Hacker mindset to me is the predictable ability to swap between divergent and convergent thinking at will to discover optimal paths to desired outcomes regardless of means, context, biases, etc. — frequently just for the fun of it, to learn more, to be intentionally different, etc.
Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
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Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#72Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters?
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#73I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting. Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlati…
> As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#74Maciej Ceglowski has a good bit in one of his idlewords posts about how the "what makes hackers tick" genre is full of pieces that are really "how to be someone just like the author". There's probably nobody that remark applies to more than ESR, and ESR is probably not someone you'd want to work to resemble more closely. So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good id…
Mythical Mammoth is a delightful correction.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#75True spherical hackers in the vacuum want to be undisputable experts in complex topics and as this often mixes with sheer egoism, they like to flex with this knowledge and remind others how unsophisticated others are. But ideal spherical hackers are rare. Moreover, smart people like to learn new stuff not only about the tech side of things, so if they sniff you're trying to manipulate them, they'll pay you back with the same coin and you'll get a team of cynical snarky devs. If you want to become a leader for them, you'll have to earn their respect (again, a lazy attempt to earn it by slipping how you know some python will dump your rating that very moment, as that would be seen as a cheap manipulation). A leader for them can be a super knowledgeable jerk (e.g. Linus) or a super humble guy who sends the message "you know more than me, so I'll step out of your way". In other words, if you really want to step on their ego by telling them what to do, you'd better be an undisputable expert, or expect a delayed counter reaction.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#76I'm with the people asking "why."
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.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#77True spherical hackers in the vacuum want to be undisputable experts in complex topics and as this often mixes with sheer egoism, they like to flex with this knowledge and remind others how unsophisticated others are. But ideal spherical hackers are rare. Moreover, smart people like to learn new stuff not only about the tech side of things, so if they sniff you're trying to manipulate them, they'll pay you back with…
The turn of phrase "true spherical hackers in the vacuum" is quite clever and entertaining, but I submit that it is unlikely to be grokked by someone who does not already have familiarity with hacker-isms/culture. :)
(And of course they likely wouldn't understand "grok" either").
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#78For me the mindset means a lot of different things.
1. Go beyond what people tell you. Discover your own truth.
2. The love for tinkering.
3. The idea that what you bought is your own and you can do anything with it.
4. To use something in a way that is completely not how it is intended.
5. Deep reverse engineering dives.
6. The guilty pleasure of picking digital locks.
I think I've books in all those directions.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#79The answer's simple. You're looking right at it!
Don't give them Mythical Man Month or Eric Raymond or any of that stuff: dated and esoteric. My interpretation of your post is basically that the business founder is going to be (involved in) hiring, and will be working with several software engineers soon. And you want to help them understand what makes the engineers tick: the sorts of things they find interesting, the sorts of ways they talk about it.
So that's easy. Tell them to look at HN, pick an article with a technical theme that's getting a lot of attention. Read the article, and then read the comment threads.
Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?
#80I'm with the people asking "why." 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 h…
I don't think I agree with this. I think what the poster is looking for is how to help the more businessy founder understand the engineers that (s)he's necessarily going to be hiring and working with. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible and worthwhile goal and one that will probably help their start up have a healthy culture in its early months/years.