not exactly putting hackers in a petri dish with some agar

[rone]

Paul Graham has written some interesting and enjoyable essays over the last few years.  Peter da Silva pointed me at his latest, where he starts off by pointing out the ways that Yahoo! failed to grab a commanding lead in the Internet game and takes a tangent into companies where hacker culture is key.  At first i was engaged with what he was saying, probably in no small part because of confirmation bias, but then it became more of a matter of him saying, "Companies with hacker culture are awesome because good hackers write good software," without actually supporting his case; the longer i examine the essay, the more it reads like selection bias and circular reasoning: "Yahoo! had no hacker culture and sucks; Google has hacker culture and rules.  Ergo, hacker culture leads to success."

What also really got me going was a paragraph that Tom Fawcett pointed out.

Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.

I emailed Graham the following comment:

This is quite frankly the stupidest thing i've read in quite some time and falls right in line with Zuckerberg's hubris.  That's not a commitment to hacker culture; that's falling prey to your blind spots.  Having hackers work with HR and Marketing is a good idea; having them work in those departments is delusional.

(The excuse i gave for missing it was that my eyes glazed over once i read "Mark Zuckerberg" and "Startup School".)

There's no doubt that, when your company's product depends on the work of programmers, the vast majority of which fall culturally under the hacker umbrella, it behooves management to foster that culture in order to maximize their return from their employees.  But to go from that to implying that companies that let the inmates run the asylum reap the most benefits is at best wishful thinking and at worst foolish.

There's a second half to my response to Graham's essay which i'll write once i wake up from my nap.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I tuned him out once I read the essay about how the extreme income inequality in America was a good and necessary thing because who would found dot-com startups otherwise?

He has an unhealthy adulation of 133t cowboy coder gods and believes they are Heinleinian Competent Men who can do anything.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Don't be silly.

a) An IT company needs hackers in every job because no-one else understands what we do, man.
b) Any serious geek can get up to speed with accounting, sales, or management by reading the manual, or possibly the IEEE spec over the weekend.

What could possibly go wrong?

solitaire@netizen.com.au.
.

[reddragdiva]

Absolutely. Sufficiently advanced engineering knowledge equals potential competence in any other field, which can then be treated as a special case of engineering.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Oh, I got sidetracked reading the entry on ESR, because it so matches what I have been thinking recently. I've been poking lisp and emacs, and wound up on his blog, and ye gods, he has gone utterly mad. Shame, really.

[reddragdiva]

Kurzweil's another startling case and the one I was originally thinking of.

Engineers and technologists are arrogant fuckwits with delusions of general competence. So, like everyone else then.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

OK, now I need to know more about Andrew Schlafly's animus toward complex numbers. If true, this sounds even more hilarious than the relativity thing.

(The Conservapedia article about them seems unremarkable.)

[reddragdiva]

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Conservapedian_mathematics#A_digression_on_complex_numbers

[jwgh]

I had thought that the fact that facebook is really buggy and makes major interface changes with no warning at the drop of a hat as a sign that its programmers didn't know what they were doing (and that management didn't care), but linking it to hacker culture sort of makes sense too.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

This is largely the reason why American Apparel is imploding right now. Dov what's-his-name is a brilliant marketer and has his finger on the pulse of the hipsters and stuff, but he can't run a business for long-term success. American Apparel needs to kick him to the curb and get a real CEO.

[epileptikitty.livejournal.com]

Hackers should be seen and not heard.