July 31, 2004
Hiring "Great Hackers"
There’s been such a furore about Paul Graham’s dismissal of Java in his latest essay, that nobody seems to have bothered to examine the meat of the essay. Which is a pity, because the whole Java snipe was trivia. It’s part of the Lisp-hacker mentality to take random swipes at more successful, but less technologically pure environments. Before Java was whipping boy #1, C and Unix were the root of all evil.
The thesis of Graham’s essay seems to be this:
1. Hire great hackers.
2. …
3. Profit!
Step one is where most of the controversy has been directed, both because Graham’s definition of “Great Hacker” is really based on himself and his friends, and because his recipe for hiring great hackers is “Offer them equity, and jobs that don’t involve Java, Windows, or dealing with end-user expectations”.
Step two is more interesting to me, because its supposed to be the real point of the essay, but it consists of a great deal of hand-waving, essentially boiling down to “Be one of the companies that I’ve mentioned in this essay that hired great hackers, and succeeded as a result.”
It’s very easy to find counter-examples. Look at Xerox PARC, which hired insanely great hackers, gave them room to work on problems that interested them, and only managed to make a bunch of other people rich as a result. Or closer to Graham’s territory, look at the AI Winter, where a group of incredibly smart hackers dug such a huge hole for themselves that they managed to make Lisp a lingua non grata for the next decade.
Graham even makes exactly the points as to why hiring a Great Hacker can be a risky proposition. Such hackers (at least, the ones described in Graham’s essay) are generally not motivated by money, an even if money were a factor, they’re good enough to waltz into any programming job they feel like. A Great Hacker is motivated by the problem not yet solved, and bored by pretty much everything else. A Great Hacker is productive when working on an “interesting problem”.
The challenge for hiring great hackers is holding their attention. If your interest is pure research, or if you and they happen to be moving in the same direction, they’ll give you the benefit of that order-of-magnitude productivity advantage. If the great hacker gets distracted by some new shiny thing, some more interesting problem to solve, they’ll pour their energy into that instead.
And there’s not much you can do about it, because it’s that focus of single-minded attention that marks a great hacker.
So the missing step 2 is:
2a. Identify a hard problem, the solution of which would fill some market niche, and that your great hacker is sufficiently interested in finding a solution to
2b. Make sure your great hacker is kept away from shiny things until the problem is solved
2c. Pray that the hacker can, in fact, produce an effective solution (if this was a certainty, you wouldn’t have needed the hacker in the first place)
2c. Market that solution effectively
There, and that’s the path to success, and ultimate riches!
Posted to nerd at July 31, 2004 09:26 AMGreat Hackers vs. Professionals: I was going to add one more voice to the hoopla generated by Paul Graham's "Great Hackers" article. But Charles Miller beat me to it. Graham's exaltation of the prima
From: Creative Karma at August 2, 2004 10:15 AMJava Versus the World: In the past month or so, the World seems to have taken Java on; and Java has responded by taking on the World. It all started with Paul Graham's Great Hackers and the quote:The programmers you'll be able to hire...
From: Dichotomy's Purgatory at August 25, 2004 07:38 AMAmassing Hackers: Yesterday, I was holding my daughter's hand as we crossed a street. A car, presumably turning left, stopped to let us cross. After we reached the sidewalk, the car did a u-turn. Instead of a 90-degree left turn, it ended...
From: Will Carroll Presents... at August 30, 2004 04:25 AMAmassing Hackers: Yesterday, I was holding my daughter's hand as we crossed a street. A car, presumably turning left, stopped to let us cross. After we reached the sidewalk, the car did a u-turn. Instead of a 90-degree left turn, it ended...
From: Will Carroll Presents... at August 30, 2004 04:27 AMhmmm... you just described Steve Wozniak from Steve Jobs' point of view :)
Posted by: Nate Friedman at July 31, 2004 09:41 AM (#link)Ha, now that's worrying. True, but worrying.
Posted by: Charles Miller at July 31, 2004 09:49 AM (#link)The salient point for me was that the great hackers can be set off to the side building tools (and architecture) for the rest of the mere mortal programmers to use in building the thing that actually makes money. I think he also identified that picking the right problem to solve, and by deduction the right tools to build, remains a risky proposition. But there's nothing remarkable about that. Great business leaders are always trying to find the right problems to solve, to clearly identify what they need to do to make things work. And they are just as likely, or unlikely to have great success as great hackers.
Posted by: Philip Nelson at July 31, 2004 03:00 PM (#link)"The salient point for me was that the great hackers can be set off to the side building tools (and architecture) for the rest of the mere mortal programmers to use in building the thing that actually makes money."
Never trust anyone who doesn't have to eat their own dogfood. We've all had such _wonderful_ experiences with APIs and architecture that were presented to us from Really Smart Architecture People who are too precious to be wasted on the "nasty little problems" that Graham so derides.
Posted by: Charles Miller at July 31, 2004 03:56 PM (#link)Employment is not for life. People should change jobs as often as it fits them, and companies should come to expect and plan for that. "Hackers" are not "for the long haul". I imagine that these are the kind of people who get hired for a lot of money to start a particularly challenging project or fix a difficult issue and then move on, much like a specialized consultant.
Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache at July 31, 2004 09:29 PM (#link)That whole 'hire hackers for tools' stuff is rubbish too. The hackers Graham describes are, by definition, utterly incapable of writing something for 'mere mortals'. They're blissfully unaware of catering to a target audience, or ensuring their family jewels are presentable to those less gifted. Unmaintainable code and terrible user experience seem to be the biggest outputs of these 'hackers'.
Posted by: Hani Suleiman at August 1, 2004 01:17 AM (#link)I don't think Xerox PARC is a good example of failed hackers. That's an example of failed management/project management. The hackers turned out cool, groundbreaking stuff. The management failed to figure out what to do with it and gave it away.
I wrote a blog entry about fitting these "great hackers" into an XP environment:
http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/2004/07/30/great_hackers_and_xp.html
Graham definitely did gloss over the need for hackers to be working on something that has business value.
Kevin
Posted by: Kevin Dangoor at August 2, 2004 03:50 AM (#link)Kevin: The PARC story is actually quite apt. Here were a bunch of great hackers who were motivated exactly how Graham describes in his essay: none of them were bothered about financial return, they just wanted to make cool things, and solve interesting problems.
As a result, none of the stuff they invented turned a profit until it was taken _out_ of that atmosphere, and under the control of people who wanted to make sure all the "nasty little problems" were solved that would turn good ideas into marketable products.
Posted by: Charles Miller at August 2, 2004 10:44 AM (#link)Xerox PARC did make lots of money off of their "Great Hackers". They made enough money off of laser printers (developed at PARC) to pay for their whole PARC inventments many times over. Had it not been for this outcome of PARC, XEROX probably wouldn't still be around. The industry often laments what they didn't market while forgetting what they did.
Posted by: Kevin Greer at August 4, 2004 12:08 AM (#link)The security team at the place I'm working at the moment wouldn't approve an open source PDF SDK library on any of our servers because the author had contributed to O'Reillys book 'PDF Hacks', so he was a HACKER!
We are now spending $699 USD on another component...