







Some people seem to have interpreted You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss as putting down programmers who work for big companies. Jeff Atwood reproduced one quote summarizing it as saying: Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck. In fact the thesis of the essay is exactly the opposite: that although the press treats startup founders as gods, the differences between them and other programmers are due less to their nature than to their work environment. Here is the beginning of the last paragraph: Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment... Why are people reading an essay that says this, and coming away with the idea that it says exactly the opposite?



My guess is that this is an instance of a fairly common Internet phenomenon. People are reacting to what they imagine I'd say in an essay on this subject—that an essay comparing startup founders to corporate employees would say that founders are great and corporate employees suck.



Actually that has not been our experience. Startup founders are not somehow set apart from "ordinary" programmers. Lots more people could start startups if they wanted to. In fact, our business model depends on it. If the pool of founders was limited to a few rare geniuses, Y Combinator wouldn't work.







