Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset? Background: technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset. I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right. Any suggestions? (In case it helps an analogue in the mathematical world might be A Mathematician's Apology or Gödel, Escher, Bach.) |
The reason I ask is that in my experience the "hacker mindset" is a very nebulous thing. There's sort of a "hacker ideal", but in practice actual developers, white/blackhats, makers, etc. come from all sorts of backgrounds, have all sorts of ways of thinking about problems, and are motivated by all sorts of different things.
Are you hoping for the business founder to better understand how to effectively work with technical people?
https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-to-computer-sc...
Direct link to "Computational Thinking - CS50's Computer Science for Business Professionals 2017" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2f9h_-_Fv4
The Psychology of Computer Programming
by Gerald M. Weinberg
Written in 1971, and still completely relevant. Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, etc.
If you want to understand the details behind these general statements, you’ll need to spend the next several years in the trenches delivering dozens of technical projects.
How to understand the business/sales/marketing/leadership/political mindset. Without cynicism.
I was left agasp by some of the language (some is NSFW) and techniques ised by the scammers, but you would be the grandmother with dementia (non-technical user) vs someone who will say/do anything for money.
It focuses on the "rise of the developer," if you will, as an influential decision-making and budget-holding role within a company. It also includes lots of perspective on appealing to developers and avoiding marketing and business jargon.
As a nontechnical founder myself, it's been really helpful.
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.
Made me realise that many just do it because they like the challenge.
I recommend hackers and painters by pg.
Skims on the painting part, I thought, but it makes for an interesting insight into the personal philosophy of someone who values both creativity and logic.
Many of his ideas are universal (probably why I'm here!). Others don't port so well (or are specific to his experience).
Well worth the OPs time, given the question.
Joel on Software is also a fantastic read. More concrete in talking about specific aspects of a software developers' working experience, and ideas towards technology in general.
A mentor of mine suggested I should read it alongside Hackers and Painters.
I can't thank him and his friends enough, frankly...
The Anarchist's Cookbook
Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people.
> technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset
What does "the hacker mindset" mean to you?
If you ask me: The most important thing about a hacker mindset is that it must exist outside of technology. A hacker mindset is not a "techy" mindset, it's something far more sublime, and is portable across different fields.
Hacking is about creativity and problem solving, but not in a formalized way. That doesn't always involve computers and related technology. Hacking should be fun, regardless of what industry or specialization it manifests in (which doesn't always translate well in business settings).
That isn't something that you're going to inject into someone by recommending them read a book. They have to seek it out for themselves. Without curiosity, hackers do not exist.
If they're going to be able to understand the mindset without having experienced it themselves, you might as well just share my comment here with them. If it sinks in, great! If not, I don't believe a few hundred pages of prose will have a different outcome.
Why? Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]?
Because promoting ESR's work to people has the unfortunate side-effect of elevating ESR's prestige.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513086 for more on why ESR is bad.
> Do you have some problem with his advice on how to ask questions[1]?
No, I think he's a bad person and we do our entire industry a disservice by continuing to elevate his status.
Find better heroes, should you even want heroes.
If I recall, there's a Buddhist proverb, where a pig is held up as a good example of enlightenment: it will happily pick truffles out of mud, taking the truffle and leaving the mud behind. It doesn't develop an opinion on the mud in the process; the truffle grew from the mud, but the mud isn't relevant to the truffle. It doesn't venerate/privilege/respect the mud—but nor does it find it disgusting. It's just mud. Irrelevant. Not food. The truffle, clean of mud, stands on its own. The truffle is a necessary part of a creature's mental model, insofar as it experiences hunger; but the mud is not.
Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlation and causation, and being rigorous about what you accept as real knowledge vs mere opinion or anecdote. The business world, and the tech world, has a lot of "opinion" that masquerades as fact. E.g. "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"
But the OP isn't asking for help themselves, and has said nothing about needing help themselves. Maybe they already understand the business side?
I am not saying that it is but I do think that Stephen Coveys famous "seek first to understand, then to be understood" quote holds a lot of truth. In order to communicate your own perspective on something to someone, you need to have a sense of how theirs differs to yours.
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.
Are there any good resources for learning more about this?
If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?
In another instance, people who try one main thing (e.g. applying to a particular college) but who succeed entirely through no effort of their own (e.g. through nepotism), will end up thinking that what they did mattered.
Is it fair of me to assume that this talisman works, and that I can safely climb into a tiger enclosure?
“Creativity Inc.” (Ed Catmull) explains how Pixar manages people & throws in a few insights from mature (post Apple firing) Steve Jobs.
“Managing the Design Factory” (Don Reinertsen) explains how to prioritize projects and analyze a business for bottlenecks in order to minimize cost of delay.
So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good idea to take ESR seriously when he says that you should find a "real" Unix (your technical cofounders are, actuarially speaking, almost certainly macOS people), hand-write lots of HTML, or "serve" th "tribal elders of open source". And the idea that "attitude is not a substitute for competence" among hackers is both funny on a variety of levels, and also a singularly bad note for understanding software developers you work with.
The Mythical Mammoth doesn't have any of these problems, and is a great book, and one worth reading simply so you can have a sense of what building software actually entails (Dynamics of Software Development is another older book that has aged somewhat well --- as have all of Joel Spolsky's posts on Joel on Software; in fact, I'd probably start there). But while this stuff will help you understand the work that's happening on your team, it probably won't do much to help you with the mindset of your team members.
There probably isn't a substitute for just talking to your cofounders, a lot, and asking lots of questions.
And, tptacek, guess whose name I stumbled upon while I was reading his wiki page? Incidentally, I think that section of the wiki is poorly written. I'm left even more confused due to lack of context.
Lots of hackers are introverts. They are wired differently from founders and ceos (who have gravitated towards a life full of constant interactions with people). Hackers don't mind being "in the zone" for hours at a time to work on a problem. Sometimes this means coding, but sometimes this just means having enough quiet time to just sit an think while they turn a problem over in their mind. This is required.
Another side to the introvert thing -- I believe "open plan seating" is a fundamental disconnect between extroverted decision-makers and introverted knowledge workers. It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem-solvers working from home.
Another tip is to ask "what do you think?" then listen. Then wait even longer and listen some more. The absolute best business people I've worked with were masters of this. The worst would already have made decisions and questions were just checkboxes.
(this works everywhere in life, but is particularly relevant to the really smart people at the top of the tech tree)
also, hacker doesn't mean criminals who break into computers. Go with the original meaning (well, the one after carriage driver)
reading:
Do you have a source with data to back that up? The early indicators of the efficacy of WFH that I've seen have been pretty mixed.
I'd also recommend Peopleware
1) True "hackers" value knowledge over money.
2) True "hackers" value doing things once and doing them right, no matter how long that takes. (Compare to the business mindset of "we need it now", or "we needed it yesterday")
3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art.
4) True "hackers" are not about work-arounds. If/when work-arounds are used, it's because there there's an artificial timeframe (as might be found in the corporate world), and there's a lack of understanding in the infrastructure which created the need for that work-around.
But, all of these virtues run counter to the demands of business, which constantly wants more things done faster, cheaper, with more features, more complexity, less testing, and doesn't want to worry about problems that may be caused by all of those things in the future (less accountability) -- as long as customer revenue can be collected today.
You see, a true "hacker's" values -- are completely different than those of big business...
And business people wonder why there's stress and burnout among tech people...
So being a hacker is a practice, and in some cases it's a lifestyle (when you orient your life around hacking). But it's not a mindset. Some folks are compulsive hackers, some are methodical, some are opportunistic, others are hackers out of necessity - but they're all united by what they do, not how they think.
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.
The issue is that OP question is an answer to the real question, which goes unasked.
Cheers.
IMO hacker culture includes but is not limited to computer engineering and science. It is about being so curious about a domain of knowledge that you end up learning it in its little details, and as result, you can bend that domain to your will. Hackers are often working on experimental stuff that have little to no commercial value but are still valuable in their own way. You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.
Examples of (people I consider) hackers are (YouTube channels) Applied Science, cnhlor, and styropyro.
The Jargon File is an artifact of "hacker culture" as it existed in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would hesitate to recommend it nowadays -- it's rather dated, and could lead an unaware reader to some false impressions.
Read books by hackers, watch conference talks. And ofc get to know hackers, go to hack spaces. Keep an open mind and be curious. That's a good starting point to see how hacker culture really is. It's mostly about unorthodox curiosity and having fun with machines and systems. Think of children playing with toys, who grew up and never stopped playing with toys.
Don't waste your time on pop culture presentations of hackers, like movies or reading articles about "great" hacks or hackers, it's misleading and not going to transform your mind to think like a hacker in any way.
The only connection between Facebook and hacking I can think of is that their software may have relied on "dirty hacks" and crutches in the past to make it work.
Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.
If the OP thinks "hacker mindest" equals being on a path to create the next big app or service, you are being mislead big time.
Yes! I came this close to recommending "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman for that exact reason. But I got the feeling that was not exactly the type of hacker that OP was looking for...
Fiction:
Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"
Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)
Real Genius (the film).
Nonfiction:
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.
Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.
The one case that I can think of off the top of my head that might apply to this situation is if there are disagreements re:product refinement/feature set/bug prevalence. (Basically, “why doesn’t this work as seamlessly as X?”) In that case you might do well to find the MVPs (and later iterations) of famous startups.
(crass generalization) non technical people tend to see the "idea" they have isolated out of the sea of possibilities as the important thing.
Now that this important idea has been identified I just need someone to stuff some "supports" under it and we are done!
top down
From the other direction, great ideas are a dime a dozen. Enormous amounts of (outwardly invisible) time have been spent exploring the landscape these "supports" would need to sit on the down to the bedrock. There may be things that are just to obvious to consider explaining why that particular idea is not worth the effort. Maybe it is boring or sub optimal or infeasible, or just dumb.
A hacker (what ever that means anymore) would be more apt to consider what they had on hand and where they were and most importantly, how they could inject some cleverness into the building of their supports, then climb up and see where they had gotten themselves.
bottom up
All obvious gross simplifications for illustration purposes.
If you are endeavouring to address a disconnect, first of all kudos to you for making the effort.
Two paths that could help are
Better illustrator of "the idea". The everyday marketing of the idea to the masses is not going to help here. You would need to demonstrate the value added that would make what ever reluctance there is be set aside.
The other is experience what is causing the reluctance; get some blisters yourself.
I strongly encourage you to make your non-technical folks aware of good engineering practices, instead of this "everyone needs to learn to code and have special snowflake hacker skills" mindset that has so permeated the industry.
(And of course they likely wouldn't understand "grok" either").
From 1000 ft, what's different between the two? It's all about solving problems.
The business focused founder sees a problem, a business/market opportunity. He/She needs to figure out how to solve it, how to come up with a way to satisfy that market. If a product exists, how do they get that product into the hands of the customer. If the product doesn't exist, how to get it into existence and then get it into the hands of the customer.
The hacker/developer/whatever sees a problem and He/She tries to develop a product that satisfies that problem based on the requirements they're either given or suss out themselves. The hacker mindset is an insatiable need for knowledge. How to do a thing. How to make a thing. How did others make a thing. Don't business people think that way, also? Probably one big difference might be that the hacker mindset shares knowledge. Business people are more protective of it. (Generally)
That's painting with broad strokes obviously and a person can be motivated by both. But that's the axis I would draw the distinction on.
Hackers / programmers are trained to be cognizant of these details and complexities that aren't obvious on first glance.
Heck sometimes this weighs us down. I'd rather have someone ignorant and brave on my team. :)
It is not a technical book.
It'll be as good as anything : ).
"Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.
Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:
Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker"
The thing about it though, is that mindsets are not readily transferable. They are basically worldviews which are formed slowly and because of their foundational place in cognition are remarkably resistant to change.
One challenge is technical debt. To start to understand it, find a tool that he uses regularly (assuming such a thing exists). Maybe it is Excel. Now have him solve some kind of problem with it. And then schedule a meeting with his friend the following week to review his spreadsheet. Then add requirements that his spreadsheet must handle. Tell him he must hurry so that those requirements are complete before his meeting. Ensure that there are too many requirements for the spreadsheet or that there isn't time to properly reorganize it.
In the meeting, explain to his friend that he has been the mastermind of this spreadsheet design. Have him first demo the calculation features of the spreadsheet. The have him walk through the design, show the formulas in the cells, explain his naming scheme.
The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate why engineers seem to be so concerned about their code organization and technical debt. Which is that they have their name on any mess they make in the code, and they have to maintain it as it changes. Without ever having done that part of it, it is difficult for a business person to really understand the developer's point of view.
Business people tend to be more social-oriented, people-oriented. And one of the pitfalls of that is that most such people think if you just make the right friends, find the right words, push the right emotional buttons, you can make magic.
And sometimes that's true. But sometimes what they want is a case of "Something cannot be both heavy and light at the same time. I can be light and large -- like a cloud -- but it can't be both heavy and light. Pick one."
I do a lot of studying of social things and I hate people who are manipulative. A lot of people with serious social skills are manipulative.
In short, many of them lie when it's convenient because they don't want to deal with negative emotions or whatever.
So I would have them watch the Jim Carrey movie "Liar, Liar." and challenge them to use their social skills to tell the actual truth in a more acceptable manner instead of fudging.
I would also recommend negotiating books. Hard skills when it comes to dealing with people helps make it possible to be both honest and diplomatic.
The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator is research based and very meaty.
Getting to Yes is also research based, but a quick, easy read.
I read Fire in the Valley when I was young and it impacted me, although there might be a better book that's similar. I might also recommend something by Jaron Lanier or Stallman if you don't might being a little political.
https://www.are.na/zach-rose/use-misuse-rugged-consumerism-e...
Technical need not mean "code". It could be a medical expert working with a wide array of people to build something. Or a tax-expert. Or an employment expert etc.
Founder is what "product manager" should be. Instead it seems "product manager" is just some glue person at a large organization who is usually not great at accessing optionality and time and money costs.
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.
And I’m not a “true” “hacker” if I want to make money?
I thought I was a hacker. But if this is what hackers are, I’m pretty ok with being voted off the island.
Tons of hackers don't give a flying fuck about the "right way" to do something. Hackers are just the people who decide to apply their personal agency and creative talents towards building, altering, breaking and fixing things. There is no unifying motivation for doing so (though admittedly, curiosity is more common than money as a motivator), nor any standardized way of engaging in the process.
There's something to be said about owning your work, but I have to disagree that unhealthy attachment to work products is a universal attribute of technical founder hackers. It's not a kid, it's a thing that was supposed to be the best use of the resources and information available at the time.
I must have confused this point with vanity and retention in projecting my own counterproductive anti-patterns.
Prolific is not the objective for a true hacker, but not me but a guy I know mentioned something about starting projects and seeing the next 5 years of potentially happily working on that project, too.
so maybe use your hacker mindset to deduce this is the mindset then?
If I had to define hacker attitudes, I wouldn't use information collection and application as the standard. Some people carefully select subjects study them in depth, and others just passively pick up information through exposure to experts, and others collect knowledge as a by-product of trying random stuff and failing at it. Hackers (and non-hackers) don't necessarily need to prefer one method to the other. And everyone, even non-hackers collect information - so that's not in itself a special attitude of hackers. The application part is more unique, but how is that different from what artists do?
If I had to choose particular attitudes that would enable someone to practice as a hacker, it would be:
- high tolerance for failure and unexepected behaviors, or even joy in failure under certain circumstances.
- Gains pleasure from novelty (learning new things, having new experiences, finding new applications of things). As a result, most hacker types place more value on things that are obviously flawed, but novel and unique vs things which are perfectly executed but familiar.
I think that second point differentiates hackers from at least some artists (ie, Chefs usually prefer to stick to establish culinary pattersn, musicians playing in a symphony find beauty in the same piece that has been played for hundreds of years). Other experimental artists who do seek novelty (noise music, etc) are basically hackers IMO.
Edit: but to my original point, if you have neither of the attitudes I identified, but do hacker stuff anyhow - you're still a hacker. Those attitude patterns don't take precedence over the actual reality of hacking. There just common in people who continue to do it over their lifetime.
IMHO it's kind of against the Principle of Charity to assume that someone asking a question about how to do part N of a multi-part process, hasn't already figured out how to do the previous N-1 parts of that process. They must have, to get to the point where they're motivated enough to reach out for help with part N.
In programming terms: if I'm writing a compiler, and I'm asking about codegen, the Principle of Charity would suggest that I've already solved enough other compiler-writing problems that I have an input to feed to a codegen pass!
Ignoring the Principle of Charity in cases like this can lead to some really useless/unproductive advice.
For example, I've been writing a research decompiler for an ISA that has less embedded information than usual (e.g. no reified CALL/RET ops, just plain branch instructions.) It needs some weird heuristics to derive subroutines from coroutines, and to properly scope variables. This means that I can't immediately derive an interprocedural SSA form for the variables, in order to help calculate a dominator tree. So I want to ask people how to calculate a dominator tree from stack variables, because having something like that would help as an input into those heuristics.
But every "solution" on StackOverflow-like sites insists that the context of the problem—the assumptions it makes—are impossible/invalid. They try to mentally rewind to step 1 themselves, and then can't understand how I solved it (because I didn't write out the textbook worth of novel algorithms I used to solve step 1 in the problem description), so they don't even believe there is a step 2. Rather than just... attempting to help me with step 2. Which doesn't actually require any understanding of step 1, other than its outputs.
It's sort of the opposite of the XY problem. Rather than the parent problem X being best solved through a different strategy that avoids problem Y, people believe that the parent problem X itself is unreasonable, because they model an X that is solved through Y as requiring that the solution also flow through a previous sub-problem Z; and they think that Z is something that people just don't bother to do, so nobody could actually be asking in good faith about XY.
I've also suffered through this with doctors, who literally won't believe me when I list off the entire sequence of steps they would try and say that I've tried them to no avail. I only go to the doctor when I run out of ways to try to solve the problem myself, so if I'm here, it's because the problem is a zebra instead of a horse! A horse, I would have fixed on my own!
For example, a scientific analysis attempting to break down what "understanding" is, or evidence-based techniques for gaining understanding more quickly.
Now if you have successfully avoided tiger enclosures and subsequently not been attacked by any tigers, (regardless of what you are wearing) that method probably works ;)
Regarding your first, I have similar concerns about this gatekeeping of “engineers”. Civil engineers and the like have much more stringent regulations and much more weight put onto correctness, but they aren’t required to prize correctness-for-its-own-sake, or think of their work like art, or be doing the work for its own sake rather than money.
I’m pretty confident that attempting to ascribe a unified motive to any group is a mistake.
This sounds like quite the qualifier...which is fine, but I think it's important to take your response/reasoning into a much more narrow hypothetical.