Personality Characteristics

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are not usually intellectually narrow; they
tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental stimulation,
and can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly on any number
of obscure subjects if you can get them to talk at all, as opposed to, say,
going back to their hacking. It is noticeable (and contrary to many
outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more
likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more
than merely competent. Hackers are control freaks in a way that has nothing
to do with the usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In
the same way that children delight in making model trains go forward and
back by moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like
computers do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be their nifty stuff. They
don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring, ill-defined
little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence. Accordingly, they
tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual lives and chaotic
elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if their desks are buried in 3
feet of crap. Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by
conventional rewards such as social approval or money. They tend to be
attracted by challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the
interest of work or other activities in terms of the challenges offered and
the toys they get to play with. In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent
psychometric systems, hackerdom appears to concentrate the relatively rare
INTJ and INTP types; that is, introverted, intuitive, and thinker types (as
opposed to the extroverted-sensate personalities that predominate in the
mainstream culture).
