This is why I love Jeff. I love his sensibilities. For his manners alone I find him great! I find nothing more alienating than these off-putting, pretty much rude essays that basically boil down to “my way of doing things is right.”
I have great respect for a person who’s able to secure a well-paying, steady job. Of course there’s more potential in starting your own company/whatever, but there’s also more risk.
I’m going to go back to my cage and munch on my rather delicious banana.
http://www.paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html
I hope you respond to this because this debunks a lot of the assumptions you were making in this post.
Haha, nevermind, you already did.
Graham’s analogy is offensive but true. It would not be so offensive and painful if it did not have the ring of truth. Why do we get such great work from people working for free ie open source? Sadly we can not all be fulfilled by work but it can give you the means to attain your dreams. Don’t kill the messenger no matter how useful.
Sure, leaping off a cliff is great when you’re 20. But the brutal truth is that over 90% of those startups will fail within 5 years. Sometimes they fail because market conditions weren’t right, or because they couldn’t raise enough capital. But most often they fail because passion and enthusiasm are no substitute for experience.
It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are. Starting a business venture has a brutal way of teaching you how much you really don’t know. So then what happens? You wind up in the corporate “zoo”. Does that make you less smart? No, just wiser.
In your comment you say “That’s all” it has more of an affect if you say “That is all.”
That is all.
I am not sure if I am offended by Paul’s essay after reading it in its entirety. Actually I am quite certain I am not. However, one has to read the entire essay to gain a better perspective.
I do however feel he could have used a better example. There is something to be said about people who take risks vs people who are risk averse. Nothing wrong with either.
I would like to see statistics on how many startups end up as successful ventures.
Most animals in captivity tend to live longer than their counterparts in the wild. So I guess there is something to be said about people who have long and successful careers with bigger companies rather than short lived successes with smaller companies.
I think we should all just be glad that he didn’t write another essay on the wonders of LISP.
I’m not sure I agree with Paul’s thesis that freedom is directly inverse to the size of the company. What you need is the freedom to build your software well. You don’t need the freedom to stroke the egos of the board members or produce a good quarterly report. The critical question he raises (near the end) is this - how do you structure a company to permit your employees to be actively engaged and productive.
True, large companies create administrative overhead. But does that necessarily mean a soul-crushing, menial existence for all its employees? I hope not, because a successful, small company will eventually become a large one.
Wonder if developers were like founders back then had anything to do with the fact that the entire industry was being founded at the time?
link dump for great justice:
http://www.jsequeira.com/blog/2008/03/24.html
(another response to Paul Graham that deserves more exposure)
I think a lot of Paul Graham’s essay is actually correct - the average job in an average large corporation is indeed very low on autonomy, and this has all kinds of negative effects on enjoyment, learning rates etc.
However he fails to put this across well. The problem is that he’s using very strong imagery - caged animals as opposed to human hunter-gatherers - which massively overstates the impact of this autonomy gap, carrying the association that the low-autonomy corporation job is linked somehow with not being fully human! For many people, a software job is a 9-to-5 gig while they pursue other interests, perhaps music, writing or spending time with their kids. PG’s animal-vs-human imagery does not capture this difference very well.
In general, distinguishing two types of activity by linking one with humans and one with animals is about as strong as it gets - it really pushes people’s buttons - you should only do it if the rhetorical effect matches the distinction you’re trying to draw.
So the problem with this article is a mismatch between imagery and content, making it pretty ineffective as a way of conveying its intended argument.
If PG doesn’t want this kind of reaction to his essays, he needs a friend who’s prepared to be critical of his writings where appropriate.
But that’s his problem, not anyone else’s.
Why take offense? A code monkey is a code monkey.
Y-Combinator: they give $10k in funding in exchange for 10% of the company.
Lol
Lol
LOL
“Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy.”
I can’t care less about American economy. There’s more to the world than USA, y’know.
I don’t see what’s so “disgusting” about Graham’s zoo analogy… I think it fits perfectly. You are pretty much “caged” in a company at a certain size, where you just do what you’re told to and have no saying in what will be done, where your freedom is limited to the bounds of the tasks you are assigned to. By saying that, he’s not saying “all non-startup members suck”. It means all those people are less free than someone who is pretty much his own boss, instead of being a slave. And it’s fair to say that it’s potentially more enjoyable to be free. Not having to just do what you’re told also seems pretty “natural” to me. “This is how one is meant to work”. Absolutely, Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.
I’m an employee, btw.
But it’s as always… if somebody says something that’s true but unpleasant, especially unpleasnt for many people, as in, most people, the conclusion goes, it must be wrong and the person who said it is “condescending”.
I pull the BS! card. The weight of a statement has nothing to do with it’s truth value, dude.
@Nathan Bowers"1) Everything you do belongs to your employer. You’re not building any equity. You may think you’re building a professional network but you don’t get much network value out of seeing and working with the same people with the same skillsets for years.
Could someone explain the meaning of Building Equity quickly and concisely? I mean, it’s obviously a brilliant thing, but for all I know, it just means Making Money.
I’ve looked it up, and I’m slightly confused. If Equity just means ownership rights, then how do you build that up by going to coder gatherings? When I meet up with old schoolfriends, am I building Equity?
@James Mitchell"Our society glorifies entrepreneurship, which is a sign that our society is more advanced than others."
No it’s not. In no way does glorifying entrepreneurship imply advancement. There is no justification for this comment whatsoever, in what is otherwise a well thought out post.
#1) @ Joshua Haberman’s “Now let’s think about being a programmer at a company like, say, Google. All the boring sysadmin stuff is taken care of” …
You picked a good counterpoint to PG’s sweeping generalization, but framed within your own sweeping generalization.
As far as I can tell, Google isn’t necessarily like every other Big Company out there. What are we debating over? It sounds like it’s about PG’s intentions, and if he’s “sold out” by spouting gself-serving opinions to fuel his entrepreneurial ventures.
Who’s to say sysadmin stuff is boring? Aren’t google sysadmins expected to know how to program also, to address google-specific, “hard” problems?
Also, to say PG has it “totally backwards” seems totally moronic to me and a big wankfest of a debate to see who has a more accurate pulse on such a wide/complex industry. Maybe this is just an offshoot of how a programmer/engineer sees the world – that problems are right or wrong and the world can be seen in absolutes?
#2) I’ve read Hackers and Painters - it was a good read. But let’s not overanalyze his choice for a metaphor – ultimately he is speaking from an entrepreneur’s point of view.
That said, maybe i’m overanalyzing whom I consider the overanalyzers. In the end I say all this here is a total wankfest – porn for programmers. I have wasted 20 minutes of my life making my point heard – but is anyone really listening? And for anyone listening, is anyone going to think or remember?
Stop the noise!
When I read his essay a few weeks back, I didn’t get the same impression at all. To me, he was more talking about the circumstances and the things that people don’t always realize is happening, rather than judging them.
Ie: it’s not to say that the people working for companies are not happy but perhaps they just do not know much else so they don’t have anything to contrast against.