“I don’t want good students. I don’t want Ivy League kids. I don’t want the typical rank and file that go off to IBM or get pulled into Microsoft and Google because they got an internship via their career center.

I want kids that spent their time doing things that live and breathe algorithms. I want the students that enjoy programming competitions and breaking into each other’s computers. I want the kids that cracked a copy of Photoshop not just because it was cheaper than buying it – but also because it was fun.

I don’t want computer nerds or even software engineers. I want hackers.”

These were the words from my friend Jen, a recruiter at a very-well funded startup in Silicon Valley. Jen’s comment highlights a growing trend in Silicon Valley – the popular embrace of the hacker in establishing and maintaining a culture of innovation.

This trend has already had dramatic economic consequences for high tech. From structural changes in the labor market for software engineers engineers to restructuring in corporate strategy at companies like Microsoft and Google, the rise of millennials and post-Generation X engineers and managers has brought with it a rebellious disregard for the traditional way of managing and operating a software company.

“Straight outta’ of C[ambridge]”

To understand what the paradigm shift from “software engineering” to “hacking” is, we have to first define hacking itself. Hacking is a complicated and layered topic for technologists, and has different contextual meanings and interpretations.

While the well-publicized definition of hacking as a means of defeating security for a computer system still holds, hacking typically refers to the use of unorthodox or otherwise ingenious methods for solving problems.

The word itself is the child of the MIT engineering culture in the 1960’s.  “Hacks” are ingenious pranks MIT students would play on their teachers or others. Legendary hacks include covertly transporting a famous statue from Caltech (MIT’s rival) to Boston, rebuilding professors’ cars inside their classrooms, or even hijacking the electrical system for a dorm building to spell out messages by flipping lights on and off.

The hacking culture of nerdy and ingenious pranks at MIT continues to this day. MIT’s class of 2009 was known to have somehow acquired the commencement speech of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in order to secretly play a class-wide game of bingo during their graduation ceremony. In 2010 students suspended all of the furniture in a lounge underneath the MIT Media Lab off of a roof upside down outside.

As newly-christened engineers wearing the Brass Rat ring flooded Silicon Valley, they brought with them their hacking culture – and the out of the box thinking and obsession with the subject matter it required. Hacks are complicated and difficult to pull off. Coordinating and conducting a hack required a student to use tools and resources at his or her disposal in new and unique ways.  This skill set and MacGuyver-esque approach to solving difficult problems translated very well into software engineering.

A consequence of this fusion of technology and MIT hacker culture formed the popular contemporary definition of unorthodox problem solving.  For many in Silicon Valley embracing this desire and obsession to solve problems is critical to maintaining a culture of innovation. Instead of simply being a “software engineering” shop, a company of developers could embrace the hacker culture and let their engineering staff approach a problem outside of the tools and pace dictated by traditional design methodologies (ala: the Waterfall Model) in order to better navigate technology roadblocks, decrease time to market, and increase the utility and happiness of employees.

Dirty, beautiful code

Hacking has ramifications for product quality and code stewardship. The quality of a hacked solution can vary, and two types of hacks are frequently discussed when talking about a hack’s quality.

Dirty hacks are solutions that were either quickly thrown together or otherwise unstable and unrefined. Often a dirty hack can arise when a time-sensitive need or feature requires an immediate solution (or when the problem is so intense or difficult that no elegant solution exists).

Dirty hacks are often the bad side of hacking. They allow rapid development and problem solving, but the lack of stability and elegance inherent to their solution might cause problems when the code interacts with other parts of the system (e.g.: Race Conditions). Dirty hack solutions may provide an immediate solution to problem, but they can also create serious new problems that are difficult or seemingly impossible to debug.

Dirty hacks often have implications for future code management and stewardship. The code written to solve a dirty hack might be completely incomprehensible to another software engineer who would later inherit owning and maintaining that code. Among other serious problems, this would (ironically) increase the time to market of patches or changes to code that results from a dirty hack as more effort would be involved to understand the architecture and flow of such a hack.

Beautiful hacks are the more ideal results of hacking. These often comprise of the ingenious use of algorithms or technology to solve problems they were never designed or intended for.

A great example of a beautiful hardware hack is Square’s card reader. The card reader interfaces directly with the iPhone through the headphone jack, allowing the peripheral to work with the iPhone without interfacing through the dock connector at the bottom (and presumably skipping a painful and expensive vetting process with Apple who owns the patent for the interface).

Obviously the headphone jack was never designed with the intention of being used for anything other than an audio/mic interface. But that didn’t stop Square from using it to create a small and cheap to produce solution to solve the unique use case of empowering small businesses to process credit card orders.

Software beautiful hacks often take the form of the ingenious use of algorithms or math to solve a difficult problem. Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms are often used to looking for teaching a computer to look for and understand problems. With inspiration and some work, they can also be used to help show more relevant content to a user as a function of their social graph. This is the case in Facebook’s Newsfeed, which orders events and status updates based off of activity and the nature of a user’s friendship.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is another excellent example of a beautiful hack using algorithms and math. Websites in Google are ordered as a function of their “popularity,” quantified by links on and off their page. Page and Brin designed the algorithm using deceptively simple Graph Thoery and Linear Algebra to quickly calculate how popular a website is relative to another one. This is contrary to the so-called “typical” use case of either fields of math – understanding the mathematical nature of graphs or solving linear equations respectively.

Beautiful hacks take much longer to produce. But they are the true badges of honor and glory for a hacker. They highlight his or her skills, and the most legendary beautiful hacks have the potential to garner historical importance (as is the case with PageRank). Beautiful hacks are also sometimes of a higher quality than dirty hacks, as they are not marked for their instability but rather their ingenious design and implementation.

Why we fight

The use of the word “beautiful” in the phrase beautiful hack highlights a critical factor in all hacks: elegance. A particularly beautiful hack displays many of the traits of  mathematical beauty, including solving a complex problem with minimal lines of code or otherwise computing a solution much faster than possible with a conventional approach.

Like mathematicians, hackers are incentivized to seek these solutions because they derive aesthetic and personal pleasure from their works and the act of hacking.

Realization of this is key for HR staff and recruiters, as it means that the process of incentivization and compensation must also recognize the the nature of the subject matter and problems inherent to a software engineering position. Indeed, the programming languages and problems a candidate encounters can be just as salient as a company’s benefits package or their proposed salary.

Changes in the landscape

As hacking is often a de facto defiance of traditional software design methodologies and best practices, many companies have also discarded the conventions of how they produce software or run their business internally.

At Facebook there is no QA process; every engineer is responsible for his or her code and is able to directly merge their code into what will become the weekly build of the website. This decreases time to market (at the cost of potentially breaking the product), and is absolute heresy in a traditional development environment.

Companies like Yahoo, Facebook, and Google all frequently hold hackathons to rapidly design features or solutions.  Hacakthons are rigorous “sprint” coding sessions where engineers spend hours or days mired in a particular problem. This is also against what many consider would be traditional development methodologies, but allows the off-cycle release of features quickly to immediately match market needs and improve competitive and comparative advantage.

As companies embrace hacking, their corporate culture is likely to change as well. Hacking requires dedication and obsession with a problem. Therefore, hacker-friendly companies often do everything and anything to make sure their employees are happy, focused, and incentivized to continue hacking.

Many of the perks Google employees famously receive is a nod to this practice. Doing an engineer’s laundry means he or she doesn’t have to go home. Giving out beer at the workplace means an engineer will have more fun in solving their problems (and potentially stay later in order to avoid drinking and riving). All of these perks are designed to keep engineers focused and incentivized via positive reinforcement.

Hacking does require a certain type of individual. As Jen pointed out at the beginning of this article, hackers are often not the typical rank and file of engineers. Appreciation for mathematical beauty and obsession is key to the success of a successful software hacker. If more companies adopt a hacker-friendly approach to software engineering, it is likely that these intangible traits could become critical in getting a job in high tech as a developer.

And the geeks shall inherit the earth

It’s clear that the rise of the hacking culture within technology organizations isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The success of Facebook, a major proponent of hacking and its culture, has pushed its competition and other companies to similarly embrace hacking.

A famous example of this is Google’s recent decision to promote Larry Page to CEO. Page, who does not have a business background, is a strong technologist who’s seen all of his experience in management within engineering. It is popularly speculated that Page’s promotion was a response to Facebook and an attempt to make Google more engineering and hacker friendly in order to capture talent and stem the flow of engineers from Mountain View to Palo Alto.

If the embrace of hacking continues we can only expect more seismic shifts to occur within Silicon Valley. Right now it’s clear though that hackers are no longer the 12 year olds who threatened to take down Excite and AltaVista. They’re the executives and leaders who run the companies that have displaced them, and we as an industry want more of them.

SF New Tech Contributor Andrew “Andy” Manoske is a PM by day, hacker by night, and sometimes in the evening he fights crime. He currently serves as a product manager at NetApp – the youngest in the company’s history – and previously held technical positions at SAP, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts. He received his Bachelors of Arts in Economics and Computer Science from San Jose State University in 2010, and was a finalist in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition and the Silicon Valley Neat Ideas Fair.
Twitter: @a2d2 Website: http://www.zomghacks.net