面粉，精制糖，果葡糖浆，氢化植物油之类的东西的。可逛逛食品店，会发现这些成分是大部分食品能量供给的来源。“正常”的食物竟然对人有害。最注重自然饮食的要数伯克利市那些脚踏勃肯鞋的“异类”了。
“正常”的食物既然对人不好，为什么这么普遍呢？主要原因有二。一是这些食物见效快，吸引人。吃皮萨，第一口咬下去感觉很棒，但如果吃完整个，一小时后就会感觉不适。二是规模经济。垃圾食品可以批量生产。新鲜蔬菜则不能。所以 (1) 垃圾食品很便宜 (2)可以花大把钱营销。
如果必须二选一，便宜，广告满天飞，让人暂时愉快的，还是昂贵，鲜见，长期有益的？你们应该能猜出大多数人愿意选择哪种。
工作也一样。麻省理工大学的毕业生一般都想去谷歌或者微软上班，因为公司知名，工作稳定，入职就能有可观的收入。这份工作相当于午餐的皮萨饼，缺点只在事后暴露，让人隐隐觉得不适。
创业人士和早期加入新公司的职员就像伯克利市穿勃肯鞋的怪人 ：这群体人数有限，可他们是按自然规律生存的人。这个虚虚实实的世界里，也只有极端主义者活得自然了。
程序员
由于编程的本质是创造新事物，大公司对程序员的要求就特别苛刻。销售人员的推销词百年不变，客户支持人员每天回答的问题也几乎相同。程序员呢？没有哪个程序是重复以前的。所以程序员得不断创新。在一个组织里，“树”越大，个人的自由越小，创新的时候就会受到阻碍。
这似乎就是规模庞大的结果，公司运转机制再灵活也不可避免。最近我和一名创业者聊了聊。他本来想一毕业就创业，但最后去了谷歌，希望能多学点东西。可他发现能学到的东西没达到预期。程序员是在实干中学习的，但在谷歌，他想干的都干不成---要么领导不允许，要么代码受限制。一面受遗留代码拖累，一面要考虑在大公司做研发的经费问题，还要受其他组界面限制，自己想做的事少有做成的。他说，自己开公司学到的东西更多。虽然编程的同时还得做些杂事，但至少编程的时候可以随自己意。
下游堵塞上游也会不通。新想法要是不能付诸实践，就从此消失了。反之，如果想法都能成真，就会激发更多新想法。所以给自己干活时，思维会更活跃有力。正如发动机排气系统顺畅，才能运转良好一样。
给自己干活不一定要创办公司。可程序员如果在大公司打工和创立自己的公司之间犹豫不决的话，创办公司能使他们学到更多。
你可以选择不同规模的公司工作，以此获得你想要的自由。而如果开公司，自由就可以最大化。如果你成为一家新公司头十名雇员之一，获得的自由几乎和创始人是等同的。在10000人的和100人的公司工作感觉就是不同。
当然在小公司不一定就很自由。大公司的树型结构规定了个人自由的上限，而非下限。小公司里，领导者也可能独裁，不给人自由。但大公司却是不得不这样。结构使然。
结果
机构和个人创业者的发展结果是能预见的。公司规模越大，增速就不可避免地放缓，不管怎么保持创业的激情都无济于事。树型结构的后果就是这样，每个大机构都不得不面对。
大机构如果不采取树型结构，或许也能避免停滞。既然人的本性决定团队合作的规模不宜太大，我能预想到的唯一可避免树型结构的办法就是没有结构：每个小组都是真正独立的，像市场经济各个独立个体那样共事。
这想法值得探索一番。我想已经有部门可高度分化的公司慢慢走上此道了。不过就我所知，技术类公司还没这么做的。
如果不能像海绵那样发展组织，有一件事还是可行的：控制规模。如果我想法没错的话，不管公司，尤其是技术公司出于哪个发展阶段，尽可能地使公司维持在小规模都必须付出代价。因为招聘最棒的人才更重要了。招些平庸之辈的坏处是双重的：干的活少了，却让公司变大了——因为想要完工，你总得多雇些这种人。
我对个人的建议也是一样：给小团队干活。给大公司干活感觉差劲极了。公司越大，感觉越糟。
几年前，我写了一篇文章，建议大学毕业生先在一家公司里干几年再自己开公司。我现在想稍作修改。可以先为别人干活，但注意是小公司。如果想直接创业，不妨大胆干吧。
我过去之所以反对毕业生一出校门就创业，是因为我感觉成功几率小。事实也是这样。但对一个有抱负的程序员来说，就算尝试之后失败，也比去大公司上班的滋味要好。况且他们还能有更多机会学习。甚至经济上也会更宽裕。有些人二十几岁就负债了。他们刚离开学校，总觉得拿到的薪水挺高，所以常常超支。创业者就算失败，最多是零资产，不至于成负值。
现在创业者很多，他们的融资模式很多样。我们了解到了很多成功模式，因此感觉在大公司干活没什么好处。虽然在大公司上了几年班的人，看起来好像不再是初出校门的毛头小伙子了，但这不过是因为年纪长了。
从大公司跳槽来加入我们的人总多多少少显得保守。很难说是因为在大公司的经历让他们这样，还是正是因为他们个性如此，当初才会选择去大公司。
这类例子见得多了，就更坚定了我的想法，只有创业，或者退而求其次为小公司干活才是程序员应有的生存方式。
刚来Y Combinator的创业者都感觉像落难进了难民营。三个月以后，他们全变了：充满自信，看起来个头都像长高了好几寸。他们变得更快乐，也更忧虑了——奇怪的评价，可我对野地雄狮也是这样形容的。
雇员也能转变为创业家，这清清楚楚地说明，两者差别是由环境所致。在大公司工作对程序员真是毒害不浅，以至于刚开始创业他们总像起死回生一样。毕竟这才是人们该过的生活嘛！