Hacker-centric culture

Posted by on 12 August 2010 12:00 Leave a comment (4) Go to comments

Paul Graham’s essay on “What Happened to Yahoo” is very thought-provoking.

In technology, once you have bad programmers, you’re doomed. I can’t think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.

Paul talks about Yahoo being “taken over by suits and middle managers.” The effect of that is that any “hacker-centric culture” Yahoo might have had got crushed.

Google and Facebook, Paul says, still have this hacker-centric culture, and that’s why they’re so successful. He sums it up nicely:

So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are “in the software business” in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.

I interned for Kynetx earlier this summer and experienced that hacker-centric culture first hand. Nobody there wears a suit. For that matter, people rarely wore collared shirts. Diet Coke was a staple, and it wasn’t uncommon for the people to stay at the office late into the evening. Pretty much everybody is or has been a programmer. And what’s the result? Kynetx makes awesome software.

While I won’t mention where, I’ve also seen the flip-side of this, at a place where collared shirts are required, shorts forbidden, and normal business hours expected. The atmosphere feels more like a corporation than a software development shop. And it shows in the quality of the software they create and the time it takes to deliver it. Because that culture (read: not hacker-centric) has become so engrained in the organization, its chances of matching the innovation and success of companies like Facebook, Google, and Kynetx are significantly reduced. And its chances of attracting the brilliant talent a software shop absolutely needs to survive are also significantly reduced.

Anecdotally, this reminds me of “Simon the IT Dummy.” The whole series is hilarious, by the way–a great parody of the corporate culture so despised by brilliant hackers.

programming
  • http://chesl.es/ chesles

    same experience here..i was offered a full time job with salary and benefits and everything at a place that wasn’t hacker-centric. i was an intern there last summer

  • Anonymous

    Hey, are you talking about where I work? Because if you are, I can probably agree with you. Because we do make some crappy software.

    I like the essay you linked to and a few other essays that he wrote. I read “Apple’s Mistake” and “Microsoft Is Dead”. I especially liked in MID where he says, “…Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.” If only I had a million dollars and a time machine…

    And might I make a plug for Android? I love it! The Android community is so much friendlier and far less fanboy than the Apple community. I just rooted and even wrote a guide for a forum to help others. I couldn’t be happier about switching to a Droid. I love that I might have the first of all “Droid” devices but it’s still as supported as the latest Droid X or Droid Incredible. Try having an iPhone 3G and still be supported. I did and every time Apple announced something new it was like they said, “Hey, I know you just bought that phone, but now it’s ancient.”

    Anyway, I could go on and on… But I just wanted to comment and say I liked the post.

  • http://globalconstant.scnay.com/ Steve Nay

    Where you work…yeah. I wasn’t actually thinking of that when I wrote the post, but I think it fits. There might be other issues there, though. Anyway…topic for another discussion.

    And I can say the same thing about the webOS community. It’s a whole lot smaller than the user base of iOS or Android, but the supporters are really committed to the platform. Plus there’s a lot of support from Palm themselves (the fact that they got bought out by HP didn’t change that one bit). These open platforms like Android and webOS have awesome communities, and I think that’s essential to their success and longevity.

    Thanks for reading!

  • Anonymous

    Well, if you haven’t already, read “Apple’s Mistake” by the same guy. He talks about how programmers will program for the devices they have. And I think that sums up the communities for Android or webOS. It’s funny how the devices people choose to love say so much about their personalities.