What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all, coupled with a tone that deals only in absolutes. There is no space for doubt, for hesitancy, for understatement. It is grandiosity dialed up to 11 in a way I've seen precious few "essayists" do. Even that word grates me. Oh, no sir! Paul is above mere 'blogging'. He is an "essayist" because his blogposts feature more than 2500 words. Look at what he claims:
> 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.
> It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything approaching sensitivity. Here's Jeff Atwoods take on it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-nar...
It's an opinion I sympathise with a lot more than PG's.
I work for a big company (CERN). Group of thousands upon thousands. It's wonderful here. I wouldn't trade it for the next "Uber of...". My 'boss' is just someone who has worked on my topic for a lot longer than me, and is therefore a veritable treasure chest of knowledge. I LOVE working for him because I learn a shitload on a weekly basis, and the projects that he is responsible for align with my interests. I LOVE working in my 'group of hundreds', because that group of hundreds can accomplish a lot more than a full-stack developer straight out of Stanford thinking he can disrupt everything just by ignoring zoning laws. I also imagine there are a significant portion of people working for places like NASA/ESA etc who share my view. Where does this jive with Mr Graham's World Of Absolutes?
Further, even if we limit ourselves to the corporate world, 'groups of hundreds' can afford to do more than one guy. A large group can, for example, dedicate resources to lowering the environmental impact of the product chain, in a way that a three person startup couldn't. They can have customer service that a small startup just cannot match. Is all of that worthless?
And if it isn't, just what is Graham getting at in this article? Is it limited to young graduates? Then why the far reaching claims and the excessive overreach? And if not, is he genuinely so delusional as to think he can speak for everyone?
I will give another example, at the risk of outing myself, just because this article is still fucking grinding my gears. My mum is working on the Polio program. In a couple of years, they will have rid the world of this killer disease. Millions of lives saved. It's not necessarily the glorious work environment that gives Paul Graham a hardon. Doesn't mean it 'sucks'. Just means that most of the people working there are capable of understanding that there are some necessary evils involved in taking on such an enormous challenge. You need to talk to Politicians the world over. You need to coordinate the door to door vaccine distribution. You need to balance the books for millions and millions of dollars in funding. You need to set up secure enclaves for staff that are going into dangerous zones and risking their lives for the project. I would like to see some fucking bossless Ycombinator graduate try their hand at that.
Thank you. I completely agree. It’s implicit in your points about your manager and work group, but I’ll add that at bossless startup you can’t walk down the hallway and chat with different subject matter experts in hard science fields. Another point I would like to make is that working for a big company gives me the flexibility and means to continue going to school. I know graduate degrees can be controversial on HN. But getting a graduate degree is a life goal of mine. I wasn’t ready at the end of my undergrad to take on debt.
It comes across that you're not a PG fan :) but I think that clouds your response here a little.
CERN (thankfully) is not a company, let alone a big company. I don't think it's fair to counter argue on this point. I've worked across research, big company and startups.
I would argue that the way researchers work is a lot more akin to the 'natural' way of working (free from such artificial constraints as quarterly shareholder value) that this article is trying to get at.
Thank you for this. Counter to what one of your detractors said, I actually went and read Atwood's post (again) at the point at which you posted it in your comment here. Then I read Idle Word's post, which Atwood references. Then I came back here and finished reading your post -- that specific order (if for some reason your detractor thinks it matters). That was earlier this morning. Then I came back just now to read your post again. So, thank you. Bravo.
Thank you for your counterpoint, I wished I'd studied some
branch of physics so I could have joined your ranks, alas
all I could do to stay afloat was to use the one skill I
have, to program computers which put me more on the path
that PG prefers but I still see there is plenty of validity
in humans working in larger groups and feel this blog post
is one that really made its point poorly. Best regards, Jacques.
I'm actually a mechanical engineer! So for sure there is a whole spectrum of science-ish people here, not just physicists. In fact, programmers are central to much of the science that CERN does, starting with 'Trigger' which actually decides and filters out which minute fraction of all collisions are actually worthy of human attention.
I think his point more accurately could have been that working at a bigco will always suck - for the kind of people who like working at a startup. (Or “hackers” by his definition.) For many/most people, bigco is fine.
Yep. Then why the overreach? Why this idiotic claim that ALL humans are like caged lions just desparate to be let free and roam the wild? This article is awful, and awfully myopic in the extreme.
And encouraging the kinds of people who aren't compatible with the startup lifestyle (e.g. myself) to join startups is a recipe for disaster for not only the employee but the startup itself.
Successful startups require people who will do things that people who naturally gravitate towards big companies just aren't interested in doing. If you take someone (like me) who likes structure, regiment, and routine and idolizes people like Raymond Chen and put them in a key role in an early-stage startup, that's a recipe for a) the startup failing miserably, and b) the employee ending up on suicide watch.
It's in the business interests of startups to filter for those who would actually enjoy working at one, not to pressure the rest of the world into thinking they need to work for one.
Isn't cern a government job? I would argue government jobs are different in the sense that there's less pressure to deliver. Thus your boss will likely give you an easier time.
I have worked for the government (research, not much unlike cern) and I concur that it's completely different than working for what I believe anyone would refer to as 'a big company'. I'm pretty sure it doesn't even qualify to be referred to as a 'company'.
I haven't. Indeed, I just found out about Hubski from your post. It looks like a much more refreshing place than Reddit, and kleinbl00 seems to be pretty active on it.
One of my new year's resolution, however, is to quit Reddit, so I am in no mood to have a new network take its place :)
> What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all,
>> It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
> My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything approaching sensitivity.
He doesn't explicitly exclude publicly funded institutions. He says working for big organizations will always suck. I quoted him verbatim. And this highlights my problem with him: absolutes.
Also, does your final sentence insinuate that people at CERN aren't actually working?!
He might implicitly exclude them? I wouldn't discount his post completely just because it has an absolutist tone. To do so would be absolutist yourself.
Like most public institutions, CERN is overstaffed and has produced comparatively little.
Publicly funded people in Europe act and feel like royalty and build themselves Veblen goods. In several German cities, the only buildings that are in good shape are government buildings and universities.
Normal people do not have money to paint their houses (if they have one, that's another thing only civil servants can afford).
Yeah, no. There is probably quite some inefficiency at CERN like at all large institutions, but none of the rest is true according to my observations. Even in Berlin, which is a relatively poor German city, there are plenty of well maintained private buildings of all kinds. I've also seen somewhat rundown looking government offices.
Having been to Germany a few times, I've not noticed anything like only government buildings being in good repair. Can you identify a few cities that are like this?
1. You could have quoted Atwood's article briefly to capture his basic ideas rather than just jarringly moving on to your next point. Most people are going to finish your post first, then, if they're still interested, go read supplementary links.
2. You could have just pointed out that you worked at CERN, making that whole paragraph about half as lengthy and ten times as punchy. "My group of hundreds does things Uber could never in a million years dream of doing. Or for that matter, YCombinator." Maybe leave that last one out.
3. Once that sordid bit of egotism is out of the way, you could have dealt better with the obvious "well duh, working at CERN is way better than working at Uber!" C'mon now, PG's talking to the masses, not the guys smart enough to advance the state of human knowledge by the day.
4. More space could have been given to the nuts and bolts of accomplishing real things in the real world that might include third-world politics than continuing to grind your ax on PG. Instead we get four measly sentences! You're already slumming it with us webdev bums, at least give us something to salivate over! Give us an essay of your own, big man!
You say "well duh", but PG makes no effort to eliminate any "type" of large organization. He claims with no equivocation that working for all large organizations sucks. Surely you must admit that there must be smart people in many, many other large organizations, and not the exclusive domain of us super-smarties here at CERN! And those people see something of value in their circumstances and cannot be justifiably lumped along with caged lions (I know this metaphor causes uproar every time this article comes up, but he chose it not me!).
Also, as to your last point, if it is in refernce to what I was talking about Polio, it _is_ endlessly interesting. UN gets a bad rap for being bureaucratic to the point of statis, but in fact, some of the hardest working people I know are employed there.
Here's more about Polio to whet your appetite, with the MASSIVE caveat that this is second hand, non-expert knowledge vomited out off-the-cuff.
Polio has been eliminated virtually everywhere on Earth with the exception of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. There are some other places where vaccine-derived (kind of, there is more to it that I don't fully get) Polio sometimes rears its head when ineffective propagation occurs, specifically in Syria, where the war zone threw the entire operation into chaos. But mainly, it is problematic in the three countries. The trouble is, big parts of these regions are inaccessible, and therefore we don't know the details of how bad the situation may be, and how many households are unvaccinated. So one big challenge is how to make sure these countries (with Taliban controlled regions for example) get the distribution sorted.
Further, Polio was unprecedented in the sense that W.H.O. (and others) managed to set up the VERY complicated infrastructure of mobile testing labs, vaccine distributions, but most importantly, door to door canvassing through the enormous amounts of hard work of poorly-paid LOCAL volunteers (MANY women) who go door to door, month after month, conducting surveys and understanding the plight of the local populace. They are the ones who could tell us, down to the household, who had been vaccinated and who hadn't. On a global scale. Imagine the complexity.
And because this infrastructure was in place, OTHER departments could use it too, for instance to study Malaria rates etc. All on Polio money. But now with funding soon to be sunsetted, the issue is how we can maintain the good of the program: the door to door stuff, the mobile labs etc., with no Polio funding?
Other things are complicated too, such as health ministries not being fond of their for-years-guaranteed Polio funding going away. This is perhaps ok in non-corrupt countries, but in less fortunate countries, their representatives must argue for greater share of the funding for THEIR government, knowing full well that that money could maybe be better used elsewhere.
On the other side of the equation, you have to deal with the funding agencies: the Gates etc., who would love nothing more than to be able to see the fruits of their labour paid off as soon as possible, since they've been waiting for a decade. Patience is an ever-scarcer commodity, and it's hard say that I don't sympathise with them, given how many resources they've invested into the project.
And WHO is liable for everything it states, so all outreach must be carefully vetted. So you need a big PR team/lawyers etc. There are just endless complications. W.H.O. has to manage ALL of this, and that is exactly why they require a big staff.
This stuff is not limited to just the UN btw. All big companies face such challenges. By contrast, PG's article seems more to be desigend to caress his ego rather than express something truly useful for the world to consume and learn for.
Perfect! What makes Nigeria so complicated? Is it corruption? Are they not letting health workers operate?
In the business space, I think there's a sense that everything people are doing is going to line some asshole's pockets and you're going to get none of those benefits. HNers in particular just often seem like they can't see the meaning in plugging away at the company they're working for, and the Silicon Valley dream is predicated on making a startup and compressing your work life down to a few short years.
The dream is inspirational to some because there's rarely any glory in being a cog in a machine. Even guys that work at Google get burned out after awhile. It's just hard in many cases to stay motivated. PG's essay wants to say that it's just working in a big organization is unnatural. I think that's way way off the mark, we would never have society and people wouldn't collect into cities if that were the case, and his understanding of hunter-gatherers seems trite, even for 2008.
But Silicon Valley is a thing and people do flock there from all over the country to chase a certain kind of ideal. I think it's the same kind of thing that encourages young community workers to keep gathering data in their communities year after year. The opportunity to chase a real goal and be a part of something bigger.
Silly Valley wants to unify intelligence, glory, and meaning together. All things that run out of the tap at CERN. In order for that to happen though, there needs to be a healthy amount of creative destruction. Not all companies know how to manage teams. Encouraging those who are feeling burned out and squeezed to find greener pastures can only make it better.
But yeah, I don't think any of the generalizations he makes are at all accurate enough to be stated. Some programmers work better in small groups. But lots of them need lots of structure.
Your whole thread is gold. I have come back to the posted article twice so far to read your comments specifically. Thank you, and I'd just generally love to read more about these thoughts. Whether publicly-funded or military (a different thread) or whatever, it's still possible to learn from healthy, effective orgs wherever they are.
What a nice thing to say! And a refreshing change from my own acerbic tone, so thanks for that. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, Maciek's blog (Idlewords) is fantastic. He is humorous but gives every topic he chooses a lot of respect. Start with his article on the space shuttle. Also, his talks are fantastic too!
sigh
What grates me about Paul's writing is the sheer pomposity of it all, coupled with a tone that deals only in absolutes. There is no space for doubt, for hesitancy, for understatement. It is grandiosity dialed up to 11 in a way I've seen precious few "essayists" do. Even that word grates me. Oh, no sir! Paul is above mere 'blogging'. He is an "essayist" because his blogposts feature more than 2500 words. Look at what he claims:
> 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.
> It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
My god! One must have a super limited and convenient worldview to inflict such idiotic statements onto the world with such a wanton disregard of anything approaching sensitivity. Here's Jeff Atwoods take on it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/paul-grahams-participatory-nar...
It's an opinion I sympathise with a lot more than PG's.
I work for a big company (CERN). Group of thousands upon thousands. It's wonderful here. I wouldn't trade it for the next "Uber of...". My 'boss' is just someone who has worked on my topic for a lot longer than me, and is therefore a veritable treasure chest of knowledge. I LOVE working for him because I learn a shitload on a weekly basis, and the projects that he is responsible for align with my interests. I LOVE working in my 'group of hundreds', because that group of hundreds can accomplish a lot more than a full-stack developer straight out of Stanford thinking he can disrupt everything just by ignoring zoning laws. I also imagine there are a significant portion of people working for places like NASA/ESA etc who share my view. Where does this jive with Mr Graham's World Of Absolutes?
Further, even if we limit ourselves to the corporate world, 'groups of hundreds' can afford to do more than one guy. A large group can, for example, dedicate resources to lowering the environmental impact of the product chain, in a way that a three person startup couldn't. They can have customer service that a small startup just cannot match. Is all of that worthless?
And if it isn't, just what is Graham getting at in this article? Is it limited to young graduates? Then why the far reaching claims and the excessive overreach? And if not, is he genuinely so delusional as to think he can speak for everyone?
I will give another example, at the risk of outing myself, just because this article is still fucking grinding my gears. My mum is working on the Polio program. In a couple of years, they will have rid the world of this killer disease. Millions of lives saved. It's not necessarily the glorious work environment that gives Paul Graham a hardon. Doesn't mean it 'sucks'. Just means that most of the people working there are capable of understanding that there are some necessary evils involved in taking on such an enormous challenge. You need to talk to Politicians the world over. You need to coordinate the door to door vaccine distribution. You need to balance the books for millions and millions of dollars in funding. You need to set up secure enclaves for staff that are going into dangerous zones and risking their lives for the project. I would like to see some fucking bossless Ycombinator graduate try their hand at that.