Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)

ericsink.com

29 pointswyday12 comments

When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to.

Ay, there's the rub: keeping highly productive people's interests aligned with the goals of the organization can be hard, particularly for tasks that don't take advantage of whatever it is they like about what they do. Organizations need to realize that this is the same for all great individuals, hackers or otherwise. The type of people ISVs like SourceGear need for success is probably different from the type needed by YCombinator startups.

Exactly, this is a problem in any profession. When you run into a situation where you need someone to come in and fix something or do, at first, seemingly mindless work, it is incredibly hard to the right person. I guess the solution is to try and make sure you never create these 'opputunities' for future hires.

Here here. Very insightful. I often wonder... I've made a pretty bad employee so far, which is one of the reason I'm a consultant for my cash monies and start companies whenever I can afford to. But... then again I've never had a really interesting job... ever.

I wonder if I would make a great employee at some kick ass company doing interesting research, large or small?

I don't think he's actually read much of PG's writing. For example, he says "great hackers" aren't willing to do grunt work, but the way you get Robert Morris to do your Unix admin is to give him a big chunk of equity!

Smart people are perfectly happy to do mundane or tedious tasks a) in support of a grand vision or b) for a big pile of money. That's why movie FX and games pays so badly, and SAP implementation pays so much. If you're in the middle somewhere, well, complaining about it won't make much difference.

"Wednesday, August 04, 2004"

Pretty positive it's been posted here before too.

Yep: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244621

Edit: And the URLs are identical; does the dupe-blocker only apply to submissions less than a year old?

Sorry, I didn't catch it the first time. Thanks for the link to the original, it has quite a lively discussion.

I remember reading a discussion on a post that was a dupe of another that was over a year old. PG said it was cool and that a year was enough time.

The expression in the title is incomplete. Let me fix it:

  Great Hacker != Great Hire unless (Good Company && Interesting Work)

That's better, and now you don't have the read the article, which is just some whipped-sounding guy complaining that all the smart programmers don't want to waste their time doing telephone support for his Visual SourceSafe tool.

some whipped-sounding guy

He owns the company. Does he also hold the whip?

Why not. He chooses to work with VSS, so we know he enjoys self-flagellation ..

I can't believe this is getting upvoted. He chooses a market where lots of desperate people got locked into the wrong choice and he makes it halfway bearable for them. This is called winning.

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