What is a Good Hack — A Jugaad
Traits in a solution that make it a Good Hack or a Jugaad.
Over the years, while running engineering teams I have heard the word Hack spring up in all kind of contexts and situations. Hack was deemed fit to capture an elegant solution or an ugly one, an ingenious one or one that was simply stupid and lacked any depth of understanding. The question is how come smart engineers who are often sticklers about syntax are doing this mix-up.
The answer lies in the origins of word Hack which starts with a negative connotation of being a rip-off, ugly or at times an illegal method of solving a problem. There however exists a positive underbelly to the word and Paul Graham in his influential essays might have been the first to pen it down.
Early on in my childhood in India I was exposed to a word Jugaad [pronounced ju-gaa-r] which captured the positive side of the word hack in it’s effectiveness & cleverness of find the solution to a problem.
So what traits in a solution make for a Good Hack or Juggad?
Needed
If you have been to India in summers a glass of Lassi or blended yogurt is heavenly. Shops selling the drink needed a big enough blender to make them @ scale — a washing machine fit the bill perfectly and is widely used for the job.
A Jugaad is a solution to someone’s real word problem — it’s not a cool technology looking for a solution. Yes a washing machine can be a blender when it solves a real customer need.
Specific
Recently a totally new political party came into being in Delhi elections — the challenge was to get their message across. Being a new they lacked funds but had a strong support base in taxi/auto owners. Hence, a solution was born — fix the posters to the taxis. Low and behold, millions of moving billboards were covering the streets of Delhi at minimal to no cost.
In Engineering there is a pedestal reserved for solutions and patterns which can be applied universally, a Juggad on the other hand resists the universal, preferring situation-specific solutions.
Repeatable
90’s India and present Kenya a bicycle knife sharpener was a known sight. It was an ingenious way to attach a knife sharpening stone to the bike so that when the bike was lifted up on a stand paddling it would rotate the sharpening stone. This worked wonders since the sharpener could travel on his bike without needing a specialized sharpening equipment.
Any solution that cannot be taken out from a particular instance and applied to the same problem somewhere else is not a Jugaad. Assume that the same bicycle knife sharpner had a complicated setup would it have stood the test of time? Would it have been able to move with the problem from India to Kenya? Simplicity of form underlies these solutions and makes them repeatable & transferable.
Robust
Take any of the above solutions. They all have their roots in constraints and almost always were critical to existence — if they were to break down often they had traded the main problem with the problem of keeping the fix up and running.
We often end up referring to rushed last minute quick-fixes done with little to no understanding of the code as Hacks — these though needed at times do not qualify as Juggad. A Jugaad once put in place fixes the problem at hand once and for all — if it were to break down every so often it would take away from it’s effectiveness to solve the problem.
So a good hack or a Jugaad is:
· Needed
· Specific
· Repeatable
· & Robust
