When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to.
Ay, there's the rub: keeping highly productive people's interests aligned with the goals of the organization can be hard, particularly for tasks that don't take advantage of whatever it is they like about what they do. Organizations need to realize that this is the same for all great individuals, hackers or otherwise. The type of people ISVs like SourceGear need for success is probably different from the type needed by YCombinator startups.
Here here. Very insightful. I often wonder... I've made a pretty bad employee so far, which is one of the reason I'm a consultant for my cash monies and start companies whenever I can afford to. But... then again I've never had a really interesting job... ever.
I wonder if I would make a great employee at some kick ass company doing interesting research, large or small?
Exactly, this is a problem in any profession. When you run into a situation where you need someone to come in and fix something or do, at first, seemingly mindless work, it is incredibly hard to the right person. I guess the solution is to try and make sure you never create these 'opputunities' for future hires.
The expression in the title is incomplete. Let me fix it:
Great Hacker != Great Hire unless (Good Company && Interesting Work)
That's better, and now you don't have the read the article, which is just some whipped-sounding guy complaining that all the smart programmers don't want to waste their time doing telephone support for his Visual SourceSafe tool.
I can't believe this is getting upvoted. He chooses a market where lots of desperate people got locked into the wrong choice and he makes it halfway bearable for them. This is called winning.
I don't think he's actually read much of PG's writing. For example, he says "great hackers" aren't willing to do grunt work, but the way you get Robert Morris to do your Unix admin is to give him a big chunk of equity!
Smart people are perfectly happy to do mundane or tedious tasks a) in support of a grand vision or b) for a big pile of money. That's why movie FX and games pays so badly, and SAP implementation pays so much. If you're in the middle somewhere, well, complaining about it won't make much difference.
Ay, there's the rub: keeping highly productive people's interests aligned with the goals of the organization can be hard, particularly for tasks that don't take advantage of whatever it is they like about what they do. Organizations need to realize that this is the same for all great individuals, hackers or otherwise. The type of people ISVs like SourceGear need for success is probably different from the type needed by YCombinator startups.