http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=465516


in reply to OT: Why Hackers dont do well in Corporate World

Once upon a time a hacker without any education; other than what he learned from banging at a Tandy Color Computer II to print his novel in progress via the serial port to a brother daisy wheel typeriter, went into the military. Once there it was discovered that he could adapt his hobby to the hundreds of idle CPM machines. When the military aquired 8088's by the truckload they didnt' know what to do with them. So the hacker showed them - and it was good

A decade later the hacker left the military and found he wasn't qualified to get paid for his hobby for he had no education so the hacker built PC's first for a small shop where he automated a test process that he took to a larger shop - where he perfected his automation until he was getting 25 PC's a day out the door - and it was good.

Then the bottom fell out of the domestic PC market, so the hacker wrote database programs for the thousands of new end users in the world. The County he lived in heard of his talents and asked him to take care of the WAN for the counties library system - and it was good.

Word spread amongst the vendors he dealt with of his knowlege and a large corporation faced the job vacancies of y2k and finally the hacker had arrived. He happened by luck to have been placed with a team of hackers. They were in charge of the development integration, and the servers for both dev and QA. They were the ones that made the square block ( new applications ) fit into the round holes ( Corp infrustructure ). They exceeded every expectation. While they had more servers than production, their server uptime was higher. Their value in assisting the dev teams in customizations was highly valued by all. So they endevored to have the procedures and automation created by the team made 'standard' in production - For this the team was disbanded.

So the hacker took a new position - Java developer/analyst ( Perl became shunned by the corp ) works 30-35 hours a week at the same salary, turns a blind eye to better ways of doing things and is finally realizing he has enough time to write those books he started on so many years ago.

( Sorry had to spew - nice topic )