From: usenet@ra.nrl.navy.mil
Subject: Hacker Personality Characteristics :)
Reply-To: boyd@sunburst.nrl.navy.mil
Organization: Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 15:06:12 GMT

For all you INTP/INTJ types out there - here's a little ho-ho.
Don't know who gets credit for this so I'll apologize now. :)

:Personality Characteristics:
=============================

The most obvious common `personality' characteristics of hackers are
high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual
abstractions.  Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and
appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty).  Most are
also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.

Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not
the sine qua non one might expect.  Another trait is probably even more
important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large
amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to give it
context and meaning.  A person of merely average analytical intelligence
who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius
who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who
routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their
brains.  [During the production of the book version of this document,
for example, I learned most of the rather complex typesetting language
TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page
manual.  My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised
me, because years of associating with hackers have conditioned me to
consider such performances routine and to be expected. --- ESR]

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are *not* usually intellectually narrow;
they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental
stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even
interestingly on any number of obscure subjects --- if you can get them
to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the
better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have
outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent.

Hackers are `control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the
usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term.  In the same
way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back by
moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like computers
do nifty stuff for them.  But it has to be *their* nifty stuff.  They
don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring,
ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence.
Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual
lives and chaotic elsewhere.  Their code will be beautiful, even if
their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.

Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards
such as social approval or money.  They tend to be attracted by
challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest of
work or other activities in terms of the challenges offered and the toys
they get to play with.

In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent psychometric systems, hackerdom
appears to concentrate the relatively rare INTJ and INTP types; that is,
introverted, intuitive, and thinker types (as opposed to the
extroverted-sensate personalities that predominate in the mainstream
culture).  ENT[JP] types are also concentrated among hackers but are in
a minority.



Tammy Preston Boyd
Naval Research Laboratory
Washington, D.C. 20375

(202) 767-1624

"calm down.  it's just ones and zeroes."