Reading 03: Gamers Rise Up

I think it’s plainly clear that the Hacker Ethic cannot truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, many hardware hackers found themselves unable to continue to freely spread information once they joined or created their own companies. Even though some of the early video game companies shared information amongst themselves in order to help create better products, this behavior was limited only to those companies and larger companies (like Atari) had the opposite behavior, and tried to keep as much information hidden as possible. In addition, these companies would pursue litigation against the smaller, hacker owned companies. Over time, the hacker companies would eventually be forced to compete like larger companies did, both as the market evolved and as the hackers become more divorced from their roots, either over time or with an influx of new management (we saw the same thing happen with Apple with Wozniak leaving).

I think this was inevitable as computers and computer services became more commercialized. The influx of money brings in people who are not necessarily interested in computers because they are computers, but who are interested because of the money they can make. Even if they are interested in computers, the allure of money draws people away from the idealism that they hold, given the society we live in. While there are some hackers who are still interested in hacking for the sake of hacking, increasingly many of those in the industry are just interested in whatever will increase their total compensation (TC). If you look on reddit or TeamBlind you will see a flood of questions asking about how to get into a FAANG because of how much these companies pay. You’ll see people ask if they should go into ML or DevOps or cybersecurity based on projected salary and job growth in those subfields. If you look at Notre Dame, roughly half of our CS graduates go into consulting and not into pure software engineering. While we are an outlier, having talked to people from other schools while interviewing, even in very selective schools like CalTech people are still far more interested in having a higher TC rather than necessarily hacking for the sake of hacking.

However, it’s hard to say how big of a problem this is, if at all. If we look at game hackers compared to previous generations of hackers, they are far more focused on making money, while still adhering to parts of the hacker ethic. Similarly, programmers today, even if they are focused on money still often contribute to open source projects, and do help share information (thanks StackOverflow!). If we think of “professional programmers” versus “hacker spirited” programmers, we need to realize that the vast majority of hackers are not one or the other. Sure, it would be great if we could all abide by the hacker ethic, but that simply isn’t feasible. And even if we did, there’s no guarantee we could accomplish the great things that we accomplish now - look at how MIT hackers felt when they saw the progress that NASA made despite not programming like the hackers did. I think that for society, it would be best to have “professional programmers”, even if we want “hacker spirited” programmers because we agree with their ideals.