[ghc]

Given the state of Hacker News, this might come as a surprise, but hacker is not synonymous with programmer. I developed a weekend workshop for the Harvard Innovation Lab where I lead the students through building a pinterest clone from scratch in two days. For anyone with a basic CS background (CS50) this isn't out of reach, though it's a nice way to stretch yourself into learning new things.

A blogging platform is a similar sort of project. Any novice programmer can build one given enough time and motivation. Building a polished one is an accomplishment, but it's by no means a feat of programming creativity or a demonstration of vast skill.

When I hire junior developers I'm looking for people who know at least a few different programming languages and are skilled with a number of different tools. I'm not looking for a tumblr blog or deep knowledge of git. Git can be reasonably taught in a week or two; a programming language can't.

Most startups use a few different programming languages. Mine used 3 before we were acquired. Since we were acquired we now use 6 languages on 4 OSes (Win,Lin,QNX,iOS) to provide our sensor-based solution to our clients. A real hacker is the kind of programmer who can quickly adapt to such an environment and get up to speed quickly. That's not what defines a hacker* , but that's what makes them so valuable.

* I define a hacker as someone skilled at creatively misusing available technology to solve hard problems under extreme constraints