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Great Hackers



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July 2004(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)
A few months ago I finished a new 
book, 
and in reviews I keep
noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say
nothing of "idiotic.''I didn't mean to make the book controversial.  I was trying to make
it efficient.  I didn't want to waste people's time telling them
things they already knew.  It's more efficient just to give them
the diffs.  But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book.EdisonsThere's no controversy about which idea is most controversial:
the suggestion that variation in wealth might not be as big a
problem as we think.I didn't say in the book that variation in wealth was in itself a
good thing.  I said in some situations it might be a sign of good
things.  A throbbing headache is not a good thing, but it can be
a sign of a good thing-- for example, that you're recovering
consciousness after being hit on the head.Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity.
(In a society of one, they're identical.) And that
is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation
in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas
Edison.  It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity.
If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how
much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than
the worst?  A factor of two?  Whereas when you hand people a complex tool
like a computer, the variation in what they can do with
it is enormous.That's not a new idea.  <NAME> wrote about it in 1974, and
the study he quoted was published in 1968.  But I think he
underestimated the variation between programmers.  He wrote about productivity in lines
of code:  the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth
the time.  But what if the problem isn't given? In programming, as
in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding
what problems to solve.  Imagination is hard to measure, but
in practice it dominates the kind of productivity that's measured
in lines of code.Productivity varies in any field, but there are few in which it
varies so much.  The variation between programmers
is so great that it becomes a difference in kind.  I don't
think this is something intrinsic to programming, though.  In every field,
technology magnifies differences in productivity.  I think what's
happening in programming is just that we have a lot of technological
leverage.  But in every field the lever is getting longer, so the
variation we see is something that more and more fields will see
as time goes on.  And the success of companies, and countries, will
depend increasingly on how they deal with it.If variation in productivity increases with technology, then the
contribution of the most productive individuals will not only be
disproportionately large, but will actually grow with time.  When
you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1%
of its members, you lose big if something (whether Viking raids,
or central planning) drags their productivity down to the average.If we want to get the most out of them, we need to understand these
especially productive people.  What motivates them?  What do they
need to do their jobs?  How do you recognize them? How do you
get them to come and work for you?  And then of course there's the
question, how do you become one?More than MoneyI know a handful of super-hackers, so I sat down and thought about
what they have in common.  Their defining quality is probably that
they really love to program.  Ordinary programmers write code to pay
the bills.  Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun,
and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.
This isn't quite true.  It is true that all they really care about
is doing interesting work.  But if you make enough money, you get
to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are
attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money.
But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they
care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for
it.Economically, this is a fact of the greatest importance, because
it means you don't have to pay great hackers anything like what
they're worth.  A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times
as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky
to get paid three times as much.  As I'll explain later, this is
partly because great hackers don't know how good they are.  But
it's also because money is not the main thing they want.What do hackers want?  Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools.
In fact, that's an understatement.  Good hackers find it unbearable
to use bad tools.  They'll simply refuse to work on projects with
the wrong infrastructure.At a startup I once worked for, one of the things pinned up on our
bulletin board was an ad from IBM.  It was a picture of an AS400,
and the headline read, I think, "hackers despise
it.'' [1]When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're
not just making a technical decision.  You're also making a social
decision, and this may be the more important of the two.  For
example, if your company wants to write some software, it might
seem a prudent choice to write it in Java.  But when you choose a
language, you're also choosing a community.  The programmers you'll
be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as
smart as the
ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.
And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the
language you choose.  Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers
prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative
merits of those languages.Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view
languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on
Betamax.  The thing about languages, though, is that they're not
just standards.  If you have to move bits over a network, by all
means use TCP/IP.  But a programming language isn't just a format.
A programming language is a medium of expression.I've read that Java has just overtaken Cobol as the most popular
language.  As a standard, you couldn't wish for more.  But as a
medium of expression, you could do a lot better.  Of all the great
programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily
program in Java.  And of all the great programmers I can think of
who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software.
Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control.
Good hackers insist on control.  This is part of what makes them
good hackers:  when something's broken, they need to fix it.  You
want them to feel this way about the software they're writing for
you.  You shouldn't be surprised when they feel the same way about
the operating system.A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new
startup he was involved with.  It sounded promising.  But the next
time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software
on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer
to be their chief technical officer.  When I heard this, I thought,
these guys are doomed.  One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate
hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have
had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine
a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have
a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had
to be built on NT. [2]The Final FrontierAfter software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably
his office.  Big companies think the function of office space is to express
rank.  But hackers use their offices for more than that: they
use their office as a place to think in.  And if you're a technology
company, their thoughts are your product.  So making hackers work
in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory
where the air is full of soot.The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with
good reason.  All the hackers I know despise them.  The mere prospect
of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on
hard problems.  If you want to get real work done in an office with
cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or
late or on a weekend, when no one else is there.  Don't companies
realize this is a sign that something is broken?  An office
environment is supposed to be something that helps
you work, not something you work despite.Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle,
even the CEO.  But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously
they still view office space as a badge of rank.  Note too that
Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house.
They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where
presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft.
I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a
door.  Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to
work where you can actually get work done.   And you know, Microsoft
is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop
software in house.  Not well, perhaps, but well enough.If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at
what they do at home.  At home, hackers can arrange things themselves
so they can get the most done.  And when they work at home, hackers
don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors.  They
work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere
to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass
boxes set in acres of parking lots.  They have a sofa they can take
a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at
their desk, pretending to work.  There's no crew of people with
vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime
hacking hours.  There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate
retreats or team-building exercises.  And when you look at what
they're doing on that computer, you'll find it reinforces what I
said earlier about tools.  They may have to use Java and Windows
at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you're
more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.Indeed, these statistics about Cobol or Java being the most popular
language can be misleading.  What we ought to look at, if we want
to know what tools are best, is what hackers choose when they can
choose freely-- that is, in projects of their own.  When you ask
that question, you find that open source operating systems already
have a dominant market share, and the number one language is probably
Perl.InterestingAlong with good tools, hackers want interesting projects.  What
makes a project interesting?  Well, obviously overtly sexy
applications like stealth planes or special effects software would
be interesting to work on.  But any application can be interesting
if it poses novel technical challenges.  So it's hard to predict
which problems hackers will like, because some become
interesting only when the people working on them discover a new
kind of solution.  Before ITA
(who wrote the software inside Orbitz),
the people working on airline fare searches probably thought it
was one of the most boring applications imaginable.  But ITA made
it interesting by 
redefining the problem in a more ambitious way.I think the same thing happened at Google.  When Google was founded,
the conventional wisdom among the so-called portals was that search
was boring and unimportant.  But the guys at Google didn't think
search was boring, and that's why they do it so well.This is an area where managers can make a difference.  Like a parent
saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in
ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a
more interesting one.  <NAME> seems to be particularly good at
this, in part simply by having high standards.  There were a lot
of small, inexpensive computers before the Mac.  He redefined the
problem as: make one that's beautiful.  And that probably drove
the developers harder than any carrot or stick could.They certainly delivered.  When the Mac first appeared, you didn't
even have to turn it on to know it would be good; you could tell
from the case.  A few weeks ago I was walking along the street in
Cambridge, and in someone's trash I saw what appeared to be a Mac
carrying case.  I looked inside, and there was a Mac SE.  I carried
it home and plugged it in, and it booted.  The happy Macintosh
face, and then the finder.  My God, it was so simple.  It was just
like ... Google.Hackers like to work for people with high standards.  But it's not
enough just to be exacting.  You have to insist on the right things.
Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself.  I've
seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers.  Really
there should be two articles: one about what to do if
you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not.  And the 
second could probably be condensed into two words:  give up.The problem is not so much the day to day management.  Really good
hackers are practically self-managing.  The problem is, if you're
not a hacker, you can't tell who the good hackers are.  A similar
problem explains why American cars are so ugly.  I call it the
design paradox.  You might think that you could make your products
beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them.  But if
you yourself don't have good taste, 
how are you going to recognize
a good designer?  By definition you can't tell from his portfolio.
And you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had,
because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by
fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third.
There's no way around it:  you can't manage a process intended to
produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is.  American
cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with
bad taste.Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive,
or even frivolous.  It is neither.  To drive design, a manager must
be the most demanding user of a company's products.  And if you
have really good taste, you can, as <NAME> does, make satisfying
you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.Nasty Little ProblemsIt's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting:
those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have
to solve a lot of nasty little ones.  One of the worst kinds of
projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's
full of bugs.  Another is when you have to customize
something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.
To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand
cuts.The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you
don't learn anything from them.   Writing a compiler is interesting
because it teaches you what a compiler is.  But writing an interface
to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the
bugs are random.  [3] So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good
hackers avoid nasty little problems.  It's more a question of
self-preservation.  Working on nasty little problems makes you
stupid.  Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid
cheeseburgers.Of course some problems inherently have this character.  And because
of supply and demand, they pay especially well.  So a company that
found a way to get great hackers to work on tedious problems would
be very successful.  How would you do it?One place this happens is in startups.  At our startup we had 
<NAME> working as a system administrator.  That's like having the
Rolling Stones play at a bar mitzvah.  You can't hire that kind of
talent.  But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies
of which they're the founders.  [4]Bigger companies solve the problem by partitioning the company.
They get smart people to work for them by establishing a separate
R&D department where employees don't have to work directly on
customers' nasty little problems. [5] In this model, the research
department functions like a mine. They produce new ideas; maybe
the rest of the company will be able to use them.You may not have to go to this extreme.  
Bottom-up programming
suggests another way to partition the company: have the smart people
work as toolmakers.  If your company makes software to do x, have
one group that builds tools for writing software of that type, and
another that uses these tools to write the applications.  This way
you might be able to get smart people to write 99% of your code,
but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would
be in a traditional research department.  The toolmakers would have
users, but they'd only be the company's own developers.  [6]If Microsoft used this approach, their software wouldn't be so full
of security holes, because the less smart people writing the actual
applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating
memory.  Instead of writing Word directly in C, they'd be plugging
together big Lego blocks of Word-language.  (Duplo, I believe, is
the technical term.)ClumpingAlong with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other
good hackers.  Great hackers tend to clump together-- sometimes
spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc.   So you won't attract good
hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create
for them.  The tendency to clump means it's more like the square
of the environment.  So it's winner take all.  At any given time,
there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to
work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer
great hackers, you'll have zero.Having great hackers is not, by itself, enough to make a company
successful.  It works well for Google and ITA, which are two of
the hot spots right now, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or
Xerox.  Sun had a good run for a while, but their business model
is a down elevator.  In that situation, even the best hackers can't
save you.I think, though, that all other things being equal, a company that
can attract great hackers will have a huge advantage.  There are
people who would disagree with this.  When we were making the rounds
of venture capital firms in the 1990s, several told us that software
companies didn't win by writing great software, but through brand,
and dominating channels, and doing the right deals.They really seemed to believe this, and I think I know why.  I
think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at least unconsciously,
is the next Microsoft.  And of course if Microsoft is your model,
you shouldn't be looking for companies that hope to win by writing
great software.  But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft,
because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other
company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be
the next IBM.It's a mistake to use Microsoft as a model, because their whole
culture derives from that one lucky break.  Microsoft is a bad data
point.  If you throw them out, you find that good products do tend
to win in the market.  What VCs should be looking for is the next
Apple, or the next Google.I think <NAME> knows this.  What worries him about Google is
not the power of their brand, but the fact that they have
better hackers. [7]
RecognitionSo who are the great hackers?  How do you know when you meet one?
That turns out to be very hard.  Even hackers can't tell.  I'm
pretty sure now that my friend <NAME> is a great hacker.
You may have read on Slashdot how he made his 
own Segway.  The
remarkable thing about this project was that he wrote all the
software in one day (in Python, incidentally).For Trevor, that's
par for the course.  But when I first met him, I thought he was a
complete idiot.  He was standing in <NAME>'s office babbling
at him about something or other, and I remember standing behind
him making frantic gestures at Robert to shoo this nut out of his
office so we could go to lunch.  Robert says he misjudged Trevor
at first too.  Apparently when Robert first met him, Trevor had
just begun a new scheme that involved writing down everything about
every aspect of his life on a stack of index cards, which he carried
with him everywhere.  He'd also just arrived from Canada, and had
a strong Canadian accent and a mullet.The problem is compounded by the fact that hackers, despite their
reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of
effort into seeming smart.  When I was in grad school I used to
hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. It was kind of intimidating
at first.  Everyone there spoke so fast.  But after a while I
learned the trick of speaking fast.  You don't have to think any
faster; just use twice as many words to say everything.  With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to tell good
hackers when you meet them.  I can't tell, even now.  You also
can't tell from their resumes.  It seems like the only way to judge
a hacker is to work with him on something.And this is the reason that high-tech areas 
only happen around universities.  The active ingredient
here is not so much the professors as the students.  Startups grow up
around universities because universities bring together promising young
people and make them work on the same projects.  The
smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together
they cook up new projects of their own.Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him,
hackers themselves can't tell how good they are.  This is true to
a degree in most fields.  I've found that people who
are great at something are not so much convinced of their own
greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
But it's particularly hard for hackers to know how good they are,
because it's hard to compare their work.  This is easier in most
other fields.  In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's
fastest.  Even in math there seems to be a general consensus about
which problems are hard to solve, and what constitutes a good
solution.  But hacking is like writing.  Who can say which of two
novels is better?  Certainly not the authors.With hackers, at least, other hackers can tell.  That's because,
unlike novelists, hackers collaborate on projects.  When you get
to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn
pretty quickly how hard they hit them back.  But hackers can't
watch themselves at work.  So if you ask a great hacker how good
he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know.  He's not just
being modest.  He really doesn't know.And none of us know, except about people we've actually worked
with.  Which puts us in a weird situation: we don't know who our
heroes should be.  The hackers who become famous tend to become
famous by random accidents of PR.  Occasionally I need to give an
example of a great hacker, and I never know who to use.  The first
names that come to mind always tend to be people I know personally,
but it seems lame to use them.  So, I think, maybe I should say
<NAME>, or <NAME>, or <NAME>, or someone famous
like that.  But I have no idea if these guys are great hackers.
I've never worked with them on anything.If there is a Michael Jordan of hacking, no one knows, including
him.CultivationFinally, the question the hackers have all been wondering about:
how do you become a great hacker?  I don't know if it's possible
to make yourself into one.  But it's certainly possible to do things
that make you stupid, and if you can make yourself stupid, you
can probably make yourself smart too.The key to being a good hacker may be to work on what you like.
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.  I don't know if this is cause or effect; it may be
both.To do something well you have to love it.  
So to the extent you
can preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it
well.  Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at
age 14.  If you're worried that your current job is rotting your
brain, it probably is.The best hackers tend to be smart, of course, but that's true in
a lot of fields.  Is there some quality that's unique to hackers?
I asked some friends, and the number one thing they mentioned was
curiosity.  
I'd always supposed that all smart people were curious--
that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge.  But
apparently hackers are particularly curious, especially about how
things work.  That makes sense, because programs are in effect
giant descriptions of how things work.Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate-- their
ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside their own
heads.''  I've certainly noticed this.  And I've heard several 
hackers say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at
all.   So maybe hacking does require some special ability to focus.
Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their
head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just
that line but the whole program around it.  <NAME>
wrote that <NAME>'s success as a basketball player was due
partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision.  "Perfect'' eyesight
means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision.  <NAME>
had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor.
Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability.  (I cheat by
using a very dense language, 
which shrinks the court.)This could explain the disconnect over cubicles.  Maybe the people
in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter,
have no idea that working in a cubicle feels to a hacker like having
one's brain in a blender.  (Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism
are true, knows all too well.)One difference I've noticed between great hackers and smart people
in general is that hackers are more 
politically incorrect.  To the
extent there is a secret handshake among good hackers, it's when they
know one another well enough to express opinions that would get
them stoned to death by the general public.  And I can see why
political incorrectness would be a useful quality in programming.
Programs are very complex and, at least in the hands of good
programmers, very fluid.  In such situations it's helpful to have
a habit of questioning assumptions.Can you cultivate these qualities?  I don't know.  But you can at
least not repress them.  So here is my best shot at a recipe.  If
it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do
it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have
to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise),
and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.
All the great hackers I know seem to have made that deal, though
perhaps none of them had any choice in the matter.Notes
[1] In fairness, I have to say that IBM makes decent hardware.  I
wrote this on an IBM laptop.[2] They did turn out to be doomed.  They shut down a few months
later.[3] I think this is what people mean when they talk
about the "meaning of life."  On the face of it, this seems an 
odd idea.  Life isn't an expression; how could it have meaning?
But it can have a quality that feels a lot like meaning.  In a project
like a compiler, you have to solve a lot of problems, but the problems
all fall into a pattern, as in a signal.  Whereas when the problems
you have to solve are random, they seem like noise.
[4] Einstein at one point worked designing refrigerators. (He had equity.)[5] It's hard to say exactly what constitutes research in the
computer world, but as a first approximation, it's software that
doesn't have users.I don't think it's publication that makes the best hackers want to work
in research departments.  I think it's mainly not having to have a
three hour meeting with a product manager about problems integrating
the Korean version of Word 13.27 with the talking paperclip.[6] Something similar has been happening for a long time in the
construction industry. When you had a house built a couple hundred
years ago, the local builders built everything in it.  But increasingly
what builders do is assemble components designed and manufactured
by someone else.  This has, like the arrival of desktop publishing,
given people the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but it
is certainly more efficient.[7] Google is much more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.
Probably more dangerous than any other company has ever been.  Not
least because they're determined to fight.  On their job listing
page, they say that one of their "core values'' is "Don't be evil.''
From a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a
statement would merely be eccentric.  But I think all of us in the
computer world recognize who that is a declaration of war on.Thanks to <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME>
for reading earlier versions of this talk.Audio of talkThe Python ParadoxJapanese TranslationRussian TranslationItalian TranslationSpanish Translation



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