Embracing hacker culture
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Love the reference to MIT! I write about MIT student startups that are hacking their way to growth in my newsletter below:
https://seamuscassidy.substack.com/
100%. The hacker culture is not only beneficial for big companies like Netflix or Meta, or Google. The concepts can be adapted to any size company.
Data helps but ultimately it is there to serve a purpose. I was in corporate strategy for 5-6 years and I could use data to convince pretty much any team/executive to do anything. It’s voodoo magic. World is not simple as it seems :(
"Don’t let opinions from C-Level executives influence or much-worse contradict decisions made based on data."
This is really good. Obviously, there is an element of creativity that goes into hacking - in fact, that's true for most types of problem-solving scenarios. But say you're building a prototype to test whether a particular idea could work, data-driven decisions should be the focus. Don't let yourself be dissuaded by other people's opinions - collect sufficient data yourself to see whether or not it backs those opinions up or not - they could be totally unfounded.
This is true! Especially if you're talking to non-hackers. People tend to be more risk-averse than most hackers, I think. The knee-jerk response is to assume something can't be done. Sometimes they're right, so I wouldn't suggest not listening to people's opinions. But collect enough data first to see to what extent their opinions reflect reality.
I hadn't really thought about the 'competence' point before, but it's very true - as a programmer, you really can't "fake it till you make it." It's a role that's completely transparent - you can either do something of a certain level or you can't.
I was at a fairly large tech company and when I first arrived, I thought there’s just unlimited of knowledge and everyone is amazing. 6 months down the line, I can see people were just faking it. The engineers don’t know much beyond their domain. The managers don’t know how to manage. I think the fundamental issue is they all fall to Peter‘s principle. Even at this size, there’s only a handful of truly great rock stars. And they are able to consistently outperform because that’s in their dna