I am writing a book about an idea - software literacy is a new form of actual literacy and will be as impactful.
And I keep coming back to how important organising above the Dunbar number is and how bad economics etc is at this.
This resonates for me - and it’s still just grasping in the dark - but they seem to revolve around the idea that with software a company is no longer a lot of Dunbar number tribes working together through politics of their representatives (managers) but that action through the whole company can be co-ordinated through software (I even have the idea that the workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers).
Anyway the point is that founder mode might mean simply acknowledging that software runs / orgnaisies a company more than anything else - and building for that. What’s more important if your whole company is software controlled - relations between managers or the whole-org-test-rig?
Edit: apple famously has a run-book that is insanely detailed - basically instructions on how to run the org that builds the iPhone - this is software running a whole compmay. And if it’s software, it can be in one repo and that repo can be owned by Steve Jobs. Conceptually- that’s founder mode…. Maybe :-)
Hm, so a company in founder mode is like a monorepo with all projects, software, documentation, branches, processes, owners, contributors, activities, tests, issues, pull requests and code reviews.. Consolidated, visible, under source control.
Following that analogy, a company in manager mode is like many repos independently developing, collaborating with each other when needed but mostly siloed and managed separately. Maybe like microservices..
> workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers
An organization as a form of parallel computing with humans. It feels like this could yield some insights by digging deeper into the concept.
And I keep coming back to how important organising above the Dunbar number is and how bad economics etc is at this.
This resonates for me - and it’s still just grasping in the dark - but they seem to revolve around the idea that with software a company is no longer a lot of Dunbar number tribes working together through politics of their representatives (managers) but that action through the whole company can be co-ordinated through software (I even have the idea that the workers are CPUs so the coders are new managers).
Anyway the point is that founder mode might mean simply acknowledging that software runs / orgnaisies a company more than anything else - and building for that. What’s more important if your whole company is software controlled - relations between managers or the whole-org-test-rig?
Edit: apple famously has a run-book that is insanely detailed - basically instructions on how to run the org that builds the iPhone - this is software running a whole compmay. And if it’s software, it can be in one repo and that repo can be owned by Steve Jobs. Conceptually- that’s founder mode…. Maybe :-)