Date: Sat, 3 Jul 1999 14:28:28 -0500 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Bill Fumerola <billf@chc-chimes.com>, haodongpan@netease.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: how to start to be a hacker? Message-ID: <19990703142828.A236@whizkidtech.net> In-Reply-To: <377E4C45.522F3E78@softweyr.com>; from Wes Peters on Sat, Jul 03, 1999 at 11:45:41AM -0600 References: <Pine.HPP.3.96.990702075306.20843F-100000@hp9000.chc-chimes.com> <377DB95C.448E4227@softweyr.com> <19990703113140.B220@whizkidtech.net> <377E4C45.522F3E78@softweyr.com>
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On Sat, Jul 03, 1999 at 11:45:41AM -0600, Wes Peters wrote: > And, in some cases, disasters averted. I think all of us here have seen > a few graphic examples lately of what happens when the mentoring process > doesn't work. Sadly, mentoring can occasionaly hurt the mentor, too. I used to work for a company whose only programmer quit. They made testing machines controlled by a computer. All of their software was written in Turbo Pascal under MS DOS, and very poorly at that. I was hired along with a young man who had just graduated from college. The first thing I did was convince the boss to toss Turbo Pascal and switch to a combination of C and assembly language. The second thing I had to do was convince him not to fire the young man. He majored in physics and had a few programming classes which gave him the false impression he could program computers. He was completely lost. The boss wanted to fire him because "we don't run a charity here." I thought the young man was intelligent and could learn. I helped him a lot, taught him many tricks. I think I turned him into a fairly decent programmer (not a hacker, mind you, because programming was a job to him, not a passion). Two years later I was "laid off." The boss figured he no longer needed both of us, and decided to keep the younger one because he did not have to pay him as much as me. The story had a happy ending after all: When the young man saw what the boss did to me, within a few months he got a job with another company and quit. So I think I did teach him well. :-) > I think being a hacker is a combination of talent, ethics, and experience. That's a good way of putting it. > I've known talented and experienced programmers who weren't hackers, > either because they didn't have the innate curiousity you mention or > because they were ethically challenged and used their skills to steal, > cheat, and destroy, which are *not* part of the hacker ethos. Hackers > create, crackers steal and destroy. Agreed. Adam To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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