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