Eric S. Raymond Unveils New List Of 'Hacker Archetypes' (ibiblio.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Open source guru Eric S. Raymond has announced public brainstorming on a "gallery of hacker archetypes to help motivate newbies" by defining several different psychologies commonly found among programmers. He's unveiled an initial list developed with a friend, along with some interesting commentary. (Algorithmicists often have poor social skills and "a tendency to fail by excessive cleverness. Never let them manage anyone!")

Raymond cautions that "No hacker is only one of these" -- though apparently most of the hackers he knows appear to be two of them, "an indication that we are, even if imperfectly, zeroing in on real traits." But the blog post ends by asking "What archetypes, if any, are we missing?"
It'll be interesting to see if Slashdot readers if they recognize themselves in any of the archetypes. But the blog post also answers the inevitable question. What archetype is Eric S. Raymond?

"Mostly Architect with a side of Algorithmicist and a touch of Jack-of-All-Trades."

Comments

The traveller

[petes_PoV]

What archetypes, if any, are we missing?

The type for whom the journey (or development process) is all. They love creating something: code, hardware, paintings. And for them, it is the production that matters, not the the final result. You might call them "perfectionists" because they will never finish anything (until they get bored and just drop it, to start travelling on a different journey) and will constantly be adding new parts, features or functions.

Their favourite saying is "just another couple of weeks" when asked by their team-leader, project supervisor, manager when their assignment will be ready. But 2 weeks later, the answer is still the same. Although they are enthusiastic, their failure mode is that they never produce an end product and their office, lab or home is full of half-completed projects.

Re:The traveller

[Kjella]

You might call them "perfectionists" because they will never finish anything (...) Although they are enthusiastic, their failure mode is that they never produce an end product and their office, lab or home is full of half-completed projects.

I think those two are different archetypes. What you describe is a type of "abandonist" that runs into trouble/uncertainty but rather than work through it procrastinates by starting to work on something else, however since almost every project has some hardship they leave a trail of half-finished things in their wake. I know a person who is like that with home renovation, rather than do one thing in one room and finish he'll start on twenty things in five rooms and never finish. He is roughly as far from a perfectionist as I can think of. Perfectionists are people who refuse to deliver anything until they've tweaked it to some arbitrary standard of perfection that solves every corner case with every nice-to-have feature. They just don't know when to stop and deliver.

I think I'll also add a third archetype, the reinventer. This is the kind of person who - without any real effort or review - can tell you that everything you have is crap and should be rewritten from scratch, probably using Ruby on Rails and NoSQL or whatever is the buzzword of the day. They're the tech version of the trade magazine CEO who'll jump on any buzzword thinking this will solve our problems. And if you're foolish enough to listen he'll soon be exploring the next new fad saying RoR is so yesterday and we should rewrite everything in Node.js instead. Right now the magic buzzword is SQL Server Master Data Services, that'll solve our master data problems. Not.

What's wrong with "algorist"?

[TeknoHog]

Originally, the art of using algorithms was called algorism so the person in question would be an algorist. The -ithm in algorithm was apparently added due to words like arithmetic.

I've also seen "algorithmist" which follows the common logic of adding -ist to a known concept, so that too would be somewhat acceptable.

Like the zodiac for programmers

[Ed Avis]

I think it's like horoscopes or Chinese birth years or other kinds of cold reading. There's enough general stuff in there that you can always recognize something of yourself. But then as a Scorpio I am always going to be sceptical of such things.