Hacking is Important
Here's what's funny: Rands begins with a story about Borland, and how it was this amazing software company run by hacker barbarians who by 1992 were converting their products with "complete object-oriented rewrites." What he doesn't say is that Borland's hacker ethos is what greatly diminished the company.The company indulged a well-known programmer tendency to bulldoze and rewrite code. The company tried to rewrite Arago into dBase for Windows and in the meantime was surpassed by Microsoft Access. It tried to rewrite Quattro Pro for Windows, ended up with few new features to show for years of work, and was surpassed by Microsoft Excel. Joel Spolsky wrote about both cases in one of his best known essays http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.htmlRands is making the point that companies need hacking, or, as he puts it, "well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company." In this he is right. Facebook is trouncing Google with a more hackerish ethos, and is not making the same "rewrite everything" mistake as Borland.But Facebook /is/ making some fresh mistakes. If you were to ask yourself, "Is Facebook maybe taking an excessively hackerish view on anything like Borland did?" it would not be hard to find affirmative examples, including a series of features that use private data in a way that tends to offend non hackers, and a series of privacy defaults that do likewise.By more fully acknowledging the ways in which the hacker ethos burned Borland (beyond the understatement that Borland's products were "running late"), and by acknowledging the problems hacker culture contributed to at Facebook, Rands would have an even better essay, one that both asserted the importance of the hacker way and that acknowledged the potential downsides of hacker thinking. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on how to embrace hacking while also instituting some checks on the less useful impulses of programmers.