Paul Graham - Essays

For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive.

Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.

You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."

The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.

We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it because we want their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart.

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake.

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.

The same happens with writing. As we got close to publication, I found I was very worried about the essays in Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. Once an essay has had a couple thousand page views I feel reasonably confident about it. But these had had literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. It felt like releasing software without testing it.

That's what all publishing used to be like. If you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were lucky. But I'd become so used to publishing online that the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd gotten used to a GPS.

The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write what you want and publish when you want. Earlier this year I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I sent it to an editor I know. As I was waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was hoping they'd reject it. Then I could put it online right away. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor. [5]

Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not management won't let them. How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you-- and the company saying no? The most famous example is probably Steve Wozniak, who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP. And they turned him down. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But I think this happens all the time. We just don't hear about it usually, because to prove yourself right you have to quit and start your own company, like Wozniak did.

So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking about? What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here working on version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to make the release date.

And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces I've described is near zero. When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.

So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons of open source and blogging? I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people working for you have to be employees. But think about what's going on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him as investment? Then instead of coming to your office to work on your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.

Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship. Such customs evolve with glacial slowness. Our employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of master-servant DNA. [6]

I dislike being on either end of it. I'll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get someone else to do it for you. I'd rather do almost anything than give or receive a performance review.

On top of its unpromising origins, employment has accumulated a lot of cruft over the years. The list of what you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience I assume it's infinite. Within the office you now have to walk on eggshells lest anyone say or do something that makes the company prey to a lawsuit. And God help you if you fire anyone.