This paper mainly introduces the core ideas of the two books, and then briefly explains and extends them.
The first book is Hacker Ethics and the Spirit of the Information Age.
The second book is The New Kingmakers.
Both books chart the pursuits of hackers and their current state of affairs, and while neither is new (the first was published in 2001, the second in 2013), the facts and theories they describe are not out of date. Still, for the most part, ahead of our time in reality.
If you know enough about this, you can see the future of humanity.
“Note: there is no distinction between” developer “, “developer” and “programmer”. Hackers are programmers who are very good. They are the best of the best.
“Silicon Valley Season 4 Poster”
What exactly is a hacker
Context The most authoritative definition and explanation for hacker is in the Context of jargon file 1:
Hacker, n., originally referred to a person who made furniture out of axes.
The following eight categories of people can be called hackers.
1. Someone who likes to explore the details of the system and how to improve it. Hackers like to get to the bottom of things, but most people don’t. In RFC1392 (glossary for Internet users), it is more clear: a hacker is someone who enjoys understanding the inner workings of systems, especially computer systems and network systems.
2. Someone who is passionate or even obsessive about programming. They don’t just like programming theory, they like programming.
3. Someone who truly appreciates and understands hacker values. (A person capable of sweet hack value.)
4. Someone who can code fast and well.
5. An expert in a particular system. For example, “Unix hackers”.
6. An expert or enthusiast in any subject or field. Astronomy hacking, for example.
7. Someone who enjoys intellectual challenges in order to creatively overcome or circumvent limitations.
8. A malicious attempt to gain access to sensitive information through various scrambles. Cracker is the correct term for a “password cracker” or a “network cracker.”
Even if you think you are a hacker, it is better not to call yourself a hacker. It is better to let others call you that, because hacking is an honorary title, and calling yourself a hacker may be considered boastful.
Not all geeks are hackers, and some hackers call themselves geeks because they know (correctly) that the “hacker” label should be granted by someone else.
Almost all hackers agree that information sharing is a supreme good, and that open source and easy access to information is a hacker’s moral responsibility.
Most hackers think it’s morally OK to break a system if it’s just for fun or adventure, as long as you’re not stealing, vandalizing or breaking confidentiality rules.
That’s what the jargon document defines as a hacker.
For the record, Eric S Raymond, also known as the Hacker Master, hates to refer to security attackers as “hackers” (people who break into other people’s systems by cracking passwords or exploiting vulnerabilities). He doesn’t think they are hackers at all, for one reason: they are not creators, they are destroyers. These people are usually bad programmers, can’t build decent systems, and are, at best, just people who help find bugs.
The author of two books
The author of the first book, Pekka Himanen (1973-), was a technological prodigy who earned his PhD at the age of 21 (1994) from the University of Helsinki (Linus’s university, presumably at the same time), breaking the then Finnish record for the youngest person to earn a PhD. He has done research work in Finland (University of Helsinki), The United Kingdom and the United States (Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley).
The author of the second book, Stephen O ‘Grady, is co-founder of RedMonk, a developer research company. His main job is to understand developer needs and trends, and to help businesses work more effectively with developers. His work is frequently cited in publications such as The New York Times, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal.
First book: Hacker Ethics and the Spirit of the Information Age
The title immediately recalls Max Weber’s classic, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”.
Max Weber (1864 — 1920) was a German sociologist and one of the most influential thinkers of modern society.
Weber discussed the relationship between Protestant ethics and the psychological drive of capitalist development in the book, and pointed out clearly:
Protestantism led to the rise and success of capitalism.
In traditional western religious societies, the desire to pursue a profiteering secular career is regarded as immoral and despised.
But with the advent of the Protestant concept of vocation, profit-making and the idea of getting rich became orthodoxy. In Weber’s words, “In the modern economic order, so long as it is done legally, making money is the result and expression of professional virtue and ability.”
Protestant ethics not only lays a moral foundation for diligent work and devotion to duty, but also makes labor an important standard to measure whether Christians are devout or not. Protestant ethics encourages people to obtain wealth conscientiously and fulfill the duty given by God, so as to objectively realize personal value.
In the Protestant ethic, both work and money are seen as ends in themselves, and the supreme good of this ethic, Weber notes, is “to earn more and more money”.
Is that how hackers see it?
1. Hacker’s view of life motivation
Hackers are people who like to think. They are obsessed with figuring things out. How could hackers not figure out a question like the meaning of life?
According to Linus, the inventor of Linux, all human motivations can be divided into three basic types:
Survival. Social life. Entertainment.
Speaking to graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, Apple co-founder Stephen Gary Wozniak summed up the elements of his motivation:
“You don’t do anything unless it brings happiness… This is my rule of life, a simple formula :H=F to the third power.”
Here H is Happiness and F to the third power is Food, Fun and Friends.
Linux and Woz had similar ideas: Food for survival, Friends for social life and Fun for entertainment.
This can be regarded as a simplified version of Maslow’s need theory. Survival corresponds to “physiological needs and safety needs”, social life corresponds to “the needs of belonging, love and being respected”, and entertainment can be considered to correspond to “self-realization” to some extent. Although it is not quite the same, it is at least easy to understand.
Hackers don’t like to use big words, such as “self-actualization”, such big words, experts may not be able to understand, how can hackers use it.
Linus has an autobiography called Just for Fun. I don’t think you need to read it. Linus developed Linux for fun!
Woz invented the Apple computer because it was exciting (as you can see below), and many of the things he loved about the Apple computer came from trying to turn his Breakout game for Atari (similar to breaking bricks) into Apple!
It reminds us that Thompson, the inventor of UNIX, originally wanted to be able to play Space and Travel on a PDP-7, the same game he developed for Multics, an operating system project that didn’t take off!
In 1975, when Jobs was 20 and Wozniak was 25, they were both poor boys with empty fists. Woz was a computer wizard; Jobs’s talent was marked by extraordinary insight. In his spare time after work, Wozniak would hang out in Jobs’s garage, working on computers, and would often join hands at the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak was enviously watching his friends show off their Altair, and Jobs encouraged him to build a better machine himself. Microprocessors are needed to make microcomputers. The two went to the store to ask the price. Each 8080 chip cost 270 yuan. After much comparison, they drove to the Wisconsin computer trade show in San Francisco to try their luck and bought a MOTOROLA 6502 for just $20, which had the same capabilities as an Intel 8080.
Wozniak later recalled that the same night they bought the 6502, he and Jobs came back to homebrew for another party. Someone brought a computer connected to a television and showed the group a color image. Woz watched, transfixed, as the computer drew colored circles on the screen. Later, holed up in AN HP lab, he surreptitiously built a chip that did the same thing, but wasn’t sure whether it should fit inside the homemade computer. Jobs said, “Why not? We’re going to use all the new technology.” Somehow he convinced HP executives to let Woz “borrow” the chip for home use. “This is going to blow the minds of the Homebrew boys,” Jobs told his friends.
Jobs’s prediction was so accurate that when they showed up at the Homebrew party again with Woz’s homemade computer, the crowd couldn’t sit still. Woz was surrounded by three layers of computer Gamer. Woz’s computer was just a large circuit board, but it had 8K memory and could sound and display high-resolution graphics. The Homebrew boys were more than “flabbergasted.” They asked Wozniak to order the machine. Jobs, who had been standing outside the circle watching what was happening, started the computer in his head spinning so fast that it became a calculator. He mused, “About 100 of the club’s 500 people will buy Woz’s baby. If we sell the first one, we’ll make a $50 profit. Then we’ll sell the second one, the third one…”
The above story, excerpted from Computer History 2, shows the psychological drive that wozniak and Jobs used to create the Apple Computer: curiosity, excitement, the passion to create, and the thrill of showing off.
But how did Woz get the technology?
It’s also fun. 3
Woz learned a lot about practical electronics in fourth grade through a “gadget player kit” that his parents gave him for Christmas. He then used the kit to build an intercom system that connected six homes. The children of six families used this secret communication system to play a number of pranks without telling the adults.
Perhaps inspired by this small sense of accomplishment, Wozniak became interested in electronics, and with his father, he earned his ham radio license in the sixth grade, becoming the youngest person ever to do so. It’s a lot of learning to get this license. It’s very difficult.
Wozniak himself said that it was these early practices that gave him the skills he needed to design and build the APPLE I motherboard.
“Woz as a Kid.”
2. The hacker’s attitude towards work
The Protestant ethic directly developed the spiritual drive of capitalism: the systematic and rational pursuit of legal gain.
Calvin believed that God, without exception, had a way out for everyone, and that people should do their best to do god’s work, and see their earthly work as an opportunity to increase god’s glory.
The Protestant ethic says that people should devote themselves to work, and it rejects hedonism, that there is no play time in work.
Franklin said, “Always do what is good. Cut out all unnecessary activities.”
Gates used a concept of the Protestant ethic to describe his approach to work: “If you don’t want to work hard and focus and give your best, well, this is no place to work.” Ma said: “Can 996 is to repair the blessing.”
The dominant thought of pursuing maximum legal gain leads people to always try to get the “optimal” use of time, so various theories and tools of time management emerge endlessly. They optimize their time with rational, positive goals, not just to hang out, do nothing, be in a daze, or have fun.
What’s the problem with this? “Play was taken out of work, and then play was taken out of play,” Heyman pointed out pointedly.
In Waiting for the Weekend, Witold Rybczynski provides an excellent example of this change. People used to ‘play’ tennis; Now they do ‘work’ backhand volleyball. Even if people are having fun, do it professionally, learn and practice skills in a painstaking way, not just for fun.
Hackers don’t like that. Hackers don’t like things that aren’t fun.
Hackers are willing to spend their time doing what they love. If they’re working on a project that they love, that’s fine. Hackers can be highly engaged. If not, hackers hate being forced to work hard “in the name of work.”
Hackers say: “My life is my life”.
3. Hacker’s attitude to capital
Hackers are not stupid. Hackers fully understand that it is difficult to be completely free in a capitalist society unless one has enough personal capital. But if he is a competent capitalist, he can decide his own life.
So many hackers start companies, or work for a few years, using stock ownership and stock options to gain financial independence.
Ward is a classic, such as two, a co-founder of apple, he has a large number of shares of apple, he described his life after the company: “my accountants and secretaries, please do everything for me, so that I can spend as much time as possible on what I want to do: it is to work with computers, school and children.”
Berkeley’s Bill Joy and three Stanford students, including German-born tech whiz Andrea Bechtosh, founded SUN in 1982 as an acronym for the Stanford University Network. “We were a group of 20-somethings running a company,” Bechtosh recalls. “We had just met, but we did share a passion.”
From influential businesses founded by Protestants, weber says, the Protestant ethic evolved into the dominant spirit of capitalism.
In the same way, the hacker ethic is slowly spreading to other industries through these technology companies founded by hackers.
4. Hacker’s attitude to labor
For those who can’t find a feeling in their work, they look forward to weekends in order to have more time for TV and sensual entertainment.
And hackers use their down time (weekends or vacations) as an opportunity to pursue personal passions that are different from those they pursue at work.
Hackers don’t like work-centric, and they don’t like leisure-centric. Because it is unbearable to spend holidays in dull leisure, it is better to devote yourself to the work you enjoy.
Hackers are always eager to do something meaningful. They are eager to create.
In “Deus Ex Machina, or The True Computerist,” Tom Pittman expressed what it was like to experience creativity as a hacker: “At that moment, as a Christian, I could somehow feel The satisfaction of God creating The world.”
After everything is automated, the world of the future may look like paradise.
But even so, work remains at the heart of people’s lives.
And the object of labor is but one, to feel the joy of creation, as the creator felt it.
Marx foresaw this, he said: in the communist society, labor is the first need of people’s life.
5. Summary of hacker ethics
Hackers want to act with passion.
They want to accomplish work that is joyful and intrinsically interesting.
They want to create something of value.
They want to create something valuable with their friends.
Hackers want the freedom to spend their time.
In this way, they can spend their time on the things that interest them most.
Second book: The New Kingmakers
Kingmaker is a word foreign to Chinese. A person who has a very strong political influence is able to bring someone else to power as a leader.
For this book, Kingmaker is the person who made the company a huge success: the developer. Kingmaker
O ‘Grady, the book’s author, observes two things:
In this century, ciOs often don’t know what software their employees and developers are using. They tend to think that their employees are using software purchased by the company. In fact, employees or developers often use their own favorite software, which is often free.
2. For years, enterprises were the main consumers of IT technology, and manufacturers only needed to convince a few people to win their orders. (If employees find the product hard to use, suck it up.) By contrast, today’s IT giants, such as Apple, need to convince individual customers. So the iPhone is an order of magnitude better at ease of use than normal commercial software.
This suggests two things:
1. Technology is increasingly driven from the bottom up rather than the top down.
If you want to get a broad market, you must learn to please the public.
What the giants can count on is developers.
O ‘Grady also found that:
1. Companies acquire hackers by acquisition
Steve Jobs thought a talented developer was worth 25 times as much as the average developer, many people said 100 times, and Bill Gates thought it was worth 10,000 times.
These talented developers are hackers. (They are at least category 4 hackers: people who program quickly and well.)
Much of the acquisition of hackers and good development teams is done through acquisitions, not for products, but for people.
It happened so often that the term acqhire was coined to describe it.
The most aggressive adopters of this strategy were Facebook, which bought a bunch of startups like Gowalla, Parakey, Hot Potato, Octazen, etc., all of which were shut down (or opened source) while the talent stayed.
One entrepreneur, Sam Lessin, sold his startup to Facebook for a few million dollars, only to be shut down soon after, because Lessin was the only person Facebook wanted to acquire in the process.
2. Increased developer autonomy
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, developers were dependent on employers because they couldn’t afford the hardware and software themselves — operating systems, databases, webservers — that had to be bought, that had to be paid for.
In the new century, however, developers are no longer tied to employer money.
Four factors are driving this shift: open source, cloud computing, the Internet and seed funding.
Thanks to open source and cloud computing, for the first time in history, developers can personally pay for hardware on the cloud and then build their own infrastructure with free open source software. (Same as Google!)
Previously, developers had few options for financing their startups, relying mostly on loans from friends, family and banks. Even when venture capitalists are interested, the terms they offer often go against the entrepreneurs: they offer more money than the entrepreneurs want in order to get as much equity in the company as possible.
In 2008, Y Combinator came along, offering substantially reduced funding (typically less than $20,000) in exchange for a correspondingly smaller share of the company (its average stake is 6%), enough to get the company off the ground.
Given these conditions, developers can start their own businesses if they want to.
Developers love open and simple technologies
Back in the mid-2000s, the prevailing view was that enterprises would only choose between two technology stacks: Java or Java. NET.
However, practice has proved that this is not the case at all, although Java and. NET is still used, but they compete with a dozen other languages.
The technology stack is no longer controlled by any one company, the technology stack that programmers like always comes from the Internet, always comes from open source.
Consider this: What would happen if developers could choose the technology they want to use, rather than the technology the company orders them to use?
When IT giants saw the promise of the Internet more than a decade ago, they began trying to expand their businesses to the Internet. Their big move was to jointly launch “Web services” standards.
Companies such as IBM, Microsoft and SUN have pushed more than a hundred separate standards, but are merely trying to turn the Internet into something that looks more like an enterprise network.
From SOAP to WS-Discovery to WS-Inspection to WS-Interoperability to WS-Notification to WS-Policy to WS Reliable Messaging to WS-ReliableMessaging (yes, the two look similar, but they’re different standards) to WS-Transfer, both Web Service-related standards maintained by standards bodies like OASIS or W3C and developed by big vendors.
To make matters worse, each of these 100 + standards has its own set of documents, and the documentation for each standard often exceeds 100 pages.
Developers don’t like these grand narratives, they don’t like the deliberate complexity of design, they don’t like what big companies do for developers, they like what their own people do: REST, for example.
One Microsoft programmer told Tim O ‘Reilly, “Microsoft made SOAP so complex on purpose that only tools can read and write this stuff, it’s not meant to be seen.”
Gartner’s Nick Gall attacked the WS-* technology stack in this way back in 2007: “SOAP – and WSDL-based Web services are only ‘Web’ in name, in fact, they are still the style of traditional enterprise middleware architectures.”
Programmable Web, a website that provides a catalog of apis, reported 71% of 5,287 apis as of March 2012 were REREST based, with SOAP accounting for less than a fifth.
By 2017, the gap had widened, with REST accounting for 81% and SOAP less than 10%.
Now, we can answer:
Given two technologies, the one that is easier to obtain, easier to configure, and easier to use wins out.
If you want to launch a new technology platform, if you want programmers to use your stuff, remember, it has to be open source, it has to be easy to use.
Otherwise, you can’t become a new competitor.
4. How do big companies recruit developers
Here are five ways O ‘Grady has observed companies attract developers.
Apple’s way of attracting developers is to remind them that thousands of other developers have already made it on iOS. If you develop an APP for iOS, that means higher profits, better exposure, which can translate into other opportunities.
Amazon has a unique way of attracting developers. They rely on AWS and apis. When people were just talking about SOA, Amazon built its entire company on a service-based interface.
It dates back to 2002 when Bezos issued a company-wide directive 4.
That, it now seems, was the prescience of technical genius.
If Amazon allows it, anyone outside Of Amazon can interact with its infrastructure as if they were part of the company. People can use hardware rented from Amazon (servers, storage) and API services provided by Amazon to build their own storefront and build their own services, thus bringing business back to Amazon.
At the end of the second Google I/O conference in May 2009, Vic Gondotra, the company’s vice president, gave attendees “one more thing” : a brand new phone, the HTC Hero. It’s expensive, but the intent is clear: Developers are expected to get their Hands on an Android phone, go home and work on it, master it and launch Android apps as soon as possible.
Microsoft has often said in recent years that “Microsoft loves open source”, but its attitude towards open source in the past was very poor.
In May 2001, Microsoft senior vice President Craig Mundie said the GPL “poses a threat to the intellectual property rights of any organization that uses it in a talk at New York University’s Business School entitled” Business Software Models.”
A month later, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described Linux as “a cancer that attaches itself in the form of intellectual property to everything it touches.”
It was only a week before gates retired that he finally realised he had no choice but to embrace open source.
At Microsoft’s Build conference in 2011, Steve Ballmer sweated on stage, dancing and yelling: Developers! Developers! Developers! .
He knew that the days of bossing developers around were over, and now it was Microsoft’s turn to go after them.
At the time, Microsoft had just introduced its own phones and tablets.
Netflix has taken a more unusual approach to attracting developers, offering awards to entice them to improve their algorithms. Netflix believes that out of the millions of developers around the world, someone must be able to build a better algorithm, someone must be able to make a better application.
Netflix has an algorithm of its own, called Cinematch, that predicts how a user will rate a movie.
On October 2, 2006, Netflix announced the Netflix Prize: $1 million for non-Netflix teams who can improve the accuracy of their ratings prediction algorithms by 10%. On October 8, one team beat the Netflix algorithm, but not by 10%.
Finally, in 2009, the “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” team passed the 10% mark and won $1 million. Team members from AT&T Labs, Pragmatic Theory, and Yahoo! The researchers.
5. Acquire talent with distributed development
Looking for a software development job without punching in every day? Can you find such a company?
B: of course. As long as developers want it, there will be.
Some companies use this to acquire talent.
Erik Allebest, CEO of Chess.com, said, “We have a hard time finding qualified people in Silicon Valley who are either working for another company or starting their own businesses. Today, our team is completely virtual, with 60 team members in 12 countries. I firmly believe in the remote employee model, and we want to give our team members the ability to choose how they work and how they live.” 5
There is an argument that telecommuting reduces productivity, but productivity is the result of matching the right people with the right jobs, not that people are more productive if they stay in the same building.
Instapage, a Silicon Valley tech company, keeps its top talent safe with a mix of employees and independents. At any given time, they work with 40 independent professionals from outside Silicon Valley. Independent talent not only helps Instapage maintain a high-quality product, it also saves them nearly $2.3 million a year.
Independent professionals often have specific skills, such as specialising in mobile application development or Japanese animation design. When you match this ideal talent to your project, productivity is likely to be higher. Because your people don’t always have to learn these new things. Companies can dynamically expand and build teams as needed, which is liberating.
6. Imprisoning developers with happiness
One of the most important hiring mechanisms a company can use to acquire developers is to make them happy.
For example, it’s best for companies not to interfere too much with the technology and architecture their employees choose. The easier a developer’s life is, the more productive it will be.
Zach Holman’s advice to employers: “Imprison your employees with joy, good things, and a lovely workflow.” (Imprison your employees with happiness and nice things and cuddly work processes.)
This may be an over-indulgence of developers. But the correlation between where developers want and where developers are treated well is clear.
A summary of two books
Hackers want passion and free time.
In fact, everyone wants that.
Hackers are increasingly able to do what they want, thanks to the open-source, Internet and cloud computing they have created and developed themselves.
Now, with little capital, hackers can start their own businesses.
They start businesses to invest in their passion and share that passion with others, but also to make a lot of money and gain more time freedom.
Developers now have more choices than ever before: they can choose their preferred technology stack, their preferred company, their preferred project, work from home, start their own business, and choose their preferred lifestyle.
Because developers are the new kingmakers, they are becoming more and more prominent.
All the companies are trying to woo them. Because all companies are or will be software companies.
The genie is out of the bottle and will not go back.
A vision of the world
The world will become more software.
That is, more automation.
So the material will be more abundant.
More people will work in software development. (Because the world is softwareized)
Development gets easier and easier. (Because people hate complexity)
All development will be open source. (Not open source is not acceptable)
Everyone just picks the open source project he likes and works on it.
Distributed development will become more and more of a trend. (People don’t like commuting and being away from their families)
People will increasingly use self-organizing methods. (Most people hate hierarchical management.)
So, in the end, people choose their favorite open source projects in a distributed, self-organized form (DAO), share the passion for creation, develop what people want, and automatically get their equity through algorithms.
The driving force behind all this is that, in the end, the world is what people want it to be.
Afterword.
According to Marx’s theory, in capitalist societies, expensive means of production (operating systems, databases, middleware, development platforms, etc.) were controlled by capitalists. Programmers, as workers in software enterprises, have no capital, no means of production and no independent choice. They can only act in accordance with the orders of capitalists and are brainwashed by capitalists: “It is your duty to work hard!”
A few, however, is in such an environment, creative and share the spirit of hackers, independently or distributed cooperation, to work free contribution (open source), become the developers can free access to production data, and they create cloud computing and the Internet, laborer can finally to personal affordable cost, Start a business or become an independent professional.
Many of them, continue to carry forward the common production, have in common, Shared thoughts, lead to more people, even more of the company, the currents of active part in open source, with their wisdom and passion, born from the traditional capitalist society, the formation of a vigorous development of the open source community (community), To create a new future world with a new mode of production and production relations, where each programmer is free to develop according to his own preferences, and ultimately promote the free development of everyone.
References:
- Hacker (github.com/Jargonfile/…
- History of Computer, ye Ping, Peking University Press, 1999
- The other side of the apple: Steve wozniak (zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/39788898)…
- How amazon into SOA (www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2016/0…
- Debunking Common Myths About Building Remote Teams (www.upwork.com/resources/d…