Background: technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset. I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.
Any suggestions?
(In case it helps an analogue in the mathematical world might be A Mathematician's Apology or Gödel, Escher, Bach.)
Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlation and causation, and being rigorous about what you accept as real knowledge vs mere opinion or anecdote. The business world, and the tech world, has a lot of "opinion" that masquerades as fact. E.g. "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"
But the OP isn't asking for help themselves, and has said nothing about needing help themselves. Maybe they already understand the business side?
I am not saying that it is but I do think that Stephen Coveys famous "seek first to understand, then to be understood" quote holds a lot of truth. In order to communicate your own perspective on something to someone, you need to have a sense of how theirs differs to yours.
Totally on-the-point advice! The mind of a business-mate is often less ranged and logical than a techy-mate would prefer. So could be your biz patner's way of understanding and discovering what makes a techy mind tick.
If this is to improve understanding between you two, the best way is to agree on zones of responsibility and what it takes to come to trust in result. The hardest for biz folks is to relinquish control, while hardcore tech guys don't like to compromise. Somehow these need to balance.
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Are there any good resources for learning more about this?
If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?
In another instance, people who try one main thing (e.g. applying to a particular college) but who succeed entirely through no effort of their own (e.g. through nepotism), will end up thinking that what they did mattered.
Is it fair of me to assume that this talisman works, and that I can safely climb into a tiger enclosure?
“Creativity Inc.” (Ed Catmull) explains how Pixar manages people & throws in a few insights from mature (post Apple firing) Steve Jobs.
“Managing the Design Factory” (Don Reinertsen) explains how to prioritize projects and analyze a business for bottlenecks in order to minimize cost of delay.
So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good idea to take ESR seriously when he says that you should find a "real" Unix (your technical cofounders are, actuarially speaking, almost certainly macOS people), hand-write lots of HTML, or "serve" th "tribal elders of open source". And the idea that "attitude is not a substitute for competence" among hackers is both funny on a variety of levels, and also a singularly bad note for understanding software developers you work with.
The Mythical Mammoth doesn't have any of these problems, and is a great book, and one worth reading simply so you can have a sense of what building software actually entails (Dynamics of Software Development is another older book that has aged somewhat well --- as have all of Joel Spolsky's posts on Joel on Software; in fact, I'd probably start there). But while this stuff will help you understand the work that's happening on your team, it probably won't do much to help you with the mindset of your team members.
There probably isn't a substitute for just talking to your cofounders, a lot, and asking lots of questions.
And, tptacek, guess whose name I stumbled upon while I was reading his wiki page? Incidentally, I think that section of the wiki is poorly written. I'm left even more confused due to lack of context.
Lots of hackers are introverts. They are wired differently from founders and ceos (who have gravitated towards a life full of constant interactions with people). Hackers don't mind being "in the zone" for hours at a time to work on a problem. Sometimes this means coding, but sometimes this just means having enough quiet time to just sit an think while they turn a problem over in their mind. This is required.
Another side to the introvert thing -- I believe "open plan seating" is a fundamental disconnect between extroverted decision-makers and introverted knowledge workers. It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem-solvers working from home.
Another tip is to ask "what do you think?" then listen. Then wait even longer and listen some more. The absolute best business people I've worked with were masters of this. The worst would already have made decisions and questions were just checkboxes.
(this works everywhere in life, but is particularly relevant to the really smart people at the top of the tech tree)
also, hacker doesn't mean criminals who break into computers. Go with the original meaning (well, the one after carriage driver)
reading:
https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
Do you have a source with data to back that up? The early indicators of the efficacy of WFH that I've seen have been pretty mixed.
I'd also recommend Peopleware
1) True "hackers" value knowledge over money.
2) True "hackers" value doing things once and doing them right, no matter how long that takes. (Compare to the business mindset of "we need it now", or "we needed it yesterday")
3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art.
4) True "hackers" are not about work-arounds. If/when work-arounds are used, it's because there there's an artificial timeframe (as might be found in the corporate world), and there's a lack of understanding in the infrastructure which created the need for that work-around.
But, all of these virtues run counter to the demands of business, which constantly wants more things done faster, cheaper, with more features, more complexity, less testing, and doesn't want to worry about problems that may be caused by all of those things in the future (less accountability) -- as long as customer revenue can be collected today.
You see, a true "hacker's" values -- are completely different than those of big business...
And business people wonder why there's stress and burnout among tech people...
And I’m not a “true” “hacker” if I want to make money?
I thought I was a hacker. But if this is what hackers are, I’m pretty ok with being voted off the island.
Tons of hackers don't give a flying fuck about the "right way" to do something. Hackers are just the people who decide to apply their personal agency and creative talents towards building, altering, breaking and fixing things. There is no unifying motivation for doing so (though admittedly, curiosity is more common than money as a motivator), nor any standardized way of engaging in the process.
There's something to be said about owning your work, but I have to disagree that unhealthy attachment to work products is a universal attribute of technical founder hackers. It's not a kid, it's a thing that was supposed to be the best use of the resources and information available at the time.
I must have confused this point with vanity and retention in projecting my own counterproductive anti-patterns.
Prolific is not the objective for a true hacker, but not me but a guy I know mentioned something about starting projects and seeing the next 5 years of potentially happily working on that project, too.
So being a hacker is a practice, and in some cases it's a lifestyle (when you orient your life around hacking). But it's not a mindset. Some folks are compulsive hackers, some are methodical, some are opportunistic, others are hackers out of necessity - but they're all united by what they do, not how they think.
so maybe use your hacker mindset to deduce this is the mindset then?
If I had to define hacker attitudes, I wouldn't use information collection and application as the standard. Some people carefully select subjects study them in depth, and others just passively pick up information through exposure to experts, and others collect knowledge as a by-product of trying random stuff and failing at it. Hackers (and non-hackers) don't necessarily need to prefer one method to the other. And everyone, even non-hackers collect information - so that's not in itself a special attitude of hackers. The application part is more unique, but how is that different from what artists do?
If I had to choose particular attitudes that would enable someone to practice as a hacker, it would be:
- high tolerance for failure and unexepected behaviors, or even joy in failure under certain circumstances.
- Gains pleasure from novelty (learning new things, having new experiences, finding new applications of things). As a result, most hacker types place more value on things that are obviously flawed, but novel and unique vs things which are perfectly executed but familiar.
I think that second point differentiates hackers from at least some artists (ie, Chefs usually prefer to stick to establish culinary pattersn, musicians playing in a symphony find beauty in the same piece that has been played for hundreds of years). Other experimental artists who do seek novelty (noise music, etc) are basically hackers IMO.
Edit: but to my original point, if you have neither of the attitudes I identified, but do hacker stuff anyhow - you're still a hacker. Those attitude patterns don't take precedence over the actual reality of hacking. There just common in people who continue to do it over their lifetime.
There is almost no real reason for a business side founder to "grok" a hacker mindset. If hackers/developers are the business' customer, then the business owner just needs to find ones to talk to.
Forgive the directness but what I hear in the way the question above is framed is that there is actually some communication misalignment between the tech founder- who considers himself to have a "hacker mindset"- and the business founder, and the "hacker mindset" is a crutch the tech founder is using to protect against some fear or concern being probed by the business founder.
If that is the case, the solution is to drop the defensiveness and just talk about it, not point to some resource as though it is an authority that business people have to worship offering tenets for them to adhere to. A new business only has a chance to succeed if the founders succeed in building a relationship that permits each other to fail and recover, and where they grok each others' mindsets, not some caricature that Eric Raymond made up.
Happy to be completely wrong.
Cheers.
The issue is that OP question is an answer to the real question, which goes unasked.
Cheers.
IMO hacker culture includes but is not limited to computer engineering and science. It is about being so curious about a domain of knowledge that you end up learning it in its little details, and as result, you can bend that domain to your will. Hackers are often working on experimental stuff that have little to no commercial value but are still valuable in their own way. You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.
Examples of (people I consider) hackers are (YouTube channels) Applied Science, cnhlor, and styropyro.
The Jargon File is an artifact of "hacker culture" as it existed in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would hesitate to recommend it nowadays -- it's rather dated, and could lead an unaware reader to some false impressions.