Yostivanich

So which com­pa­nies need to have a hacker-centric cul­ture? Which com­pa­nies are “in the soft­ware busi­ness” in this respect? As Yahoo dis­cov­ered, the area cov­ered by this rule is big­ger than most peo­ple real­ize. The answer is: any com­pany that needs to have good software.

Why would great pro­gram­mers want to work for a com­pany that didn’t have a hacker-centric cul­ture, as long as there were oth­ers that did? I can imag­ine two rea­sons: if they were paid a huge amount, or if the domain was inter­est­ing and none of the com­pa­nies in it were hacker-centric. Oth­er­wise you can’t attract good pro­gram­mers to work in a suit-centric cul­ture. And with­out good pro­gram­mers you won’t get good soft­ware, no mat­ter how many peo­ple you put on a task, or how many pro­ce­dures you estab­lish to ensure “quality.”

Hacker cul­ture often seems kind of irre­spon­si­ble. That’s why peo­ple propos­ing to destroy it use phrases like “adult super­vi­sion.” That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seem­ing irre­spon­si­ble. Los­ing, for example.

via Paul Gra­ham – What Hap­pened to Yahoo. Paul Gra­ham dis­cusses the issues sur­round­ing build­ing and main­tain­ing a hacker culture.