Great Hackers, Bad Hardware

at around evening time on Wednesday, the 28th of July 2004 by Chad

This article called “Great Hackers” brought back memories of working at Black Oak…

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.”

I know this will annoy the hell out of people, but I hated working on ASS400s. It didn’t do anything well. You either tune it for batch or interactive. Couldn’t handle both. Needed really ugly (Client Access/400) software just to connect to it. Lotus Notes on the thing was a major kludge.
But some people swore by it. For what it was supposed to do, namely be a record keeping platform, it was pretty decent. But IBM tried to make it all things to everyone, which didn’t work. Right tool, right job. Simple concept.
The article continues on to one thing that drives me crazy. Cubicles.

After 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 you work in, not something you work despite.

Working in a damn cubicle drives me crazy. The noise is so bad sometimes I have to walk outside, or hide somewhere for 10 minutes. Its the biggest corporate lie of all. Cubicles for all, it builds teamwork, and familiarity, blah blah blah. No, its because its cheaper! You don’t have to lie to people. Just say all the money saved on offices go towards salaries. At least that lie is somewhat believable.
And to those who know me. Is this me?

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. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.

It seems like it some days… Please take a few minutes and read the article. Its good stuff if you work in or around technology types…