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How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

aeon.co

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Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#71

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #55
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead relying on mercenary college grads who put up with the cost and the crazy for a few years before moving on to a more fulfilling job Good mercenaries know a lot more than fresh grads.

I'm not sure what your point is. Turnover is expensive, and the presumption that one can tough it out at a big company before taking a more lucrative offer elsewhere compounds the problem. This is particularly acute for young consultants at big names like McKinsey, where the first Google result is an ad for ex-McKinsey consultants. When engineers leave before they become managers, it forces the company to promote fro…

A company that hires the less skilled ought to lose money, and that could work against the forming of a mono-culture.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#72

Post by vezzy-fnord »

mason240 wrote: post #66
gue5t wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers) the way you envision than to have free time for hobbies intrinsically inbued with external relevance. The prevalence of computers in modern commerce makes this easy to overlook. Hacking isn't about building things the rest of th…

>The point of being a hacker (in the traditional sense) is that your utility function is completely wack. You prefer to make the lights on the screen (and by proxy, the state of the registers) Acquiring money is not the only way to profit; it's whatever your "utility function" is. Money is just an easy one to quantify and analyze. If you spend 10 hours on Saturday freelancing for $130/hr versus spending 10 hour worki…

How is this intrinsic to capitalism, exactly? It's true for any society in general where people are relatively free of coercion so as to devote time to their self-interest. The fact that you're speaking of capitalism in a mixed market economy shows this.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#73

Post by andyl »

Gigamouse wrote: post #13

For those who think this article is too long, here is summary: This gist of the article is that the hacker impulse or ‘hacker ethic’ is a natural human response to large alienating infrastructures that allow little agency on the part of individuals. Hackers take different forms, but are identified by 1) a tendency towards creative rebellion that seeks to increase the agency of underdogs in the face of systems that ar…

That's a summary? tldr

My summary: the article is a cultural-marxist parable. The victim is the hacker. The oppressor is the yuppie. In olden days the hacker lived in a sort of eden, but now the oppressor has trapped the hacker in webs of capitalist bondage.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#74

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #71
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is. Turnover is expensive, and the presumption that one can tough it out at a big company before taking a more lucrative offer elsewhere compounds the problem. This is particularly acute for young consultants at big names like McKinsey, where the first Google result is an ad for ex-McKinsey consultants. When engineers leave before they become managers, it forces the company to promote fro…

A company that hires the less skilled ought to lose money, and that could work against the forming of a mono-culture.

It's not about skill, it's about loyalty. These companies are losing money precisely because they hire great people and fail to keep them. If you ran a major company, would you like the perception that the job you offer is only meant to be a resume-padding stepping stone? What happens when those people leave and new ones have to be filtered from application pools, acquainted with your teams and business practices, trained to use your systems, and then you have to repeat the process in a year or two? What does that do for morale among the people who stay?

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#75

Post by thwest »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #30

When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…

The overlap between communitarian student protesters and Wall Street focused old money elite isn't zero but I find it very odd that you would paint them as a joint monolith. There are important tensions between those two cultures that you erase with such a claim.

(Also the timing is bizarre, the hippie image was already solidified in the summer of '68, but the old money came in increasing tides of the 80s 90s and 00s.)

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#76

Post by davexunit »

amyjess wrote: post #43
Gigamouse wrote: post #13

For those who think this article is too long, here is summary: This gist of the article is that the hacker impulse or ‘hacker ethic’ is a natural human response to large alienating infrastructures that allow little agency on the part of individuals. Hackers take different forms, but are identified by 1) a tendency towards creative rebellion that seeks to increase the agency of underdogs in the face of systems that ar…

The article just sounds fundamentally flawed to me. Let's consult the Jargon File. It was written by old-school hackers, and it hasn't been updated in years. It should have a handle on what it means to be a hacker. Let their definition of "hacker": http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html The first seven senses all give the same impression: a hacker is somebody who likes to tinker with stuff out of intellectual…

>Let's consult the Jargon File.

That's not the real jargon file. This is:

http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#78

Post by danielweber »

andyl wrote: post #73
Gigamouse wrote: post #13

For those who think this article is too long, here is summary: This gist of the article is that the hacker impulse or ‘hacker ethic’ is a natural human response to large alienating infrastructures that allow little agency on the part of individuals. Hackers take different forms, but are identified by 1) a tendency towards creative rebellion that seeks to increase the agency of underdogs in the face of systems that ar…

That's a summary? tldr My summary: the article is a cultural-marxist parable. The victim is the hacker. The oppressor is the yuppie. In olden days the hacker lived in a sort of eden, but now the oppressor has trapped the hacker in webs of capitalist bondage.

I really worry about these people trying to free me from a high income career and telling me it's for my own good.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#79

Post by Balgair »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #30

When I realized that the kids of the old money elite began to see Silicon Valley, not Wall Street, as the means to big money, I decided I could never go back. The elitists came to Northern California - a vanguard of social liberalism, student protest, and most importantly communitarianism - and brought their elitism with them. Northern California still exists in the nostalgic hippie image of the 60s, but it's compart…

Portland, Denver, Nashville, Seattle (less so), even Boise are starting to take up that old mantel. I agree though, SF is now the gold rush town stultified by takes and not givers. Other commenters mention the Burn and that some SFers want the Burners gone, a mystery to a Bay Area native that left. I guess things really have changed there. The Burn was all about participation, not gawking, but recent Burns have seen that change into entertainment that you are not acting in as well as viewing. It seems that SF became the same as we see in the Castro. Oh well, I'll take my Rocky Mountains then.

Re: How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos

#80

Post by logicalmind »

daveloyall wrote: post #57
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #40

This hits home. I read hacker news and sites like it, but I know in my heart that the people here are not, for the most part, hackers.

Yeah. When I first came here, I was shocked how often the comments about some cool tech would be focused on how to monetize it, how to commoditize it. After a while, I just accepted as fact the existence of a large contingent of "hipster web 2.0 wanks" (well, that's the tag I use internally). But today I'll start an experiment. I'll adjust the internal tag to recognize them by their true name. An old name... Posers.…

And this whole thing came full circle once Paul Graham stepped away. YCombinator was initially cool because it was a hack on the incubator/vc scene and a successful one. Now it seems more like an MBA-esque scheme replete with spreadsheets.
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