Managers only hire and reward based on loyalty and threats in these highly political environments. It is very common to see a decent director with very weak managers under him, to ensure that nobody is a threat to his position.
Mediocre corporations work in a very different way from results oriented high performance companies. In mediocre places, games of power rule the place, even if it doesn't make sense economically.
On any given dimension, everyone/everything cannot possibly be above average. If you take competence, most companies will be mediocre. At best you have a bell curve, at worst it's an exponential curve with only a very small amount of high competence.
Hacker News folks tend to see the best side of corporations, working for well managed, innovation driven, purpose oriented places.
It's a privilege. Most corporations are not Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc - which a lot of us either work for, or work for companies that were heavily inspired by these top companies.
Yes, past a certain point you are operating to reduce variance.
There's only so many top 1% players, and if you aren't able to pay as well as the GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/AAPLs of the world, then your not going to be able to hire 1000s and 1000s of them.
So most employers are not able to be as selective, especially at scale. Which means they are hiring for B+ players and putting in a lot of "administrivia" to prevent screwups. It's more about hiring for average outcomes and avoiding the downside.
Scrappy startups pre-scale can be an exception in that they have equity and independence to offer to hires in lieu of top tier compensation. Both of those of course are drastically reduced when you have 10s, 100s, 1000s and then 10,000s of employees.
It's not a diss on anyone, so much as the natural order of things.
Even those corporations aren't homogenous in how well they are managed and have a lot of "second class citizen" to whom the privilege doesn't have to apply (managed services, external dev partners, armies of contractors...)
There are examples of successful companies all over the founder mode spectrum.
What level of "founder mode" is optimal depends on a lot of factors. For example:
- size of the company
- available people (at every level of the company)
- type and number of products (is it possible to scale the work over different departments?)
- qualities/personalities of the founders (trust me when I tell you, being micromanaged by a non-technical founder on a technical product is not effective)
- type of business (for example; in aviation, you're going to need a lot of certification management)
And you can execute poorly all over the spectrum, even when making the right choice on the level of "founder mode".
Agreed; I dont remember the source but I much prefer the Marines → Navy → Police continuum. Some circumstances require a highly capable team with high communication, aligned goals and motives, who can take decisions individually or at a low enough level. Some circumstances require bureaucracy, process, external and internal controls.
The dumb "Founder mode" discourse hides away two things: a) scale forces you to climb that ladder towards bureaucracy and controls anyway, b) it's scope-specific. You don't want to go "Founder mode" on phone support. Or accounts payable, or probably HR. There are specific objectives, projects and also circumstances that need a more hands-on approach. And honestly a "Marines" analogy where the team is tight and authorized to make decisions, is better than some micro-managing, coke-fueled "Founder mode".
Most at-scale firms struggle to create the authority internally for specific teams to act, as you call, "Marines" within the bounds of their responsibility.
Something I'd term as an "authority budget", that is, not an approved annual dollars budget of what they can spend, but a defined amount/area of authority that they can flex without needing to escalate.
The most stifling thing to any high performance employee is to have no sense of control, to have the ground constantly shifting under them OR feeling like their company is actively trying to protect themselves from you & making your job harder.
Yet this is the average case for many larger orgs.
There are good reasons for this from an organizational perspective as it reduces risk from a “lone wolf” making a catastrophic decision. It’s a good idea to have checks and balances when billions of dollars of people’s investments are at risk. Yes, the company may miss out on a few big victories from star performers, but it avoids catastrophic risks from overly allocated authority to a single individual.
Indeed, often a mix of both types of processes is needed within a company.
For those who are not familiar with it, check out Jeff Bezos’ 1997 Letter to Shareholders on irreversible (Type 1) vs. reversible (Type 2) decision making.
People like Paul seem to have just so much to say about startups for such a long time that at some point it starts to feel like they’re coming up with stuff to have things to keep saying.
The binary state is too simplistic. But it is largely the hook to make the post attractive and successful.
Let's say I'm a founder. I am one with the vision of what we're trying to build. Can a professional manager do that better than I can? Can he/she make the calls about what's in or out of scope, or what the architecture needs to be, better than I can? No and no.
So it's not that professional management is harmful, just that it's worse than the founder can do.
And in a startup, that's likely true. But founders don't scale, and there comes a point in the growth of a company where it quits being true.
You may be right about the answer for any individual decision, but for the universe of all decisions, the answers are yes and yes, because any decision is better than no decision, and a culture where only the founder's decisions are good enough is a culture that has a massive bottleneck in its ability to make decisions.
It depends on three things: how fast the founder can make decisions, how fast the managers can make decisions, and how many total decisions there are to make.
Founders often can make decisions more quickly than managers. They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers. If the company is small, the founders can be a win - especially with higher-quality decisions.
This is just another way of saying that the decisions of founders are not strictly better. Even if it's stipulated that founders always make better decisions given the same time constraints, their advantage will dwindle quickly as they become more time constrained.
> They can also revisit decisions more quickly than managers.
Why? This seems very unclear to me... I would intuitively say the exact opposite. Founders seem far more likely to make a decision, move on, and never think about that particular thing again.
To use a concrete example. Say a founder makes a key hire, essentially unilaterally, but to a position that does not report directly in to them. Who is more likely to notice and revisit that decision if the person isn't working out, the founder who hired them or the manager (and team) who is working with them day to day? It's the manager, clearly. The founder has done their part, they've brought in a key person, they're off focused on something totally different, as they should be, they have no idea how this person is working out.
I feel this but how many long term successful companies exist with no professional management folks? Beyond Valve, are there more than a few existence proofs?
I'd say Valve isn't even that successful at managing. IMO they lucked into a huge market demand and did a competent job. Yet haven't managed to produce HL3 after several attempts. There are also some horror stories from former employees of a shadow hierarchy and popularity contests.
It amazes me how much people seems to want someone like PG to just give them a single one size fits all solution to all their founder problems. It just will never exist for any particular person/company/situation. The trick is to be aware of the differing modes and when to apply them. And also, knowing these things can be useful when receiving external advise (investors, advisors, etc) as far as evaluating whether the advise would even work for your situation.
Where founder mode can be felt is when a founder has a "Vision" for their company, perhaps one that is difficult for others to see. They lean into the functional areas of their company that make strides into executing that vision and bringing it to reality. This is where they probably should exercise Founder mode. Other functions of the company may be support areas or lower impact areas towards realizing the vision, or just benefit from a particular domain expertise, this is where Manager mode likely comes into play. Although, I don't like the framing of "hire smart people and let them do good work" because it makes it sound like there are no goals or guardrails to what they are doing. The founder still needs to set expectations and monitor, and this even changes over time as next years goals for this team/individual will be different than this years.
In any case, hiring good people is most likely still going to be important. I think in most cases even a founder with a great vision needs to be challenged by their employees (Founder asks for X, but Engineer makes a case for Y). You don't want to squash collaboration and morale. Although, if you're lucky enough to be an exceptional Founder then your employees will tolerate it, it's probably not a good strategy to bank on though.
A lot of whether "founder mode" or whatever the opposite works has more to do with the personality of the founder.
Some founders are going to fail in either mode.
Successful founders have their preferred mode but aren't succeeding because of the mode. I suppose if a successful founder was in some way forced (by who?) to use the opposite of their preferred mode they'd have more difficulty, but they still are likely to succeed.
Yes, this is very odd. Exercise is healthy because it lowers blood pressure and BMI. They compensate for blood pressure and BMI, and lo and behold, no health effects are left..
If you read to the end of the article he actually lists the pros/cons where this is mentioned. That aside, the point of the article is maybe not so much using C++ regex but a technique to integrate C++ code into C code.
A not very insightful article on a serious problem, assembling facts in no particular order.
One pet peeve I want to point out.
It is true that a number of (violent) organised crime groups in the Netherlands have a background in smuggling weed. (Weed is essentially legal to consume but illegal to grow in the Netherlands. Thus there is an associated underworld.)
Some of these groups then pivoted to the more profitable cocaine trade as demand for cocaine grew in Europa. These groups already had a criminal logistical network in place, positioning them well to profit from this new business. Note that, because of the specifics of container port cocaine trade (high risk of losing big shipments, higher punishments and police-related risk) it tends to be a much more violent business than the old weed trade.
However, I'm skeptical of the causal relation that is sometimes suggested between the semi-legal status of weed and the cocaine-related organized crime.
This reasoning implicitly presumes that if there was no previous legal consumption of weed that there would be a) no underworld related to growing weed and (i.e. the demand for weed would not exist) and b) organised crime related to cocaine would simply have skipped the Netherlands.
This seems extremely unlikely given what we know from every other country on the planet. Weed consumption in the Netherlands is not particularly high compared to other countries and I see little reason to think that banning the consumption of weed would have made the demand for weed suddenly disappear.
A very good test of the thesis can be found in Belgium - a similarly small country with a similarly large harbor - which never had legal weed consumption and has the exact same issues related to organized crime and cocaine trafficking..
Apart from the fact that this prototype is very ugly, some limitations come to mind.
- Maintenance without blocking the bike lane. Does this require a separate access road?
- Will this work when any trees are nearby? Falling branches are likely to cause damage and block the sun.
- How does this work when buildings are nearby? You will block all the light? I'm having trouble imaging how this will look good in a more dense area - not the mention the extra width required on the sides of the bike path will be hard to get where space is at a premium (cities).
All this seems to point to a rather limited use case: bike lanes in places with few buildings and few trees, and sufficient spacing around the structure to facilitate maintenance access. That presumably means: in sparse industrial zones near edges of cities (as pictured, I suppose).
Which leads to another question: how many sparse industrial zones in Germany actually have bike 4m wide bike paths?
