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 first 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.
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