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Something else about hackers
2008-02-06 08:30 amHackers are used to working with computers, which are fast, accurate, and extremely literal-minded. A hacker knows, deep down in his guts, that if something is wrong with the program he's writing, it's his fault. The normal human mechanisms of blame-shifting and denial don't come into play at all: the only thing to do is fix the problem and move on.
This means that if you can point out something that the hacker in your life is doing wrong, there's an excellent chance that he'll get to work on it. My father provided a good example of this: he discovered that he didn't have anything to talk about besides technology. That's fine with other techies, but not very helpful at cocktail parties. Someone else (um... \me looks in mirror and clears throat) might have stuck to his own kind, or crawled off into a corner to read.
Dad, instead, made himself an expert on wine, with a sideline in hotels and restaurants around the world. By the time I was in high school he had a notebook with not only the best places to eat and places to stay in hundreds of cities, but which rooms had the best view.
I do have to warn you that there's a downside to dealing with machines a lot of the time: it's safe to yell at a machine, because it has no feelings to hurt. There's anger there, but it's not really directed at the machine -- it's really directed at himself. How could he possibly have been so stupid? A few minutes later, of course, he'll figure out exactly how, and by the end of the day he'll be happily telling the story of his own stupidity, and his clever fix for it, to anyone who stands still long enough to listen. Just something to watch out for.
(Side note: I'm going to change focus of this series from geeks in general to hackers/computer geeks, because that's really the only subspecies I'm familiar with.)
