Of Programmers and Large Organizations

When drawing an organizational chart begins, your brain starts hurting.

Paul Graham has yet another interesting essay out, this time pondering on what happens to programmers in large organizations.

One observation of his longish essay seemed particularly striking -- what happens to individual creativity in a group-think environment:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. When you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do.

The loss of creativity going from a startup company to a large organization is immense. It is in fact depressing to even contemplate as so many ideas die on the vine due to the "groups must act as one" mentality that organizations impose. It literally does put one's brain in a coma-like state where new ideas stop breeding.

There aren't many ways to get out of this box when you find yourself inside a group-think organization. Very, very few companies out there actually go out of their way to implement policies that allow free thinking and new ideas to emerge. But the ones that do tend to emerge bigger and better than their competition and as leaders of their respective fields. Unfortunately, large majority of companies pay lip service to such ideas but never act on it in a way that makes any practical difference.

Alternatives then are to work on something "on-the-side" just in order to prevent your brain from going numb.

Or as Paul Graham suggests, go do your own thing. You may fail but at least you don't turn into another zombie.

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.

So very true.