Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers • Hacker News Board

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#61

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:22 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #57

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

A good hacker is wasted in public service. Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar? Who has more impact on education, a good elementary teacher or Sal Khan? Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor, why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi? The hacker skillset is a lever big eno…

[deleted]

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#62

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:25 PM UTC

jakejake wrote: post #45

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

It sounds totally believable that your friends are having trouble finding work. It doesn't sound very believable that they are turning down six figure jobs left and right, though. Unless you just meant that they chose a career path where there are no six figure jobs?

[deleted]

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#63

Post by amirmc » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #57

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

A good hacker is wasted in public service. Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar? Who has more impact on education, a good elementary teacher or Sal Khan? Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor, why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi? The hacker skillset is a lever big eno…

I find this strange and short-sighted (and also a little naive). Does the "hacker skillset" now suddenly include the ability to navigate complex regulatory environments, deal with sales, irate customers and the myriad other things that come from running a business (since that's what most of your examples are about)? I've no doubt that people can learn those skills but to presume that they're the default skill set of "hackers" is unreasonable.

Also, if no-one with technical skills ever goes into public service, how can anyone expect the technical competence of those services to get any better?

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#64

Post by jbooth » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:30 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #51

jbooth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is great mythology, but if those people ever existed in the first place, they've been pushed out over the last 15 years of effective budget cuts (compared to costs of employment like healthcare) in most domestic public service roles. It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy. Yes…

So obviously hyperbole for colour. Thought that was clear from including a coffee-fetcher for the coffee-fetcher. But it's fact that that getting to any real responsibility involves playing a long game of politics that inherently doesn't value merit very highly - and that the guy who saves 1% at Facebook did not have to jump through those hoops to get to there. Which loops back to my assertion that it's not a sound c…

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/not-intended-to-be-a-fa...

I don't think the various departments that have been getting killed on budgets for the last 15 years "magically" became more efficient -- I think they did, objectively, do almost the same job with less resources in terms of headcount and pay freezes. No magic about it, that's based on actual numbers.

You're alleging that something being private or public is a bigger deal than the normal organizational dynamics of bureaucracies. This is the attitude that leads to us writing blank checks for the F-35 no matter how many times they double the cost, while furloughing civil servants across all layers of government because there's not enough money to go around.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#65

Post by peterwwillis » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #57

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

A good hacker is wasted in public service. Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar? Who has more impact on education, a good elementary teacher or Sal Khan? Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor, why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi? The hacker skillset is a lever big eno…

This is a great example of why a good hacker should work in public service.

Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar

Because an environmental non-profit might make immediate changes that save people's lives. A non-profit might put enough pressure on a company to stop polluting groundwater or destroying fragile ecosystems. With Tesla you'll help rich people use less gas.

Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor

Because PGP and Tor are used by computer nerds and edge cases, but privacy legislation is used by everyone.

Why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi

Either way you're fundraising. You could work as a fundraiser for a political appointee, and they could get elected to office and change how the entire country works. Or you could fund a lot of tiny things.

None of these things are a waste. There's no reason to do one over another other than personal preference. And nobody said a 'good hacker' was obliged to save the world (and oh, the hubris of thinking they could!).

Sometimes being the one guy who does want to do public service makes the difference, because all the other 'good hackers' are more concerned with one solution that will solve all the world's problems (which never happens) and making a quick buck.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#66

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:46 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #21

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #7

The article misses a rather large point: We (meaning the tech elite) are the first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for. Hear me out. Those of us over the age of 30 are mostly digital immigrants. We remember a world without CallerID, a PC in every office, and a global network interconnecting all the…

What a bunch of egocentric, self-aggrandizing tripe. > are the first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for. Everyone who calls to arms thinks that. Most radicals end up being more oppressive than the regimes they replaced. Forward progress has, much more often, come incrementally, from the U.S.'s very…

A more appropriate comment might be that any insular person or persons looking to achieve a position of authority is at risk of oppressing at least some of the people they aim to govern.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#67

Post by ISL » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:51 PM UTC

gyom wrote: post #47

chris_mahan wrote: post #25

"In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong." dang that is a nice quote.

It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail ). It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is ha…

"In the long tale of history..." may resolve your concerns?

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#68

Post by cynest » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series right now, and I'm struck by the comparisons he makes between Soviet and Nazi military doctrines. Essentially, the former is controlled by individuals too paranoid to allow for any initiative on the part of individuals under their command, while the latter actively encourages initiative on the part of commanders and dog-faces (grunts). One side effect of this is that German soldiers get away with much less deferential behavior. The result are seen both in previous battles between the two, and with the conflict against the Lizards (invaders from another planet with a much more restrictive bent than even the USSR) where the Nazis generally perform much better given their technology.

I wonder if a similar level of encouraging initiative exists in technology due to the fact that there's a low ceiling on how far you can pass most decisions up before running into nontechnical persons. Looking at it from another side, technical careers might allow for more initiative simply by the ability to enter the market via unconventional means.

Unconnected to the above, it seems to me that these sort of leaks are easier to perform versus a lot of political actions especially with the technical skills of leakers. Leaks' effect per unit of time to follow through surpasses most anything else I can think of. The only real downside is the resultant criminal penalties. Infodumps like Swartz's are similarly relatively easy to perform.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#69

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:55 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #65

jdietrich wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good hacker is wasted in public service. Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar? Who has more impact on education, a good elementary teacher or Sal Khan? Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor, why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi? The hacker skillset is a lever big eno…

This is a great example of why a good hacker should work in public service. Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar Because an environmental non-profit might make immediate changes that save people's lives. A non-profit might put enough pressure on a company to stop polluting groundwater or destroying fragile e…

> A non-profit might put enough pressure on a company to stop polluting groundwater or destroying fragile ecosystems.

The most fulfilling thing I've done in my life so far (other than starting a family) was helping to represent an Illinois village devastated by water pollution from a former industrial site. It would be amazing if some hacker would come along and figure out a cheap way to keep heavy metals from leaching out of industrial sites into water supplies. But in the meantime, maybe we could use some hackers that used their skills to help raise public awareness of the issue, put pressure on governments to stop cutting their environmental disaster cleanup budgets, etc?

I agree with jdietrich on this point: hacker skills are an incredibly big lever. The skills that programmers have: being able to decompose problems into constituent parts, apply reasoning to solve those sub-problems, and combine the solutions into a working whole, are skills that can be leveraged in any facet of life. Combine that with the ability to pitch (a skill which hackers turned entrepreneurs must develop), and you have someone that can contribute meaningfully in lots of different domains, even if they don't end up making a world-changing invention.

Re: Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

#70

Post by mindcrime » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:58 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #35

rayiner wrote: post #27

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go…

Generally agree. I've actually been quite surprised by myself the more I make inroads into "hacker" culture. Many software engineers I know seem far more concerned about the precise incoming dollar volume than very many people I know from my ostensibly "elite" background, Many old friends went wandering around the world attempting to start microfinancing initiatives, work for the Peace Corp, or who dedicated themselv…

Very sad. Silicon Valley is not what it used to be (a major reason why I left).

FWIW, "Silicon Valley" is only a subset of "hacker culture".

That sort of anti-social and anti-societal aspect has actually become more and more mainstream, as we see the success of YCombinator and the greater popularity of reddit, etc. but there definitely is a dark side to it, which goes beyond passive or active promotion of "jailbait" and to the core of our own identities as human beings.

I think you're over-generalizing. There are plenty of hackers who are total hippies (see: rms), and plenty who like to make money but also like finding other ways to make the world a better place (see: most Open Source hackers).

Many software engineers I know seem far more concerned about the precise incoming dollar volume than very many people I know from my ostensibly "elite" background

"software engineer" and "hacker" are not synonymous, FWIW.