Fair enough you disagree with PG, that’s allowed.
But why? - I mean apart from your own ego and feelings.
Do you think that its just as natural for human beings to work in large groups as opposed to small? Can you point us at a reference?
I’ll throw in a correction. Your link to your former article “Has Joel Spolsky jumped the shark”, you were mistaken in your entire analysis of Wasabi(which wasn’t a new language at all but a superset of features). You took that back(mostly) in “Nobody Cares What Your Code Looks Like” (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001022.html). Something to note there Jeff, is that people turning away from the trend are not neccesarily irrelevent to everyone, just to you.
Meanwhile, about the article itself…PG is right there is some inherent ‘awesome’ trait in running a startup(for lack of better word). But that awesome trait is mostly just sheer ego-stroking, because as Joshua Haberman mentioned a few posts before me, you’re not solving anything complex. You’re just doing it by yourself.
The absolute assumption that startup == good, big company == bad, is just wrong, and it’s annoying to see Paul keep pushing it. Of course, he needs to keep that myth going to get a steady stream of Y-Combinator recruits.
I’m sure Paul would belittle anybody taking a government job, but hey, designing a space probe mission for NASA might be one of the coolest challenges imaginable - much more rewarding than doing yet another Facebook widget.
Spending those first years out of college at a successful big company can teach you a lot about engineering practice and management, sparing you a lot of dumb mistakes when/if you do go out on your own. If you’re successful in a big company, quite often you’ll have opportunities to meet people and go places that’ll never happen at a small startup. And a few years at a big company is a great way to meet a lot of people; a professional network that comes in handy years down the road.
I’ve done all three (startups, big companies, medium sized) and to generalize the experience just on size and whether or not your a founder is missing the boat. You really need to evaluate the situations individually. This goes for financial rewards too; well run large companies have no trouble making their top contributors rich.
I’m not sure this is new - his book includes an essay about how geeks grew up to p4wn the jocks - an essay about personal adolescent experience assumed to apply to anyone in software engineering.
You have to find what you can from his writing, but for me it has always been slim pickings.
“I think startup founders, though statistically outliers, are actually living in a way that’s more natural for humans.”
Yes, PG is full of himself, but i think you may have missed what he was getting at. The quote above shows his general disdain for the limited, packaged, unthinking, brutish, and undignified quality of modern life for most of us. Early twentieth-century socialist Americans agreed - with Palo Alto’s own Leland Stanford becoming a co-operative-loving socialist when he finally saw the light of day. Why should normal, competent men be told what to do, Stanford thought – they’re perfectly capable.
What gets PG’s goat, it seems, is that relatively privileged, smart, hard-working kids should want to participate in this awful existence known as ‘the 9 to 5’, rather than strike out on their own and attempt to do something great - possibly something even world-changing. And watching these clones root around some cookie-cutter downtown Palo Alto cafe performing some absurd exercise is more than he can stand. These kids could be something - they could do something, but instead, some nutjob decided it’d be cool to send them on some wacky easter egg hunt. They could be busy trying to save the world, but instead, they’re busying conditioning their brains to be subservient to the dictatorship that is modern corporations.
That’s the crux of it. And on that part, I see his pov.
Somewhere along the line he must’ve been exposed to a good bit of Chomsky (anarchist) or Rothbard (libertarian), to give him that flair for the possibilities of one’s own life - and given him that disdain for being told what to do, to ‘follow the rules’ and play it safe.
Really, ‘happiness’ is besides the point.
The presumption of a lack of greater responsibilities is its own narcissistic bubble surrounding large chunks of the Internet, by demographic causes. The belief that any more than a minuscule minority of people regardless of age are in a position to take certain risks is a chronic myopia of the comfortable programmer set.
“After a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.”
I can’t believe I just read that on a blog where 90% of the links go to other postings by the same person on the very same blog like a twisty little maze of passages designed to spin you about like a funhouse hall of mirrors. Kettle, this is what the pot looks like.
Paul Graham is wrong about a lot of things. That post was just one more thing.
Good God Man! Are you so blind to even realize that you started going the exact same path a few months ago and are declining sharper with every single post? Go read the comments on your previous posts on news.yc and reddit and you’ll see that you’re becoming irrelevant.
I can’t believe I just read that on a blog where 90% of the links go to other postings by the same person on the very same blog like a twisty little maze of passages designed to spin you about like a funhouse hall of mirrors
This made me laugh! What you’re referring to is actually a quote from Maciej Ceglowski’s blog, which is outstanding. I recommend it: http://www.idlewords.com/
This Aaron Swartz interview of Maciej is also excellent and not to be missed:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ceglowski-interview
Go read the comments on your previous posts on news.yc and reddit and you’ll see that you’re becoming irrelevant.
Apparently, the difference between me and Paul Graham is that I know I’m full of crap. Well, that, and several million dollars.
Paul Graham writes his essays for his own sake, specifically for the purpose of clarifying his own thoughts. As he should. He’s nice enough to let us read them, but that is secondary.
I’m pleased someone wrote this article - nothing pisses me off more as a “caged monkey” to hear entrepreneurs (Steve Pavlina, Graham) talk themselves up. Most entrepreneurs fail - the few successes may reflect some talent, but they also represent a boatload of luck, which obviously isn’t something they have worked for or “deserve”. They took a risk, which is hard, but the compensation for that is the profits they make.
Often these people seem to assume they have something special, but just because these people are successful at setting up their firm doesn’t mean they have any special knowledge or wisdom - they’re just richer, that’s all. I don’t want to put them down - they do a lot for the economy, small businesses are better and more nimble, I just don’t accept they have anything to tell me.
Also - although I’m glad someone criticises these people, I’d rather it wasn’t Jeff. I love this blog, it’s the best techie blog, and openly criticising other bloggers could expose you to a lot of flaming.
I have been working for more than 7.5 yrs at big corporations (more than 50000 people). I totally relate to what Paul has said. I do not think it was a narcissist exploration. The whole point of the essay was to say working for yourself in a startup tends to bring out the best in you. Rather than having your mood/ capabilities wrecked by a Dilbertian boss, it is quite understandable that working for yourselves will really bring out the natural self.
In organizations one is forced to take up the personality of the organization (which in turn is a function of the immediate boss, the top management and whole lot of things). One becomes a corporate animal and takes on a being that is not one’s own self. You become a smooth talker, you have to work your way through the office politics.
Just by the very nature of working for yourself, how you will approach work, business etc will be based on what comes naturally to you.
I think this is what Paul meant when he said the programmers working in startup were more worried and more happier than before, at the same time. I can perfectly relate this to the lions in the wild. They know and enjoy their power, but all the same they are alert and have to strive to maintain their territory or keep themselves alive.
I think you’ve misinterpreted what Paul’s essay said. To me the main point of his article was that small groups retain freedom for its individuals whereas large organisations must necessarily create some kind of hierarchical structure in which the amount of freedom an individual gets diminishes proportionally the further down the hierarchy they are. I don’t see anything in that essay that says smart guys go to startups and dumb ones go to big companies. That’s a conclusion that you, not Paul, have drawn from the essay, and it happens to be a false conclusion at that.
Jeff… did you even read his article? It doesn’t seem like it based off your comments on it.
Enough with your muckraking already.
I liked you better when you weren’t a literary critic. You missed the analogy. No worries since you are a programmer and not an English major.
You support the point you originally attack. Your argument is incongruent. No problem, you aren’t a philosophy major.
The original author makes a value judgment… He values and holds in a higher regard the nature of the stray cat over the nature of a domestic. You may find the analogy distastfull, but you don’t deny the meaning. Your criticism is “he calls certain programmers caged animals”. It’s an analogy, a metiphor.
A pig, once experiencing the life of a man, will no longer be content with a pig’s life.*
This is why he writes the way he does.
*zomg if you think I called people pigs you missed the point.
As someone who works at a big box as a programmer I whole-heartedly agree with Paul’s comments. Innovation is hindered, senior decision makers are often those that stay longer enough to be promoted and not necessarily those that are smart enough or technically-minded enough to make good decisions. Every attempt to introduce new technologies, new tools, new ways of doing things are strongly resisted at every level.
It no fun being a geek at places like these! 
However, not every big company is like this, but I feel that often techies at non-technical companies are often seen as overhead, and managed by people who aren’t qualified to make technical decisions.
I think from an individual point of view, one can learn more working for smaller companies (or a team?) or for a start-up as one has to learn more as one’s responsibilities are more multi-faceted.
“Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say every programmer did take Mr. Graham’s advice. How is it even possible for every company to be a startup, and everyone be a founder?”
He didn’t say that.
From the article: “Working for yourself doesn’t have to mean starting a startup, of course.”
You are entitled to form your own opinion of course, as is Paul Graham entitled to his. But it would be nice to see little more respect in another person’s opinion, at least enough to read through and try to understand what they are trying to say.
It would lead to a lot less of this frothing-at-the-mouth, oh-noes-I-am-so-offended attitude that occurs because you are in such a hurry to say something about the latest topic making the rounds in the blogosphere.
It makes the whole thing more boring and depressing for the rest of us to read.
So please (everyone), try adding some signal to the discussion, rather than get hung up on the fact that you think someone else on the internet is wrong (because that never happens, right?)
Anyways, congratulations Jeff on taking the brave step to be in charge of your own fortunes. Maybe a few years later you can go back to this particular essay and re-evaluate what it is saying.
Personally, as someone who’s been through both startups (not as a founder) and large corporations, the main points that Mr. Graham is making certainly rings true to me – that is, corporation by its nature forces a structure on you that in many cases kills innovation and new ideas. This in turn leads to unhappier people and reduces self-development opportunities.
Notice the words “in many cases” and “reduces”. It doesn’t mean all the time everywhere and completely.
HTH HAND
(This is most likely straw-mannish, in that it takes the position to an extreme, but it’s only a blog comment, so what the hey)
Founding a startup is good. Being an employee is bad. If the startup grows larger than one person, then doesn’t it have to acquire employees? Who are bad, and therefore the sort of people we should sneer at?
I dunno, I’ve never started a real company and probably never will. And until my kids are grown up I won’t be able to take the risk of starting something, if ever I do. Then again, most startups fail, and of those that don’t, I’ll bet most of the founders won’t make the $300K a year I make. Every year. Velvet handcuffs don’t chafe too hard.
You know, it’s traditional when criticizing an essay to argue that the author is wrong.
Above, you claim Graham is self-absorbed, irrelevant, tells distasteful anecdotes, is incredibly condescending, retroactively offensive, triggers the average reader’s gag reflex, is disdainful, and is dismissive.
Even were all of that to be true, none of it has any bearing on whether his argument in the cited essay is actually wrong or not.
Ad-hominem arguments may feel pretty good when you’re making them, but ultimately they waste everyone’s time and attention.