Kevin Korb's Jokes: Care and Feeding of Your Hacker

Indeed. And this complicated little distinction is complicated even further by the fact that "cracker" happens to be a derogatory term for poor white people in the American South. Explaining to people that they're using the wrong word, and the right word they ought to be using is a word they always thought was a semi-offensive sort of ethnic slur, is almost impossible, and probably not worth the effort.

Personally, I think we've reached the point where computers are more demystified, and we can talk in neutral terms with people about these things. To me, being a hacker means taking things apart and learning how they work; that's a morally neutral act. You can take things apart and learn how they work in order to steal money, or in order to build a great system for helping deliver donated meals to the homeless, or in order to fix something that's broken.

Isn't reverse engineering what hackers are largely about? Taking things apart and figuring out how they work, or does reverse engineering have a more specific definition?

RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others frowning upon it.

I agree that some of the folklore built up around "hackers" is a bunch of bullshit, but I disagree with some of your assertions. I would never work for a company with a dress code of business casual. It's not that I want to wear comfortable clothes at work (business casual is perfectly comfortable, it just looks horrible), it's that I think dress codes of any kind for most non-client-facing white collar workers are a sign of superficiality and ridiculous control issues on the part of the employer.

I'm also not sure that hacking is "just a job." For some companies and some people it is, but I've done my best to avoid working for anyone that thinks like that. I believe hacking is a creative endeavor, and in general I don't believe any creative person wants to be beholden to capricious and arbitrary rules surrounding their manner of dress. That's an absurd use of authority.

You know, reading this article half of me was thinking exactly this – it's so goddamn conceited and selfish to write something that says "treat your hackers like the supermen they are and allow them to do whatever they want whenever they want it or else you are stupid and don't deserve them". But the other half of my was thinking: My God, I need to get this to my boss stat.

I don't really consider myself a hacker, but when I'm sitting in front of a computer I expect to be doing one of two things: either I'm solving problems and stretching my mind, or I'm loafing off. If I'm not given work that involves some sort of interesting challenge, then I'll be spending a big chunk of my time cavorting and goofing around. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; I spent a month in an intensive eight-hour-a-day writing program where probably five or six hours were spent looking at YouTube videos and Facebooking. The mind needs its down time. But when the idiotic gruntwork piles up, I find it harder and harder to actually do these stupidly simple things. It feels so pointless. I don't have an especially short attention span, but if I'm to spend six hours in front of a computer, I want to spend that time doing something meaningful, or at least creative. If I wanted mindless work, I'd at least like it to be physical or social in nature.

I've been trying to implement a site since August, and it's been an extremely aggravating experience. I had a rough design finished in two days; implementing it took three months, as I had routine task after routine task hurled my way, stopping me from making any progress. After those three months, I presented the site and was promptly told it was no good, the boss didn't like it – even though it'd been sitting in his inbox since my first week on the job. Now I've redesigned it and waited three more months to get extremely rudimentary feedback (on the level of, "you should put a button in that corner"), and now I'm finally allowed to implement it as an actual site.

I'm on the bottom of the list of "people who actually matter" in my workplace, and I'd feel irritating and self-righteous sending this link to anybody, but it nails every single aspect of why I find my workplace so frustrating. Everybody's smart and nice and doing big, important things, but I feel out-of-place and under-utilized. I could be a hell of a lot more productive if somebody even made half an effort to figure out how I work best in a team, but nope, I just sit in a corner and fiddle my thumbs and get told to post links to things on Twitter. (In two months I finish my position here; does anybody have advice on how I'd go about finding a less teeth-gritting employer?)

What does the East Somerset Railway have to do with this article, and how is the article fluffing the East Somerset Railway?

Some useful individual noted that he is referring to Eric S. Raymond, not the East Somerset Railway, but then deleted their comment after getting downvoted. I will continue to assume that we're all talking about fluffing the East Somerset Railway, because that is more amusing.