MemeMachineGo!

A hacker writes about not being evil enough:

I should probably clarify that I mean evil in the technical sense of the word, not the moral sense. To the hacker, that which does not support the highest potential of a thing is called evil. […] The hacker in me wants to tell people about the problems and the issues I see, as well as the solutions I already know and understand. […] But the politician in me knows that, with few exceptions, telling the truth doesn’t actually work. […]

Douglas Englebart, who led the development of the first word processor in the 1960’s, tried to explain what word processing would be like to people who had never used a word processor. “Imagine a pencil,” he would say. (I’m paraphrasing liberally here, by the way.) “Now imagine tying that pencil to a brick, so that to write you have to move not just the pencil, but the brick as well. That’s actually what using your current tools is like. Now, imagine that you untie the brick. That’s what using a word processor is like.”

In essence, an astonishingly large number of developers are coding with bricks tied to their pencils. This is not, as I previously thought, because the developers in question lack smarts or an ability to get things done. Instead, I realized today, through conversations with some very bright, skilled developers, that the real issue is very simply that they never thought to look for a way to untie the brick, because to them, the unbelievable amounts of tedious, backbreaking labor they are doing is normal. […]

The real dilemna is that I would be more likely to be able to help them, if I first lied to them! That is, if I first won their trust, and then gradually taught, politicked, and manipulated them over time to accomplish the results that would make things easier for them.