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I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35

I don't think true hacking is dead, its just lost in a sea of non-hacking. The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC. In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school. This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution. There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them. In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see them.

geocar 7y ago
An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
- atoav 7y ago
  It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.
  - lsofzz 7y ago
    > And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard. I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work. Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?
    - bambataa 7y ago
      Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone. The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical. But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  One of the things that makes me sigh is how we've gone and built up a huge slate of "required features" for apps that are very effective at professionalizing software and yet may not do much of anything for the end user. In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better. For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software. And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.
- shantly 7y ago
  > An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers). 90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending. It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas. [EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.
- II2II 7y ago
  I think that it is more accurate to say that people don't realize that they can tell the computer to do something. My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process. I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)
lonesword 7y ago
> Compulsive puzzle gene Did you observe this in _all_ of the mentioned 35 students in your high school? Do you think that an aptitude for puzzles is a de-facto pre-requisite? I know that it shouldn't be, but I'm wondering if you have actually met people who are not good with puzzles but are extremely good when it comes to making a computer do things.
- markus_zhang 7y ago
  I think there are two approaches of computer lovers. One is for the puzzle solvers, and one is for the escapers.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  > Did you observe this in _all_ of the mentioned 35 students in your high school? No. The one trait that was common to all of these students in my high school and in my daughter's high school was curiosity. The question "Why does that work that way?" or "How does that even work?" were common. When friends have asked how to raise their kids to be more engaged technically with the world I have always advised them to feed their curiosity. Keep answering 'Why?' questions until you both have to look it up in a good reference. (Also answered the question for them why, in this day and age, did I have an encyclopedia set in my living room. Answer, to do tactile research and explore the world in real time with my kids.)
cwingrav 7y ago
Puzzle interest may be one aspect of it, but I and others too I would assume, are in it for the creativity and fantasy. I knew basic in 2nd grade and made simple little games. Later I learned to use a hex editor to hack saved computer games. I switched to CompSci in college because of the Internet. Today, I love building projects and hacking electronics (and wish I knew more!). I never really had a thing for puzzles, just creative creation.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Yup. I'm pretty anti-puzzle, I don't like solving completely arbitrary, artificial, self-contained problems. I've always found them boring (though these days I appreciate their instrumental value). That's why in high school I could easily code circles around everyone else (including the teachers), but I never was the best in the algorithm olympiad. I learned programming to make games, not solve random word problems from exercise books.
  - silveroriole 7y ago
    Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick. Don’t know if it’s still the case but when I was in uni everyone told you to do Project Euler to prepare for interviews/learn coding. God help the people who had that as one of their first encounters with programming, I would have been turned off it for life!
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Exactly. Now to be honest, over the years I've learned to appreciate the power multiplier deep math knowledge is, but that's not what interested me in programming. And most of the time, it's also not what's useful in a job context.
    - 0x445442 7y ago
      > Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick Yeah, my favorite "puzzle" that highlights the folly of such things is this; write a function which, given the number of participants (n), returns the number of games/matches necessary to be played in a single elimination tournament to determine a winner. I actually asked this question in an interview once, only I was the interviewee. I had just fumbled about with all the nonsense algorithm problems that had no relevance for the job when the interviewer asked if I had any questions. I popped that one on him and to my surprise he actually took up the challenge. But since he didn't know the trick he fumbled about on some recursive goose chase.
barrkel 7y ago
Puzzles don't interest me much, but composition, building and designing things does. When hiring engineers, I sometimes worry that too much puzzle-orientation shows a bias towards "clever" solutions - and complex code - where not necessarily warranted. There's definitely a place for that kind of focus, but it's usually quite low down in the stack, and that's increasingly far away from business value these days.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dmos62 7y ago
  > complex solutions Puzzles aren't really about that. It's about making a model of a problem and finding solutions to it. Complex solutions are as bad in puzzles as in any other area. Not sure what you mean by "clever" (maybe "clever" as in unreadable code). Sometimes you come to an aha moment and realise that you can solve something in a trivial way, aka clever way, and that's a desirable event.
  - rubinelli 7y ago
    A puzzle will more often than not have one right way to do it, unlike real engineering problems which are made of trade-offs, and that one way is unintuitive, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a puzzle at all.
    - dmos62 7y ago
      A puzzle is just a packaged problem. I think it's hard to argue that certain puzzles are more prevalent than others. This weekend we were doing these puzzles where you have to align unique pieces into a specified shape. It's basically a bruteforce search. The creativity is expressed in how you reduce the search-space and how you memorize the alignments you've already tried. There's definitely more than one way to do it.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Even when there is only one solution there is generally a vast array of possible approaches to solving it. A Rubik's Cube for example does not care about the intermediate states.
deaps 7y ago
The 'compulsive puzzle' gene really hits home with me. Really nails my childhood and my life - and explains why I am where I am in life. It was never enough for me to take something (anything) for granted - I had to know how it did what it did. Whether that be by taking something apart, reading a design sheet, rebuilding something, writing code, whatever, I had to figure it out. This applies to anything from a gas pedal in my vehicle to a mechanical pencil or power lines, a module in programming, etc... I can pick out those who share this trait from people around me at work and in life - it all makes so much more sense now.
mertnesvat 7y ago
> If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them. Brilliant explanation, I tried to examine that both reading and experiments. The closest thing I got was state called flow where you lose track of time, yourself and give all of your attention to the task. But most importantly the task has to be in the perfect place between enough hard for you to give all your attention and enough easy for you to solve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
asdkhadsj 7y ago
I think there's other types of compulsive people too. I'm not, in my view, a compulsive puzzle solver. Rather, I'm obsessive about understanding elegant solutions to complex problems. Usually I define elegance in different ways, but nevertheless that's the thing I most enjoy. So puzzles by themselves don't often hook me too much. Especially if the puzzle itself has 1 way to solve it. But I'll spend days obsessing, losing sleep, forgetting to eat and etc all because I "feel" a problem has a more clean solution. Though, I'm probably not a hacker in this sense.. hmm. /shrug
jaxn 7y ago
"compulsive puzzle gene" I like that a lot. I'm curious if you hire people and if you use that concept in that process.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I do, and I do. Although it is more about unconstrained thinking rather than strictly puzzles. I have observed a high correlation between people who can temporarily 'change the rules' and think about things with a different mindset, with original and creative solutions to problems. Solutions to problems that people with constrained thinking cannot see.
  - jaxn 7y ago
    Thanks for that. This led to a great conversation with my coach about our next hire.
greggman2 7y ago
people who solve puzzles and the 8 of 1500 students who became software engineers at my school had little if any overlap.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
I was always concerned that as more high schools taught programming, six-figure salaries would cease to exist because of an increase in programmer supply.
- VRay 7y ago
  I remember when I was in high school reading the weekly horror stories on Slashdot about how every job was going to be outsourced, everyone was doomed, etc Turns out that if anything, the opposite happened. The best engineers in India and China got sucked into six figure jobs in the USA. Software Engineers are now the most valuable part of every business in the world. The demand for them just keeps going up endlessly, outstripping supply even though just about everyone who can rub two bits of logic together gets sucked into the industry

geocar 7y ago

An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! We were surprised (if also for other reasons) because we confused the product with the means, or to paraphrase Feynman, hacking is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

atoav 7y ago
It is a mix of challenge, curiosity and (probably) the will to be in total control of a little subsection of reality. And it certainly isn’t dead.
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > And it certainly isn’t dead. Or to put it another way, it's alive and kicking ass :-)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I'm not sure if that's true all that much, if you take into account the scary things regular people do with Excel and Access, or did in the past with HyperCard. I think a big part is that as an industry, we've told people that the right way to use a computer to solve your problem is to track down and buy some piece of software that does it (proliferation of open source merely made the "buy" part optional). We then proceeded to take away the means of self-sufficiency, widening the initially small gap between "end-user" and "programmer" into a chasm and hollowing out the middle. It's no surprise people only consume apps, when solving any problem yourself without an off-the-shelf solution requires you to become a programmer. And now the final nail is driven into the coffin with proliferation of SaaS which take away both your data and any ability to control and modify the behavior of an application.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  But excel, google sheets, IFTTT and other tools still exist. Some of them are just more successful than others. There is still a lot of people out there who can access computers and before couldn't, but have no interest in automating any of the work. Case in point: a lot of people don't even use keyboard shortcuts, why would they use a hypercard clone?
  - bambataa 7y ago
    Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone. The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical. But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.
mntmoss 7y ago
One of the things that makes me sigh is how we've gone and built up a huge slate of "required features" for apps that are very effective at professionalizing software and yet may not do much of anything for the end user. In that respect I think we've hit some kind of endgame for software as it's historically been done - the bells-and-whistles show - because smaller, more targeted software so often hits the mark better. For example, when people ask how to get into playing piano, I steer them away from a MIDI controller and software and towards the cheap home portable hardware. The hardware has nearly ideal software for the task: it starts instantly, never crashes or glitches, never needs to update, can only be hacked with physical access, has ideal latency, and does not require additional plugs or configuration. Put in batteries and flip the switch and you can practice. And past the very most inexpensive ones, they all have the connectivity needed to control software. And yet many technically inclined people - my previous self, friends, etc. - will hear that recommendation and still opt for that MIDI controller and get a gadget with more knobs and wheels, instead of a perfect learning tool, just because of the temptations of software that could "do anything." There's a shopper's high in it. But guess what the last software purchase I made was? An emulation of old home portable keyboard sounds(Plogue PortaFM). What goes around, comes around.
shantly 7y ago
> An astonishing thing happened when we finally made it possible for everyone in the world to tell a computer what to do: We discovered nobody knows what they want the computer to do! I feel this way. I've been at this a long time but all my non-work computing is either futzing about or incredibly low-value. Spreadsheets are pretty nice but I could do without them. Some kind of instant messaging or email is pretty useful. Calendar reminders are nice. But there are decent alternatives to all of them that aren't really that much worse, for personal use, while computers are expensive and take up a lot of time, especially to get good enough to use them without constantly being confused and mystified (see: any non-nerds using computers). 90%ish of what I get out of all this, personally, is media access, which could be almost perfectly replaced by living somewhat closer to a library and having a Netflix DVD subscription. I kinda think the everything-always-available aspect actually makes things worse, so a little extra friction or forcing choices might be an improvement. Ditto spending—I think any savings from online shopping is probably exceeded, for most people, by increased total spending. It's looking increasingly likely I'll never start a significant side-project, let alone found a product of any significance whatsoever, because I just can't think of anything useful to do with these magical boxes that's not already being done. Since everyone says that business ideas are the easy part I guess I'm truly fucked because I can't even come up with one of those that survives a day of thought and research. I look at computers and the Internet and see a time-suck that is, most of the time, ill-applied, dangerous, and probably harming productivity in most areas. [EDIT] to support the "expensive" thing, say it's about $2000 every four years per person to keep in smartphones and larger computing devices that don't take up too much space (laptop or tablet), that work well enough to actually be semi-useful rather than just a constant pain in your ass, and that will actually probably last and remain usable for four years, on average. Two adults in a household, that's about $1,000/yr in hardware, no tinkering, no gaming consoles, no bling'd out new phone every year, no peripherals, just to basically get the "job" done. Two streaming services of some kind, call it $20/mo, and that's a pretty low count. Good home Internet plus the Internet portion of your cell phone bill, for me, that's about $110/mo combined for the two of us (kids don't have their own stuff yet, and hell, may not at all until they can pay for it, because this stuff's expensive). That totals to about $2500/yr. You can buy a hell of a lot of physical media, (physical) games, postage stamps, puzzle books, whatever, for $2500/yr, and if you don't just throw it away you can keep using all that stuff the next year, and the one after, without paying again.
II2II 7y ago
I think that it is more accurate to say that people don't realize that they can tell the computer to do something. My boss had a time consuming task to do weekly. I looked at the steps, which were very basic and repetitive. It is the type of thing that a small program could easily handle. So I automated it. The problem is that most people see the tasks that they perform as a job that must be done. They may think about delegating it to other people, but they rarely think that it can be delegated to the machine. Which is ironic when the machine is involved in the process. I suspect that there are many reasons why people don't think about writing a program. One reason is that software developers rarely make such possibilities clear to the end user. Another reason is that there is an aura of wizardry around programming. In a sense there is: programming languages rarely allow users to express a task in the terms process that they would use while performing it in an application. (Another irony, since the user is essentially telling the program what code to execute.)

lonesword 7y ago

> Compulsive puzzle gene Did you observe this in _all_ of the mentioned 35 students in your high school? Do you think that an aptitude for puzzles is a de-facto pre-requisite? I know that it shouldn't be, but I'm wondering if you have actually met people who are not good with puzzles but are extremely good when it comes to making a computer do things.

markus_zhang 7y ago
I think there are two approaches of computer lovers. One is for the puzzle solvers, and one is for the escapers.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
> Did you observe this in _all_ of the mentioned 35 students in your high school? No. The one trait that was common to all of these students in my high school and in my daughter's high school was curiosity. The question "Why does that work that way?" or "How does that even work?" were common. When friends have asked how to raise their kids to be more engaged technically with the world I have always advised them to feed their curiosity. Keep answering 'Why?' questions until you both have to look it up in a good reference. (Also answered the question for them why, in this day and age, did I have an encyclopedia set in my living room. Answer, to do tactile research and explore the world in real time with my kids.)

cwingrav 7y ago

Puzzle interest may be one aspect of it, but I and others too I would assume, are in it for the creativity and fantasy. I knew basic in 2nd grade and made simple little games. Later I learned to use a hex editor to hack saved computer games. I switched to CompSci in college because of the Internet. Today, I love building projects and hacking electronics (and wish I knew more!). I never really had a thing for puzzles, just creative creation.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Yup. I'm pretty anti-puzzle, I don't like solving completely arbitrary, artificial, self-contained problems. I've always found them boring (though these days I appreciate their instrumental value). That's why in high school I could easily code circles around everyone else (including the teachers), but I never was the best in the algorithm olympiad. I learned programming to make games, not solve random word problems from exercise books.
- silveroriole 7y ago
  Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick. Don’t know if it’s still the case but when I was in uni everyone told you to do Project Euler to prepare for interviews/learn coding. God help the people who had that as one of their first encounters with programming, I would have been turned off it for life!
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Exactly. Now to be honest, over the years I've learned to appreciate the power multiplier deep math knowledge is, but that's not what interested me in programming. And most of the time, it's also not what's useful in a job context.
  - 0x445442 7y ago
    > Also often the puzzles have very little to do with your coding skills and everything to do with knowing some mathematical trick Yeah, my favorite "puzzle" that highlights the folly of such things is this; write a function which, given the number of participants (n), returns the number of games/matches necessary to be played in a single elimination tournament to determine a winner. I actually asked this question in an interview once, only I was the interviewee. I had just fumbled about with all the nonsense algorithm problems that had no relevance for the job when the interviewer asked if I had any questions. I popped that one on him and to my surprise he actually took up the challenge. But since he didn't know the trick he fumbled about on some recursive goose chase.

barrkel 7y ago

Puzzles don't interest me much, but composition, building and designing things does. When hiring engineers, I sometimes worry that too much puzzle-orientation shows a bias towards "clever" solutions - and complex code - where not necessarily warranted. There's definitely a place for that kind of focus, but it's usually quite low down in the stack, and that's increasingly far away from business value these days.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dmos62 7y ago
> complex solutions Puzzles aren't really about that. It's about making a model of a problem and finding solutions to it. Complex solutions are as bad in puzzles as in any other area. Not sure what you mean by "clever" (maybe "clever" as in unreadable code). Sometimes you come to an aha moment and realise that you can solve something in a trivial way, aka clever way, and that's a desirable event.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  A puzzle will more often than not have one right way to do it, unlike real engineering problems which are made of trade-offs, and that one way is unintuitive, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a puzzle at all.
  - dmos62 7y ago
    A puzzle is just a packaged problem. I think it's hard to argue that certain puzzles are more prevalent than others. This weekend we were doing these puzzles where you have to align unique pieces into a specified shape. It's basically a bruteforce search. The creativity is expressed in how you reduce the search-space and how you memorize the alignments you've already tried. There's definitely more than one way to do it.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Even when there is only one solution there is generally a vast array of possible approaches to solving it. A Rubik's Cube for example does not care about the intermediate states.

deaps 7y ago

The 'compulsive puzzle' gene really hits home with me. Really nails my childhood and my life - and explains why I am where I am in life. It was never enough for me to take something (anything) for granted - I had to know how it did what it did. Whether that be by taking something apart, reading a design sheet, rebuilding something, writing code, whatever, I had to figure it out. This applies to anything from a gas pedal in my vehicle to a mechanical pencil or power lines, a module in programming, etc... I can pick out those who share this trait from people around me at work and in life - it all makes so much more sense now.

mertnesvat 7y ago

> If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them. Brilliant explanation, I tried to examine that both reading and experiments. The closest thing I got was state called flow where you lose track of time, yourself and give all of your attention to the task. But most importantly the task has to be in the perfect place between enough hard for you to give all your attention and enough easy for you to solve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

asdkhadsj 7y ago

I think there's other types of compulsive people too. I'm not, in my view, a compulsive puzzle solver. Rather, I'm obsessive about understanding elegant solutions to complex problems. Usually I define elegance in different ways, but nevertheless that's the thing I most enjoy. So puzzles by themselves don't often hook me too much. Especially if the puzzle itself has 1 way to solve it. But I'll spend days obsessing, losing sleep, forgetting to eat and etc all because I "feel" a problem has a more clean solution. Though, I'm probably not a hacker in this sense.. hmm. /shrug

jaxn 7y ago

"compulsive puzzle gene" I like that a lot. I'm curious if you hire people and if you use that concept in that process.

ChuckMcM 7y ago
I do, and I do. Although it is more about unconstrained thinking rather than strictly puzzles. I have observed a high correlation between people who can temporarily 'change the rules' and think about things with a different mindset, with original and creative solutions to problems. Solutions to problems that people with constrained thinking cannot see.
- jaxn 7y ago
  Thanks for that. This led to a great conversation with my coach about our next hire.

greggman2 7y ago

people who solve puzzles and the 8 of 1500 students who became software engineers at my school had little if any overlap.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

I was always concerned that as more high schools taught programming, six-figure salaries would cease to exist because of an increase in programmer supply.

VRay 7y ago
I remember when I was in high school reading the weekly horror stories on Slashdot about how every job was going to be outsourced, everyone was doomed, etc Turns out that if anything, the opposite happened. The best engineers in India and China got sucked into six figure jobs in the USA. Software Engineers are now the most valuable part of every business in the world. The demand for them just keeps going up endlessly, outstripping supply even though just about everyone who can rub two bits of logic together gets sucked into the industry