Book Summary — Hackers & Painters

Hackers and Painters is interesting as it was written in 2004 by written by Paul Graham (Y-Combinator founder) about programming and computer “sciences. Soooo many things have changed since then, but Paul was pretty spot on with all his predictions.

Chapter 1 — Nerds are Unpopular

He was probably one of the first writers to put the whole “Nerds are Unpopular” statement into writing. He goes into a lot of detail, why and how and how school’s are just a bad environment to get you set up for grown up life.

Chapter 2 — Hackers & Painters

Lots of us think that programming is a very boring, systematic thing to do — Paul paints a different picture. “Hackers” create stuff and can be super creative, they just do it in a slightly different way than painters — but ultimately it’s very similar.

Chapter 3 — What You Can’t Say

This is probably my favourite chapter, as it’s timeless and hits the nail on its head. Society creates rules and there are things we are careful not to say or avoid talking about. What are those things? They are exactly the things that will change and need to be challenged? This has been happening throughout history — taboo topics which become the norm.

What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say?

Conformist Test

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in a front of a group of peers?

That’s the ideas worth exploring.

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed.

Chapter 6 — How to Make Wealth

A corporate hacker/programmer earns $80,000 (remember: this was written in 2004)

• x2 — you can probably work double the hours of a corporate employee
• x3 — you can get three times as much done if you really focus and put your heart to it
• x2 — you double productivity by avoiding middle managers
• x3 — you are way smarter than what your job description limits you to

$80,000 as a corporate employee, but a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year (above multiple of 36x).

…and this how you make wealth and start a startup.

What also many people don’t realise is that wealth is not constant. It’s not like if one person is more wealthy the other person is less wealthy. If you do a good job or create something — you are, literally, creating wealth. So everyone is better off.

In the second part of the book Paul makes great observations around the future of computers — the cloud, fast deployment, technical advancements, programming languages and design. He is spot on with most of his predictions.