Reading 03: Day Jobs & Degrees

I think Paul Graham’s hacker persona shares strong political and personal characteristics with Levy’s hackers but that Graham’s conception of hacking as an activity is different than Levy’s formulation. The hacker type in Graham’s description is an anti-conformist who is programming out of love for the sport, so to say. On page 23 of Hackers & Painters he begins a multiple page tirade against the large, corporate conception of hacking and how off-base it is for intentionally dampening creative output. This evokes a type of purity in the heart of true hackers that Levy’s MIT and hardware hackers surely would share too. However, Levy’s two distinct types of hackers would have strong thoughts about Graham’s conceptualization of hacking as an exercise akin to painting. First, I think the MIT hackers would be offended by the analogy. In their work they valued bottom up, whole system design and seemed very calculative in their work. Graham’s suggestion that hacking should be sloppy and on-the-fly as well as the idea that hackers should be willing to stand on the shoulders of others and not feel they have to reinvent the computing wheel themselves seem to fly in the face of the MIT approach. Levy’s California hardware hackers would surely be more amicable to Graham’s open source, hobby hacker who does what they have to at their “day job” to support their on the side hacking, but I think the analogy to painting is a bit too formal for their attitude. Talking about painters and architects evokes the sense of someone doing something very formal using well-studied and understood tools to create a pre-imagined scene. The hardware hackers were doing something much more abstract and less well-defined. In any case, it is a small difference and the two would likely get along really well at happy hour. In fact, I think this minute difference is probably due to the passing of time and the formalization of the computing field.

I found Graham’s “computer science as Yugoslavia” discussion really compelling. It’s kind of a lot of things and they’re not really all that similar. He describes the mathematicians using software so they can get DARPA grants, the engineers doing real-time autopsy on systems to understand the natural science aspects, and then the hackers who are trying to make interesting software. He goes on to bash formal research and theory courses because they force people into uninteresting problems for the sake of publishing or that they overcomplicate what could just simply be beautiful. Of course, understanding time and space complexity is a valuable tool to make elegant and performant software, but on the whole, what we do in computer science educations isn’t really what makes good hackers, the people who are so enthralled by the subject they turn into dedicated hobbyists. I guess I don’t know if that’s what “computer science” degrees are even trying to create, but maybe they should. At any rate, Graham draws out interesting parallels between other maker fields of studies that cause computer science to differ from traditional sciences. As a personal example, I can’t be coding without listening to music. My other engineering friends think it’s insane and should be distracting, but coding isn’t some exercise in maintaining trains of thought, it’s creative problem solving-almost artistic. It’s the kind of thing painters and designers do when they work. I had never thought of my music habit in this parallel until reading about Graham’s art studies.

Finally, I’ll leave a quick thought on the class discussion and reading about nerds being unpopular. In the reading and the class discussion about the reputation of nerds and geeks there seems to be an implicit collusion against “nerds” from all the cool kids. I don’t think this is an intrinsic natural law that is unchangeable as it seemed to be taken for. In fact, later in the readings Graham solves the problem himself without realizing it. When he was discussing that good hackers are empathetic because it allows them to create things just work for users, he recounts his own journey towards becoming an empathizer. He says that he avoided developing the skill early on because for STEM minded folks you can succeed without it and early in life, he saw it as a ploy for others to get them to do what they wanted rather than what he wanted. I think this is what is missing from the nerd/geek persona that creates such a divide early on. They’re just not naturally relatable, and they haven’t been taught how to make themselves so. With the proper help and experiences in socialization, it is possible for nerds to avoid ostracization in high school.