Article 9095 of comp.misc:
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From: eric@snark.uu.net (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc,comp.unix.wizards,soc.net-people
Subject: "PORTRAIT OF THE HACKER" -- requesting feedback
Message-ID: <1WOg5n#313Q9H9DGQvv79pRjh2pg2jp=eric@snark.uu.net>
Date: 10 May 90 16:26:22 GMT
Followup-To: comp.misc
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As part of the preparations for the 2nd edition of _The_Hacker's_Dictionary_
I'm trying to assemble a composite portrait of the ur-hacker, especially in
those respects in which he/she differs from Joe Average.

If you care, please respond to the following *by email* with comments or
criticisms or additions. I realize this invites incredible flooding
of my mailbox, but I do *not* want to see the net clogged with endless
back-and-forth on the subject.

Try to base your comments not so much on yourself as what you've observed
in all of the people you think of as hackers. *I* don't fit this profile
real well in some ways but I wrote them in anyhow.

Feel free to add your own categories. The result *will* be posted so
please don't ask me to email six thousand copies to individual addresses.

			A PORTRAIT OF J. RANDOM HACKER

Note: where comparatives are used, the implicit `other' is a randomly
selected group from the non-hacker population of the same size as hackerdom.

General appearance:
   Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Interestingly for a sedentary
profession, more programmers run to skinny than fat. Tans are rare.

Dress:
   Casual, vaguely post-hippy; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes (or bare
feet). Long hair, beards and moustaches are common. High incidence of
tie-die and intellectual or humorous `slogan' T-shirts (only rarely
computer related, that's too obvious). Hackers dress for comfort,
function, and minimal maintenance hassles rather than for appearance.
Very low incidence of suits or other `business' attire.

Reading habits:
   Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science
fiction.  Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes `liberal
arts' people but tend not to talk about it as much.

Other interests:
   Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the
culture, including: music. SF.  Medievalism. Chess, wargames and
intellectual games of all kinds. Logic puzzles.  Ham radio. Other
interests that seem to correlate less strongly but positively with
hackerdom include: martial arts, linguistics, bicycling.

Education:
   All hackers are either college-degreed or self-educated to an
equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered
better-motivated and more respected than his B.Sc counterpart.
Academic areas from which people often gravitate into hackerdom
include mathematics, physics, linguistics, and philosophy.

Things hackers detest and avoid:
   Most team sports. Disco. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening
music. Television (except for cartoons, movies, the old _Star_Trek_ and
the new _Simpsons_). Three-piece suits.

Food:
   Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most especially Szechuan,
Hunan and Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely declasse). Also
high-quality Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed. 

Politics:
   Vaguely left of center, except for the strong libertarian
contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely.
The only safe generalization is that almost all hackers are
anti-authoritarian, thus both conventional conservatism and "hard"
leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to
either a) be aggressively apolitical, or b) entertain peculiar or
idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them
day-to-day.

Ethnicity:
   Predominantly Caucasian with a strong minority of Jews (east coast)
and Asians (west cost). The Jewish contingent has exerted a
particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food). Hackers as a
group are about as color-blind as anyone could ask for, and ethnic
prejudice of any kind tends to be met with extreme hostility; the
ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a function
of who tends to seek and get higher education.

Religion:
   Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly
three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional
faith-holding Christianity is rare though not unknown (at least on the
east coast, more hackers wear yarmulkes than crucifixes). Even hackers
who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be relaxed about it,
hostile to organized religion in general and all forms of religious
bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody' religions such as
Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius. Finally, many hackers
are fascinated to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or (less commonly)
Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native' religions.

Ceremonial chemicals:
   Most hackers don't smoke and use alcohol in moderation if at all.
Limited use of `soft' drugs (esp. psychedelics such as marijuana, LSD,
psilocybin etc) used to be relatively common and is still regarded
with more tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use of `downers'
and opiates, on the other hand, seems to be particularly rare (hackers
seem in general to dislike drugs that `dumb them down'). Many hackers
regularly wire up on caffeine and sugar for all-night hacking runs.

Geographical Distribution:
   In the U.S., hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area/Boston axis; about
half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of Cambridge
or Berkeley. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities, especially
`university towns' such as the Raleigh/Durham area in North Carolina
or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact that
many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).

Sexual habits:
   Hackerdom tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle
variation than the mainstream culture. It includes more gays. Hackers
are more likely to live in polygnous or polyandrous relationships,
practice open marriage or live in communes or group houses. In this
as in some other respects (see Dress) hackerdom semi-consciously
maintains `counterculture' values.

Personality Characteristics:
   The most obvious common `personality' characteristic of hackers is
high intelligence and facility with intellectual abstractions.  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 the predominate in the mainstream
culture). Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and
appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are
also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond = ...!uunet!snark!eric  (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)