Thought for Today:

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

- Woodrow Wilson
From an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909: Link.

“This recession is going to be a bad one.”
- Gary North

Mises’ theory of the business cycle:

The central bank inflates. This creates a boom. This creates sectoral bubbles. Then the central bank ceases to inflate. The bubbles will pop. The economy will go into a recession.

… This recession is going to be a bad one …. I think your first line of self-defense is your job. If you lose your job, you are in big trouble. You will have to sell your assets in a fire sale economy.

You need to do whatever it takes to increase your value to your employer.


- Gary North @ LewRockwell.com: March 22, 2008: Link.

Thanks, EB.

“A 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.”
- Paul Graham

Paul Graham on the anthropology of big companies versus small companies:

What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.

Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet — for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature — a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together.

… Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree.

… A 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.

… The 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.

… Working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

- Paul Graham, March 2008: Link.

Via NewsVine: Link.

Thought for Today:

Since I am one of those people who work under pressure or not at all, it seems better to have a full-time job, if only as an alibi.

- D.J. Enright @ The Writer’s Almanac: Link.

“Dennis Joseph Enright (March 11, 1920 – December 31, 2002) was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic, and general man of letters.”
- Wikipedia: Link.

Thought for today:

Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.

- THX 1138: Link.

“A ‘master of all trades’ is a threat to any large organization as you can not replace them easily.”

Big companies want cogs. You hire interchangeable people who do very simple well defined tasks. If one leaves you hire someone else give them the ISO9000 job description and have the replacement up and working in a week. (after the 6 month hiring process)

A “master of all trades” is a threat to any large organization as you can not replace them easily. I had this issue at past jobs luckily I had a boss who knew how to balence the process vs my skills and I was essentially made into a one man prototype lab.

If you have one guy set up firewalls, wire the network, configure the server, write the application, and leave you have no one else who knows all the steps and at best you have to hire several people to replace the person who left.

It may seem silly but large companies/organizations want consistency over brilliance.

[Worse Than Failure]