Great Hacker != Great Hire
ericsink.com
ericsink.com
One of the reasons PG suggests building server-based software is that you have more flexibility in language choice, and hence more ability to hire great hackers. But there are other reasons to go for that business model: recurring revenue, fewer distribution hurdles, less chance of incompatibilities, ownership of customer data, network effects, etc.
I think there was an article about open-source software and Sun's cash hemorrhage that made it to Hacker News recently - it was either here or Proggit. That's another instance. Google was cited in the article as a company that supports open-source - well, that's because Google's business model is selling services supported by software, and so it behooves them to get the price of software down as low as possible.
For that matter - hardware, software, and software services are all complements (in a microeconomic sense), and so each of them has an incentive to commoditize the others. Hence we have Google supporting open-source and buying commodity hardware; Sun and RedHat supporting open-source; Microsoft training lots of developers and providing plenty of tools for them; Apple basing OS X on open UNIX instead of proprietary MacOS 9; and great hackers everywhere supporting open source, because it drives up the value of the service they provide.
An ordinary small business doesn't need people so smart that they can redefine the problem. They just need people who are cheap and reliable. Whereas startups generally try to hire the smartest people they can, even if they're difficult or expensive.
Software as a Service, and plain old ISV application software can both scale immensely. I do not need to hire extra bodies if I'm selling 1 million copies a day of my app than if I'm selling 10 copies. The only thing stopping an ISV from growing is the popularity of the software, just as the only thing stopping a Service from growing is popularity of their webapp. In neither case there is no roadblock to growth caused by a lack of resources.
ISV != small. It never has, and it probably never will.
Give me a break. If Intuit sells 10mm copies of QuickBooks a year, why don't they just have 5 or 6 employees instead of the hundreds that they have (that work on the QB side)?
Your "Build a better mousetrap and the users will come" approach just apply to every scenario. Maybe to yours, but not to everyone's.
Why do Google and Yahoo have 5000+ employees, when Craigslist gets by with about 20?
Many companies hire people because they can, and because cash in the bank gets a miserably low return. The extra employees aren't strictly necessary, though they do help (presumably over the marginal return of cash, which is about 0 when you figure in inflation).
BTW, Intuit's sales took off when they did only have 5 or 6 people. They probably wouldn't have been able to release anything else if they hadn't hired more people - the engineers (all 2 of them ;-)) were answering phone calls all day instead of coding. But they could've grown quite large just on Quicken.
There're a bunch of other ISVs that grew very large on very small teams, eg. Aladdin (StuffIt) and NullSoft (Winamp). Weren't many of Borland's early products (Quattro Pro, Turbo Pascal) also done by teams of about 4?
2) Your "Build a better mousetrap and the users will come" approach just apply to every scenario. Maybe to yours, but not to everyone's. No idea what you are going on about here. I never said anything about building better mousetraps, neither literally nor metaphorically.
3) I wrote a big long reply explaining why you're wrong, but Nostrademons said it far more clearly, so I'll leave his words as the definitive answer...
If you actually wanted your comment to be taken as a seperate thing, and not read in conjunction with your other writing, then I guess we don't have anything to talk about - as Eric defines small ISVs, they are effectively... small :-)
In my experience, "great hackers", or stevie's "done, and gets things smart" types, and so on, are exactly the ones who seem to care the most about users.
Great hackers don't suffer inefficiency; they correct it. If you want your nasty little problems solved elegantly, expose the great hackers to them. If you want to throw warm bodies at annoyed customers, find someone mediocre and reliable.
Great hackers are the ones that cringe in revulsion at a sloppy code structure, not (just) because they're OCD about that kind of thing, but because inconsistency gets in the way of creating beauty.
Erik seems to say that pg is suggesting we should hire a bunch of prima donnas who don't do "real" work. What I got out of the GH essay is that, if you can hire Edison, it's madness to put him to work installing light switches. Great hackers are the game changers, and if you're not a game changing institution, you won't get them.
Hire people who care about users.
Great hackers do. More than Eric seems to realize.
Hire people who understand the difference between a job and a hobby.
The difference seems to be that you enjoy your hobby and not your job. I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
Hire people who want to contribute in lots of different ways to the success of the product.
Great hackers turn mediocrity into gold. They make everyone on the team more productive, and add value all over the place.
Case and point: Software development process at Google vs Microsoft. The former is more like code-n-shoot (not all, but some), the latter is more disciplined due to years of experience. The former is close to the definition of "hackers" while the latter is more of "developers" type.
If you put a dollar in msft in 86, that would have turned into $6.02 in 1990 and $11.09 in 96.
If you bought a dollar is shares of goog in 2004, you would have about $3.93 now.
So the MSFT of the 80s and early 90s hugely outperfomed the current google. But Microsoft was probably a very different company at the time. As it gets bigger, it would be much hard to sustain the same path of growth.
And all those people that say "google is different", and wont make the same mistakes as MSFT, probably are wrong, as at some point, the sheer size of the company will make it harder to grow, and it will slowly turn just like any other larg corp.
The early Microsoft, from what I've heard, depended more on good hackers and less on discipline and organization. So it's not surprising that when they were more like Google, they had growth more like Google's.
Microsoft suffers from lack of vision and strategic direction as they do from anything else these days. People still accept 60%-of-industry salaries to work there, after grueling interviews.
Their benefits are better in overall (depending how you view it I guess). If you're young and single, you probably don't care much of this-n-that. But if you're planning to own a house and family, MS compensates you quite well.
ie, the competing Microsoft service.
I think people generally like Google's products; they build value by actually building software. Microsoft builds value with marketing.
So you can't really compare the development styles and making money. If you compare software quality, I think Microsoft loses big time. Ever use Vista?
And there was of course Linux, and Unix versions, but really would execpt average Joe to have to manually configure drivers, and go back to the 80s and start using command line just to get their computer the net.
Sure, now both Mac OS X and Linux are much better choices than Vista, but at the time Win 95/90 then 2000/XP were the best choice for general productivity.
Windows has always been buggy as hell, and has really made people wary of software in general. If Windows never crashed or did weird things, people would be a lot more comfortable with computers. Actually... Mac OS was slightly better than Windows back in the day. So really, there were better choices than Windows. Windows just happened to be popular, and it got that way by marketing and business tactics, not by software quality.
(Did you ever notice how the Mac users in that era were really confident in their abilities? It's probably because the computer didn't treat them like shit. If what you do always works, you'll probably be pretty confident in your abilities. Windows barely worked, so people were afraid of computers.)
I also used Windows 98, and 98SE. It rarely crashed unless when I did not reboot it more than 2 days. Who left their desktop on for 48 hours (except me for my own reason and probably people who leeched pirated illegal stuff)
Ditto with Windows 2000.
For desktop, Windows is okay. Yeah so there are viruses due to popularity (or being targeted). If Mac OS 7-9 were more popular back then, it'll suffer the same fate (virus wise).
People were always afraid of anything that they don't know how to operate. My parents used OSX once in a while lately. But they're still afraid to click on certain things. They said "If I messed up, I don't know how to get it back to the previous state".
Wasn't Google went up to 700 and went down to 450 ish. I see they rebound now, what about tomorrow and in the future?
On another topic: http://valleywag.com/5018349/googles-either-in-a-hiring-free... http://valleywag.com/5024181/google-cutting-costs-hiring-slo...
Someone who works inside Google confirmed me as well.
By the way, their main money making machine is written in a non-hacker platform.
Yahoo! is a big company. Blaming their trouble on one thing seems to be absurd.
One thing that comes to my mind is that when your company grows, you need business savvy and a good management team. These two are something not "hacker"-ish trait.
Google seems to do quite well [Note: For A While] because they made good decisions.
It has nothing to do at all with Sergey or Larry coding skill [Reference to your earlier statement that they seem to be a good founder because they're "hacker"]. Remember they almost sold their hit-single to Yahoo! for just about One Million Dollar.
It has everything to do with time, luck, and their decisions.
If Graham is right, a great hacker is someone who is not willing to do any of the un-fun things that need to be done. Small ISVs don't need people like that.
If Graham is right, a great hacker is someone who is not willing to help the people who use the software he creates. Small ISVs don't need people like that.
I've read "Great Hackers" too but noticed nothing of the sort.
See also: Liberal, Conservative.
Here is a direct quote
Here is my reply.
this->is_for('code'); # not direct quotes
Try as I may, I simply cannot wrap my mind around the concept of "building a team" to create the Mona Lisa or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Just look at this for 5 minutes and try to imagine it was designed and built by anything other than a team of one:
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=...
Kinda makes the "Great Hacker != Great Hire" argument kinda moot, huh?
http://tn3-1.deviantart.com/fs25/300W/f/2008/043/7/9/perfekt...
its made by Nastera(aka Nasimo), one of Bulgaria's best graffiti artists and a Balkan champion. What you show doesn't look like it was designed at all. It was paint pored on the floor!?!? But still you point is correct, just not your example.
ps I did choose my example very fast, but im a long time graffiti art fan, so i knew what to look for. I didn't look specifically for this work, but i knew what artist i wanted to show.
Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.
a business based on SourceSafe.
He's missed the main point that PG makes about languages - if you are writing software to run on your own servers and is delivered through HTTP, no-one cares what language you use. In that context, fussiness is fine.
If you want to write a server app, which is pretty much what everything is these days, you can use any language. They'll all do fine. The choice of language is never going to be your scalability problem.
Easily one of the stupidest things I've ever read. I've seen better logic on the back of cereal boxes. I seriously, sincerely believe that my dog Kaia who recently passed away (RIP) was smarter than the person who wrote this post.
I can't even read every random piece of stupidity I encounter. Neither this nor the one about New York was worth reading all the way through. I'm a writer, I need to avoid stupidity "for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers."
I agreed that you were wrong about New York, and I took the effort to conceal my contempt for the post itself because I figured it was the low point and people would move on. Obviously the low point was yet to come!
In either case what's more important is the expression of dissent - people on the site are disagreeing with you. They're trying to launch arrows of criticism but the points are so pathetically blunt it's more a feeble attempt at a public stoning than anything else.
My hope was the dissent might provoke you to work harder. That nonsense about New York, you wouldn't have wasted anyone's time with that in the "Hackers & Painters" days. This site has completely ruined you as a writer, and you used to be pretty fucking good. You too need to avoid stupidity for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers. I bet you read this ridiculous Eric Sink crap all the way through, every last word. Those braincells are dead now and nothing will bring them back.
You should kill Hacker News. Revenge for your slaughtered neurons. A favor to those of your readers who actually understand the things you write and don't just read them to kill time after lunch when they should be working. Any site of this nature is inherently, inevitably, built into its design, a magnet for the type of jackass who only reads blogs because if they played Warcraft in the office they wouldn't be able to fool themselves. This site is a diseased mutant doomed from birth. Give it some tranquilizer so it dies in peace, but the minute it loses consciousness, take it out back and CUT OFF ITS HEAD.
And before you build the next one, read "The Wisdom Of Crowds." Free votes for everyone is a recipe for groupthink factories.
Also, the thing about my dog? TOTALLY TRUE. My dog was absolutely smarter than this Eric Sink guy. Probably by orders of magnitude. Eric Sink has gills and lives on a diet of algae, pond scum, and moss.
And they're not "essays", dude. They're blog posts. It's a good intention to elevate the discourse, but it won't work, because what really elevates the discourse (or lowers it) is the economics of participation. You can call it anything you want but if it's cheap to publish, cheap to link, and everybody has one, then it'll display a very wide range in quality and maturity, and that's just life.
I don't know what the hell is wrong with people that this economics of participation thing is so obscure. Vote costs nothing but time? Vote becomes expensive for people with no time and cheap for people with nothing but. Supply and demand.
The same thing holds for comments, which is why I made it so personal. I'm going to remember writing it, so you're going to remember reading it. I don't have time for another one.
Kill this fucker. KILL IT.
This post is old. So what? Well, old posts that have merit ought to be reposted. But old posts of little value? Why are we upmodding this? So that we can all agree that Eric is wrong about hackers in a self-congratulatory fit of back slapping and strutting?
Either way, I agree that this is another sign that HN is changing character. I am not prepared to say it is changing in a bad way, or that the site has no value, or that there is going to be an exodus.
But I agree that there is a change going on.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7Ynw9RT9coU
All right let me dress up in a suit and monocle to accomodate the distinguished gentleman. I've gone into great detail as to why sites of this nature are all inherently doomed via a flaw in their paradigm.
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
If my learned colleague shalt consult the appended citation, he will see that my predicated futures have come to trespass, and verily this event doth match the anticipatification in profile.
I knew the article is old; however, i hang around just to read comments from specific users