Paul Graham's wrong on the value of a hacker culture (sadly) | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham's wrong on the value of a hacker culture (sadly)

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99 pointscoderdude63 comments

If you must substitute a cultural element in your company for hackers, make sure its designers or artists. You can still pull out a win with these folks. If you sub in bureaucrats or marketers instead, you're done.

Most companies go hackers -> suits, sharks are jumped, people start talking about the good ol' days.

Apple instead chose a path hackers -> designers. (They did take an almost fatal detour sans Jobs through suit territory.) This makes them an outlier of the first order and probably not a very good example for establishing a general case like the essay attempts.

The most that could be said is that a culture of design is a viable substitute for a hacker culture in some instances.

But then there is eBay, Intel, CraigsList, SAP, Oracle, etc...

In fact I'd argue that most companies succeed based on being good at customer engagement more than hacker/artist/designer culture. There are only two strong counters to this I can think of which are Google and Apple.

I'd definitely leave CraigsList off that list, but it seems that once a certain level of market dominance is achieved (through hacker culture, esp. in the case of Intel and eBay) you can switch to almost any old pointy-haired-boss management scheme and still survive. They fossilize and move unstoppably on pure inertia.

Ebay illustrates this perfectly. Nearly everyone who sells on ebay and gets paid through paypal wishes there was a better alternative, but there just isn't.

"...you can switch to almost any old pointy-haired-boss management scheme and still survive"

That's actually exactly the way its supposed to work in the minds of <for lack of better person to put here> suits

Steve Blank has a great articles about this.

http://steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1/

Read Cringley's book on Silicon Valley (the one that ends with "and still can't get a date" or the like) for how one individual, a lowly receiving clerk, came very close to killing Intel after it had become very big (maybe Fortune 500 big).

"pointy-haired-boss management schemes" have killed many a high tech company and will continue to for the forseablefuture.

eBay is the only on that list not dominated by hackers. Yes even Larry Ellison is a hacker, from Wikipedia:

During the 1970s, Ellison worked for Ampex Corporation. One of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle"."

"Ellison was inspired by the paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[4] He founded Oracle in 1977, putting up a mere $1400 of his own money, under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL).

And despite a HUGE first mover advantage in a market where size is critical, eBay is floundering.

But I think you and the grandparent are not really disagreeing. A company can succeeded if it is dominated by very competent marketers and sales people... as long as they have something to sell.

The point is competent, passionate people are a great sign of success.

And if you have hackers and sales people, and designers, all of that type in a company... they can STILL be foiled by bureaucracy.

There was a comment thread about this question a few months ago in which people from Apple talked about whether it had a hackerly culture: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596733

I always took PG's Hacker-centric culture to mean one of hacking in a broader sense, and not strictly applied to coding.

I believe that a hacker-centric culture is one that promotes innovation and is purely meritocratic, with a constant drive to improve and better absolutely everything.

So from my (very much outsider) perspective, Apple would definitely have a hacker culture, but it's not just about the code.

Maybe the problem is simply that no one knows what "hacker values" actually are,.

A problem which is only made worse by the desire to apply the word "hacker", "hacking", and variants to everything.

Loosening the definition of hacker culture to "successful companies promote innovation and grade on merit", then yes, I agree. However, at that point, you can also claim the Toyota, earlier days of GE, and Walmart have hacker cultures, and I don't think that's true at all.

You can broaden pg's statement so it's never false, but that strips it of its interest and utility.

I think you're absolutely right: if you take it to mean anything, then it has no meaning.

However, as mechanical_fish touches on below, the definition of what a 'hacker' is (I think) is pretty misunderstood. Hacking is a creative process; are we trying to define creative people/roles/cultures merely by the tools that they use? That sort of limited scope feels extremely hubristic.

So maybe I didnt clearly express my point, and used bad examples: I'll accept that. The article seems to believe that Hacking = coding, and thus Hacking Culture = coding culture, which I think is a pretty limited way to look at things. Hacker culture is all about rejecting restrictive and unnecessary bureaucracy and procedures, and instead focussing on giving people the freedom and tools necessary to perform better and in a more creative way. Which I dont think really applies to your examples. A lot of places that claim innovation and free thinking still do so within a pretty rigid set of rules.

I don't think anyone can agree on what hacking is, so discussing it is pointless, as is this article.

I don't see a problem with saying that Toyota has a hacker culture.

Granted, I don't know anything about how Toyota (the company) works ..

Ebay is another interesting counterpoint to PG's essay. They are a company constantly made fun of in the tech community as monopolistic, unoriginal/innovative, without visionary guidance, but somehow they are more profitable than Amazon. Hackers are critical in many businesses, In Yahoo's case they need them to stay on top of changes to media, but if you can get significant network lock in like eBay then hackers may not be as important in the medium term. In the long term I think they'll face disruption in much the same way a company like AirBNB disrupted Craigslist which has a similar profile to eBay.

I have a suspicion that eBay are Altavista to some other company's Google. I don't know which company that will be, but surely it's possible to be 10 times better than eBay and overcome the network effects.

(Plus I did some consulting for eBay and saw first hand how ineffective and stupid their management are)

eBay is the beneficiary of an intense network effect that Altavista and Google search never could be.

Until the newer management, the Bain & Company mafia that e.g. don't understand or want the traditional eBay sellers, screw things up enough, it's likely to keep its position despite how horrible it is on so many levels.

Check out Gunbroker.com for a pretty big auction site that indeed does things "10 times better"; it started up shortly after eBay wimped out and banned gun and gun accessory etc. sales, so it benefits from the same sort of network effects. Having used both, there's absolutely no comparison.

I think the argument applies to the internal culture of the company, not how they behave externally.

I also think the OP has an awfully limited definition of hacker. I'm not allowed to have a sense of theater? I'm not allowed to also be a designer?

Steve prefers artists and artisans. Artists can hack and code, but there is a different worldview.

I'm with PG: The distinction between an artist and a hacker is thin to the point of nonexistence.

Don't be fooled by the fact that, say, emacs isn't pretty to look at: Even emacs is a work of art. It isn't just a utilitarian tool for typing stuff, it certainly wasn't designed just to make money, and it is opinionated software that makes a statement, at every level from the implementation language to the architecture to the workflow to the license.

A lot of hacking is performance art. Think: _why the lucky stiff. Think: Zed Shaw.

True. I guess I meant programmers.

programmers : hackers :: designers : artists.

The difference between an artist and a designer is that the designer is incapable of using ugliness to express a truth. (Also, money.)

I like to liken programmers to poets, but only because of the volume of bad meter and code humanity has produced.

Being a designer by trade and programmer by accident, I've always found this funny. That programmers have no problem having their work being compared to poetry or art in general. Designers, on the other hand, get enraged on the sole mention that design is an art or --worse-- a craft.

Heh, I'm actually a designer as well, and a printmaker who was vetted for the tamarind institute a while ago. Designers don't want to be boxed into the art world, as modern art is strictly solipsistic, and attempts to make a statement in and of itself and it's context. Design attempts to amplify a statement, to add value, clarify and guide. Saying design is art and craft is like saying engineering is intuition and emotion. There are a shade of in both, but it's missing the point.

Programming on the other hand, is not a strictly visual field which helps any analogy, and while the product is engineering, the act of is comparable to an art. There's no such thing as perfect code, and the hacky little stuff is analogous to the troubled motion's of Jackson Pollck's arms struggling against the constraints of physics to make a statement.

That programmers have no problem having their work being compared to poetry or art in general.

I wouldn't go that far. A lot of programmers have civil-engineer envy and would be incensed if you suggested that what they did was driven by anything other than cold, hard numbers, physical laws, and building codes.

Hacking is about coming up with creative solutions to problems, not being open. By this definition, Apple has a very hacker centric culture. Being open lowers the barrier of entry to hacking but it isn't a prerequisite.

What I am not sure is that the word 'hacker' is a useful word. There were other words widely used before the word hacker appeared: 'smart people', 'creative people', 'artists', 'scientists', 'mathematicians', 'engineers', 'polymaths' etc...

The word 'hacker' is a feel-good word for us programmers: we feel that we are more than just programmers, we are some kind of 'polymaths'. But the truth is that so are other smart people: noone should think that a very smart mathematicin, phyiscists, other engineers cannot be good in other disciplines. (And engineers especially were always a bit polymaths, because ergonomy, technical difficulties and business considerations always were there paralelly.) As it is with every successful essayists, pg's essays have some feel-good values. As I grow older I no more like the feel-good component of essays. I am not a hcker, I am an engineer, and I was that ever. This does not mean that I have to be totally idiot in every other disciplines, but being good at something requires lots of practice. People are called engineers because they practiced engineering a lot, people are called mathematicians because they practiced mathematics a lot, etc... If somebody could be called a 'hacker' it is the caliber of somebody like von Neumann, but even him we call just a 'mathematician' (and we call Einstein 'just' a physicist). Why previous generations did not need the word 'hacker'? Why we suddenly need this word for no other reasons of feeling good?

What's wrong with feeling good? I, for one, like feeling good.

And the reason previous generations didn't need the word "hacker" is simply because computers hadn't been invented yet. But computing is hardly the first field with this kind of verbal distinction. What's the difference between a reporter and a journalist? Or a painter and an artist? Or an actor and a star?

I think programmers are special kind of engineers. We could call them software engineers. My feeling is that the word 'hacker' is invented to state that hackers are somehow more than engineers. As if engineers were dumb people without creativity, who can only follow predefined processes. As if there were no engineer geniuses. As if engineers could not be enthusiast and as if sometimes engineering could not be treated as art the same way programming can be. 'Hacker' is a romantic word some people use to describe _themselves_, not a word society describes these people. In my opinion this wording is not really necessary. There were/are/will-be bad/good/exceptionally-good engineers in history of mankind. I just have a feeling that 200 years later the word 'hacker' will be forgotten but the word engineer will still live. (This is just my feeling.)

Thank you. I have trouble understanding how this is even an argument. Maybe the word hacker will still be around, maybe not. Being creative, academically informed, and practically skilled will always be around.

I thought openness was an important part of being a Hacker? "No problem should ever have to be solved twice": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe2

I disagree wholeheartedly with his analysis. Yes, Apple is more closed. But…you can do a lot with OS X, other than the window manager and desktop system.

I rooted my iPhone. Just like a lot of people.

I script everything.

I don't run the apple versions of openssh or openssl or a bunch of other things, all just done with the ordering of folders in my path.

Almost everything I want to do on Linux, I can do on OS X. And the things that I can't aren't GUI-based, so ssh works fine.

It's worth having to run another computer (or a virtual machine) to run some OSX/Windows-only apps. And it's not worth running windows.

The hacker culture is alive and well on OS X, and I don't see Apple as doing anything to stop it…you just have to learn a bit more…in a lot of cases, that's not even necessary.

But, I guess that fits…because it's all about user experience instead of coding the actual OS.

> "in the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture" can be contradicted with a single word. Apple.

Since when is Apple a software company? They make consumer hardware, and the bare minimum of software needed to make this hardware deliver the value users expect. That's why OS X isn't supported on other hardware than Apples own. That's why you need iTunes to interact with your i{Pod/Pad/Phone}, rather than exposing a standard interface.

To Apple, like Yahoo, programming is little more than a commodity.

In Paul's essay, he suggested that a software company was any company that needs to have good software. I would say that Apple fits this description.

OS X and iOS sell Apple hardware.

How many people would really buy Macbooks with Vista installed? How many people would really buy iPhones with Symbian installed?

Yes, Apple's income technically comes mostly from hardware, but all that would dry up without their software.

Honestly, if I needed a Windows notebook, I'd still be pretty tempted to go with Apple hardware. Conversely, I'd be loath to carry around a Dell or HP box, even with Mac OS X installed. Apple's hardware is a positive competitive advantage, not just a lock-in scheme for them to extort more money for their software.

In the big Steve Jobs/Bill Gates interview a couple years back, I recall Steve saying that Apple is a software company and that the computer is the pretty box it comes in. Although they might require their own hardware, the hardware isn't all that different (from a functionality standpoint) from the hardware that other manufacturers were putting out.

So I'm inclined to agree with Steve. Apple is a software company. The hardware is just a pretty box.

I love my Mac, IPhone etc. but Apple is not the be all end all of success stories. They have one culture, Google has another (more hacker-centric), and other successful companies have even more of a hacker culture.

Apple is a hardware company first, software second, with web services a distant third. So one could also argue that Apple's top down, less hacker, culture has produced some mediocre web services compared to Google and even Yahoo.

I disagree, steve is defiantly a hacker in the wider sense of the word. Especially since him and the other steve was so much into phone phreaking in there youth.

I think PG's definition of The Hacker Culture is not quite the same as ESR's definition.

ESR's definition falls more in the kernel and system tools end of hackerdom, where the only users are other hackers.

PG's definition extends to products and applications and generally stuff where the users are not necessarily hackers.

By ESR's definition, Apple is not hackerly at all. By PG's definition, they are very hackerly.

This is probably off-topic but I'd never heard of Inventables (http://www.inventables.com, referenced in the article) before. I'm having a geekgasm just browsing through the weird and wonderful articles on there. Love the mini-faq below each one. This is going to make me blow so much money...

Apple is externally antihacker, but internally they prefer hacker type programmers, not mediocre code monkeys who don't actually get things done. They want people to solve interesting problems as well. They just need to be prepared to have Jobs tell them it sucks and to do it differently.

Right, and their anti-hacker public position is relatively new. Mac OS X has always been hacker friendly; you don't need to tweak it to have a good experience, but Apple never tried to stop you if you wanted to. It's only with iOS that they've called their customers criminals for trying to gain control of their own hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if that shift ends up affecting their recruiting ability.

I think you are forgetting that apple started out as the very epitome of hacker culture (dudes in a garage soldering shit together while listening to rush and eating their parents food) - where they are now is a direct result of their initial launch trajectory.

There are tons of successful hacker driven companies. There's only one Apple. It is interesting how author still uses a sole outlier as a counterpoint. I guess love is blind :)

(Also, there that was Wozniak guy hint hint)

there are tons of non-hacker driven successful companies too. In fact the majority of them.

But how many of them are tech companies? You don't need a hacker culture to drill oil or make breakfast cereal.

really? I might have watched too many Hollywood movies, but I have a feeling that many of the oil people are actually more hacker types than those coding drones at your Microsofts and Oracles...

that's not to say that it's essential to their business, but there's a lot of low level creativity in many industries, not just IT.

I thought the article discussed tech companies..

it actually depends on the phase of the tech in question. apple is capitalising on a period of consolidation of the cool tech that had been created at an astonishing rate. you could say that a lot of innovation was done by hackers, but consolidation of that tech in the market place was done by marketing gurus such as steve jobs. a company which gains its competitive advantage through constant innovation needs a hacker-centric culture. a company which simply consolidates on existing tech does not.

If you don't consider the iPod and iPhone radically hacking up their markets, he has a point.

It is not all-is-acceptable hacking. Jobs, nonetheless, is hacking and innovating.

Congrats on completely misunderstanding his essay, and confusing the consumer with the developer.

That would actually matter if Apple had good products. At least I can't stand the nazi experience that OS X is (i own a macbook, my first and last Apple product, now running Archlinux).

You sound really mad about something! If only you said what it was.

My bad choice when purchasing a laptop.

Hackers love to experiment in public.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Apple is a hardware company.

Apple is a product company. Those products are a combination of hardware and software. This is absolutely key to understanding their success.

TL,DR: Paul Graham? NO! Steve Jobs!

I usually don't approve of laconic 4chan memes on Hacker News, but this one actually seems like a pretty fair summary of the article.

I like your essay, but you're way off-base in your latest analysis of Paul Graham's essay. Your conclusion that 'Paul Graham's wrong on the value of a hacker culture (sadly)' can be contradicted with a single word. Software.

You make a great argument, but Apple is not in the software business.

This distinction between being in the "hardware business" or the "software business" is what much of the rest of the industry follows and, as a result, has allowed Apple many of its inroads in the last decade. People want and buy products, and good high-tech products are a result of good software running on good hardware.

This article doesn't really disprove PG's point. Remember that Steve Wozniak was an incredible hacker. Sure, Apple has since turned into a locked-down technological empire, but that is probably largely due to Steve Jobs' business savvy, and willingness to give up any hacker culture to make money. But the company was started by one of the most famous hackers of all, and you can bet he had an influence on the culture.

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