The best hackers I've worked with didn't have degrees. The best software engineers did. You need both. On the hacker front, I noticed a lot of patterns--they h

The best hackers I've worked with didn't have degrees. The best software engineers did. You need both. On the hacker front, I noticed a lot of patterns--they had a lot of drive, were self-taught (obviously), and had other things about them that were remarkable. One can play any song on the piano that he's heard just once before. Another is a multiple-time CTF champion. Another is the best performance engineer I've ever met, and who can diagnose and fix site outages 10x faster than anyone else. There's a difference between hackers and engineers though. I found that the engineers were good at breaking projects into milestones and driving their teams toward them, e.g. steady state development when conditions are good. And I found that the hackers excelled at exceptional or emergency situations like debugging complicated multithreaded code on the fly or figuring out which switch in a datacenter was corrupting packets for production traffic. There were exceptions in both directions (hackers who were great technical leads and engineers who were great detectives), but this was a pretty general rule I saw over the years. I also worked with a number of people without degrees that weren't very good, so it's not like the lack of a degree makes you a hacker or makes you good at your job. You have to be very driven when you're self-taught and sometimes have to work harder than your peers who have a more evenly balanced education. I ended up being a bit of a wildcard myself--I'm a self-taught hacker and did lots of cool debugging and detective work for 14 years, and then I was a manager for 5 years. I think hackers can make interesting managers since they are willing to upend traditions and try new things with their teams. I did a lot of that.