Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
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 SyrupA 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 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.
ProgrammersThe 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.
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