5. Status in the Hacker Culture
Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on
reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how
interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is
something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally
equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score
primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren't
really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is
obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural
taboo (now gradually decaying but still potent) against admitting that ego
or external validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift
culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating
other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other
people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by
giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your
skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by
hackers:
1. Write open-source software.
The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs
that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program
sources to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works ``free software'', but this confused too
many people who weren't sure exactly what ``free'' was supposed to mean.
Many of us now prefer the term ``
open-source'' software.)
Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written large,
capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so
that now everyone uses them.
2. Help test and debug open-source software
They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect
world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time
in the debugging phase. That's why any open-source author who's
thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to
describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs
in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic
routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can
make the difference between a debugging phase that's a protracted,
exhausting nightmare and one that's merely a salutary nuisance.
If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that
you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural
progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to
helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate
good karma with people who will help you later on.
3. Publish useful information.
Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information
into Web pages or documents like FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions
lists), and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as
open-source authors.
4. Help keep the infrastructure working.
The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet,
for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary but
unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going -- administering
mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software
archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because
everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as
playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.
5. Serve the hacker culture itself.
Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for
example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)).
This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've been
around for while and become well-known for one of the first four
things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have
culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople.
When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of
these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders,
so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than
striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in
your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.